User-generated Content's downside

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 18:14:10 GMT

clipped by: orangysb

The mainstream media are fighting back against the encroachment of the Web. I don't mean the Web as medium, but the Web as social network of sound and fury that signifies less than it seems.

When Jason's entry loses out to a classmate's competing design, one with "a bunch of puppies and hamsters and some menus with 'useful information,'" he's genuinely indignant. "Mine had RSS, CMS, W3C compliance, and fully embraced the ethos of Web 2.0 and the Long Tail!" he protests. "Puppies and hamsters aren't even buzzwords!" No, but that "useful information" on the winning page was presumably what pushed it over the top. Unfortunately, mass-media success is determined by, um, the masses rather than by content-oriented schoolteachers.

Maintaining the quality of mass media is not a parochial issue. A Museum of Media History video, "EPIC 2015," opens its prospective narrative with, "In the year 2015, people have access to a breadth and depth of information unimaginable in an earlier age. However, the Press—as you know it—has ceased to exist…"

The video describes an imagined 2008 merger of Google and Amazon.com: a combination that transforms the mediascape with "a custom content package for each user ... at its best, a summary of the world deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before; at its worst, and for too many, a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational."

If the mechanisms of trusted, objective reporting are allowed to wither in the face of social networks and the putative wisdom of crowds, we're building one giant positive-feedback loop that intensifies popular misconceptions. As John Bogert's column concluded, "We deserve something far better than we're asking for."

Tags: technology, editorial

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User-generated Content's downside