This week I ‘led’ a session at the excellent BeebCamp on UGC. It means User Generated Content. But as fellow camper Suw Charman-Anderson has pointed out:
collaboration is now almost a given, “We ought to collaborate”, but that it’s not entirely clear what it is or how to do it.
UGC is a beautiful thing. It is the public creating something and then sharing it through the media. It gives you a warm feeling. It is the things that politicians dream of: public participation. It is the act that both conservatives and socialists believe binds society together: voluntary collaboration.
And best of all, from a news business model point of view, it is free. Or at least it is until you start to do something with it. And that, of course, is where Networked Journalism comes in. As I keep on about in SuperMedia, public participation is not a natural phenomenon. It requires citizen media literacy and it needs investment by journalists to provide platforms, production and editing of that wonderful, creative, diverse, democratic user generated stuff.
I have just read an unpublished paper which attempts to set out a typology. I won’t steal the author’s ideas but it would be useful to distinguish between someone ringing a radio phone-in from the person who creates a Google map with a whole community.
It would also be useful to chart the flows, the expectations and the outcomes of different types of UGC. Think about the process of sending in a photo from a mobile of a snowman during last month’s blizzards. Why did they do it? what did they expect to happen? who owns it and what should you do with it?
And what about the value? Is it worth the media organisation connecting to this stuff? how does it benefit the creator? and what possible interest is it to the rest of us?
There is obviously a book in it, one that I think would follow on rather neatly from my own. But I haven’t got time, so suggestions, thoughts and ideas in the comments section please.
Great title Charlie. I’m increasingly finding the term “UGC” too vague for purpose (and ugly, as you point out). It refers to such a wide range of different activities which people do for very different reasons, in very different moods and with very different objectives. Sometimes it’s private and off the cuff, sometimes well edited and for the eyes of total strangers. It can take all sorts of forms, be solicited, structured, messy, noisy, emotional, factual… It would be great to start looking at words which better describe what we’re really talking about when using the term “UGC”.
I hate the phrase “user generated content”. It’s ugly and patronising.
It’s all just content.
Nick,
You are right. It is ‘all content’ and that’s the right place to start. But that isn’t enough. When a load of people send content to one place that changes it. Or when a load of people interact with a piece of content that changes it. So that’s the interesting question. The terminology can change easily, but how do we understand what is going on and what is your role, and mine and other people’s in producing or disseminating the different kinds of content that are created?
cheers
Charlie
When I worked at BBC London News, I once helped a young east end kid edit footage from his mobile phone, about his walk to school, into a video to go on the BBC website. It was a simple, personal story about him and his friends, but the look on his face when it went online was priceless. I will never forget it.
UGC (or whatever you want to call it) is a beautiful thing because it’s so genuine and raw (why else do we love YouTube?). Journalists have a lot to learn from it, and my hope would be that there is a convergence between the two forms — that we find a way to mix viewers’ content with our own and develop media that are more representative and accessible.