Definitions of user-generated content

As the previous chapter described, digital technology has evolved and developed, and has become less expensive and more accessible to the mainstream population. User-generated content (UGC) is a term that surfaced around the middle of the 2000s to describe self-content that is shared predominantly by everyday users on the internet. In its most basic definition, UGC can be considered any digital content that is created and published by the user from a non-professional environment. Although UGC refers to all types of personally created content, such as a simple comment

posted on a blog or social networks site, this study defines digital content creation and UGC as:

an arrangement of visual and/or audio material that requires some element of composition or editing. This could be conceptual or adapted work, original or remixed content.

The main distinguishing features in the production of UGC (also referred to as user- created or self-created content) are that it is usually a non-commercial personal expression with the intention of communicating with peers. In the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) publication, Participative Web and

User-Created Content: Web 2.0, Wikis and Social Networking (Vickery and Sacha, 2007), it identifies UGC as comprising three main characteristics. Firstly, the content

should be publicly available over the internet. Secondly, it should be created outside of professional routines and practices, and, thirdly, it should “reflect a certain amount of creative effort” (ibid.:20). However, the description of ‘creative effort’ is vague and lacking in definition:

a minimum amount of creative effort is hard to define and depends on the context (ibid.).

Apart from this indistinct definition, the OECD report is extensive and covers the social and economic impact of the internet and how it has enabled users to access, produce, distribute and reuse information, knowledge and entertainment. The report observes that the user has been afforded greater autonomy, which has increased participation and diversity leading to the effect of democratising media production and increasing the flow of information, freedom of expression and “decentralising approaches to content creation” (ibid.:14). The publication continues to define what it regards as the “drivers of user-created content” that have contributed and led to the rise of UGC. These are described as technological, social, economic, institutional and legal, which include the increased speed, availability and cost of broadband connections coupled with higher hard-drive storage space and faster processing power of personal computers. Additionally, this has been supplemented by access to high-quality software for creating content that is more intuitive and economical to use, as well as available at low or no cost to the user.

The social drivers of UGC identified by the report were a desire to create and the ability to express oneself interactively through communities and collaboration. The most eager participants are seen to be the young, so-called, ‘digital natives’ who typically have less concern about revealing personal information, whereas the older, more hesitant users are increasingly using the web for social engagement, politics and education. Finally, the publication comments that the move towards more flexible legal copyright schemes, such as Creative Commons, has provided greater access to previously created and copyrighted material. For the date of publication (2007) this report makes typical assumptions about the nature and demographic of individuals producing UGC with particular emphasis on the term ‘digital natives’. Further discussion will be given to this assumption in the following chapter when the question of the term digital generations is investigated.

Clay Shirky defines UGC as not merely user-created output. He insists that it must also be accessible to other users where it can be shared through what he calls “re- creative tools”, such as Flickr or weblogs (2008:83). In creating UGC, the user is no longer simply a consumer; they can just as easily be the creator, contributor, commentator and publisher (Shirky, 2008; Benkler, 2006). UGC moves the users’ online activity from that of passive media consumers to that of active creators of creative media content (Bowman and Willis, 2003). Martin Lister et al. (2009) suggest a “symbiotic relationship” between contemporary media and media culture, which offers audiences greater participatory opportunities. They argue that as more people start to use the web to create content, two elements have changed.

[A]udiences have become ‘users’ and user-generated content has become a real competitor to traditional media (Lister et al., 2009:221).

As production levels of UGC grow steadily, many media organisations actively encourage UGC contributions to their sites. For user-generated media sites, such as YouTube and Flickr, UGC plays an intrinsic role that is vital to the success of their businesses, which in turn has brought criticisms of user exploitation, which is discussed later in this chapter. The BBC now produces guidelines for the integration of UGC into their programmes and media platforms to “encourage [a] relationship with the audience” (BBC, 2006) and develop ‘360º programming’, its term for

programme content that is available across multi-media platforms from television to mobile phones.

In his book, Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide, Henry Jenkins (2006) develops this commercial perspective further by analysing how ‘fan’ communities have become co-creators alongside media producers. In addition to creating content, they also use the “new tools and technologies […] to archive, annotate, appropriate and re-circulate media content” (ibid.:18). He sees convergence involving two trends:

as both a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up consumer- driven process. Media companies are learning how to accelerate the flow of media content across delivery channels to expand revenue opportunities, broaden markets and reinforce consumer loyalties and commitments. Users are learning how to master these different media technologies to bring the flow of media more fully under their control and to interact (and co-create) with other users. Sometimes, these two forces reinforce each other, creating closer, more rewarding, relations between media producers and consumers. Sometimes the two forces conflict, resulting in constant renegotiations of power between these competing pressures on the new media ecology (Jenkins and Deuze, 2008:6).

Jenkins remains committed to his view that networked technologies help users build relationships along with the ability to influence decision-making within media companies. However, along with social software and technological tools that enable collaboration and UGC for users, advertisers and media companies are themselves using advanced technologies, like metadata aggregators, to track individual social behaviour. José van Dijck comments in her paper, Users like you? Theorizing agency

in user-generated content, that it is important to recognise the new role of users as:

both content providers and data providers. Besides uploading content, users also willingly and unknowingly provide important information about their profile and behaviour to site owners (2009:47).

UGC has indeed given users more freedom of expression to produce and distribute personal media but, as the last statement implies, their involvement generates issues

of privacy. Also, as site owners encourage users to upload UGC to their sites, they are:

integrating (those) amateur efforts into a capital- and technology-intensive media system […] while making a profit on them as targeted consumers (ibid.:50).

In recent years the issues of digital labour and the exploitation of users self-created content supplied for free to the media sharing platforms have become a widely discussed subject. Indeed, one commentator disagrees with the use of the term to describe content created and shared on the internet by individuals. Derek Powazek, posted a blog post entitled Death to User-generated Content, which criticised the term.

Dear Internet,

Can I make a suggestion? Let’s all stop using the phrase “user-generated content” I’m serious. It’s a despicable, terrible term. Let’s deconstruct it.

User: One who uses. Like, you know, a junkie.

Generated: Like a generator, engine. Like, you know, a robot.

Content: Something that fills a box. Like, you know, packing peanuts.

So what’s user-generated content? Junkies robotically filling boxes with packing peanuts. Lovely” (Powazek, 2006).

Andrew Keen is another author to express a dissenting voice towards the concept of UGC and the ability of the, largely anonymous, amateur to provide quality and cultural value. Keen commented in his polemical book, The Cult of the Amateur, that:

In any profession, when there is no monetary incentive or rewards, creative work stalls (2007:115) [and] creat[es] an endless digital forest of mediocrity (ibid.:4).

Laurence Lessig, professor of law at Harvard Law School, challenges Keen’s “disparaging” definition and use of ‘amateur’. Lessig cites the early 20th century American musician, John Philip Sousa, in response.

recede, until there will be left only the mechanical device and the professional executant. (Sousa, 1906:282).

Lessig points out that Keen’s book misses the value to our culture that comes from anyone developing the ability to create, irrespective of the quality of the content.

I think it is a great thing when amateurs create, even if the thing they create is not as great as what the professional creates (Lessig, 2007).

This is a theme continued by Clay Shirky. He discusses the popularity of ‘lolcats’ – the combination of cute cat with humorous caption – as being mediocre UGC. However, he points out that although the spectrum between mediocre and good is large:

you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something, and someone making lolcats has bridged that gap (Shirky, 2010:18,19).

The points expressed by Lessig and Shirky are ones that encourage active engagement and self-expression, irrespective of the subjective opinions of artistic merit. Indeed the argument regarding ‘artistic merit’ raises the concept of creativity in within this field. The conflicting views between Keen, and Lessig and Shirky are based on opposing views of production and output. Keen is mainly critical of the perceived and subjective value of UGC, whereas Shirky is concerned with value of entering into the practice of creating content, no matter how rudimentary. A link therefore has been made on the concept of creativity and how it may be perceived from different viewpoints and the different ways it can be defined.

3.2 Creativity

Creativity has become increasingly important in contemporary society. The ability to be creative increases ones ability to problem solve through a wide variety of different domains and disciplines, these might include social, economic, scientific, and artistic. As previously discussed the wide scale adoption of the internet, particularly in western societies, has facilitated an online environment for creative expression. Furthermore, digital technologies offer opportunities for creative practices to transfer

sharing. Due to the diversity of the subject, it is necessary to give a brief historical background regarding research and ideas behind the notion of creativity before addressing individual creativity in a non-professional capacity.

The origin of the word ‘creativity’ derives from the Latin ‘creation’ and was used uniquely to define the divine creation and the beginning of the world. The concept of ‘inspiration’ or ‘getting an idea’ originates from the belief that it is produced from a higher power and is located in the Christian, Muslim Greek, and Judaic traditions (Ryhammar and Brolin, 1999:260). The notion of human creativity did not occur before the beginning of the Renaissance (Leach, 2001) and until the twentieth century, creativity was considered to be a characteristic found only in exceptional individuals (Kok, 2009). Indeed, the term ‘genius’ has been a commonly used word to describe a person who is percived to be highly creative. Early studies of creativity were conducted by Bethune (1839) and Galton (1869), both of which related to genius. This area of study continued until the 1920 when four major traditions were developed; psychoanalytic, cognitive, behaviourist and humanistic. The 1950s brought a rich and influential period to creativity research with a focus on the psychological factors of individual genius and giftedness (Craft, 2001) that developed into three strands: personality, cognition and how to stimulate creativity. Since the 1950s there has been a shift towards prioritising the development of creativity in education. By the 1980s and 1990s research into creativity progressed along a social psychological framework, which recognised the important role of social structures in fostering individual creativity (Ryhammar and Brolin, 1999; Jeffrey and Craft, 2001). This is considered the fourth area of study (Jeffrey and Craft, 2001), creativity and social systems. In the 1990s theories were constructed in which creativity is viewed from a systems perspective where social and cognitive contexts are seen as highly significant to creative activity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1998; Sternberg, 1998; Sternberg and Lubart, 1995). Today creativity is considered an essential life skill for working particularly in, so called, information societies (Puccio et al., 2011). The development of creative skills encourages individuals to use their imagination, express themselves and make original and valued choices in their lives.

Creativity has been contextualised as a process that is situated within a domain. An example of creativity as a process can be ssen in Wallas’s (1926) four stages;

preparation, where a creative problem is considered; incubation, where ideas are

conceptualised; illumination, where ideas are developed into a solution; and

verification where the soultion is tested. Additionally the creative process works on

many different levels. Divergent thinking can lead to unusual or unexpected outcomes as a result of questioning exisiting norms and ideas. Boden’s research defines differnet outcomes of the creative process as either ‘P-creative’; psychological driven that have meaning or importance to the individual, or ‘H- creative; historically important because the idea has not existed before (1990:32). Creativity within a domain is an interaction between an individual, domain (a cultural aspect) and field (a social aspect) that gives a context. Csikszentmihalyi argues that creativity can only occur in this form. He defines a ‘domain’ as a “set of symbolic rules and procedures” within a field, such as music, mathamatics or graphic design, (1996:26). Consequently, he claims, creativity is a process that can only be observed at the intersection where individuals, domains, and fields interact. This rather ridged defined assertion needs further examination. Firstly analysis into the meaning of the word ‘creativity’ and some definitions are required to give broader understanding.