Lev  Manovich.

Thinking about User Generated Content

october 2007

terms: "user-generated content" (UGC) / "participatory culture"  

making professional art even less relevant

today's already astounding numbers is just a beginning (examples: internet use in China; Nokia's plans)

challenge to media theory: SCALE

user-generated content - industry term (i.e. simply counting users) - hides the fact that people who upload media to Flickr, Youtube, etc. do this for a variety of diffirent reasons - not all content intended for wide distribution

The roles of consumer electronics and software industry
for instance: the ways in which software directs the users to turn their media into social media 
(examples: iPhoto; Youtube interface)
New emerging paradigms: Platform Studies (good for game platforms); Software Studies

participatory culture or culture industry?
from mass consumption to mass consumption

critique of Henri Jenkins's Convergence:
- no evaluation (underlying assumption that everything fans create is good)
- trying to be both on the side of the fans and industry (seling fans to the industry)
- all examples are fans of mass media (as though content not created in response to mass emdia does not exist)
- purely sociological approach - not looking inside content
- the use models, templates, iconography, etc. from mass media - who is creating new models (still professionals?) - we need an analysis of circulation not only of content itself but rather of underlying DNAs (templates, iconography, styles, conventions and other elements of culture)

The shapes of long tail:
- flattening of "top 40" end (examples: the shift in art biennale participation from mid 90s to today; the shift in a number of culture industries from "masters" to a large number of smaller players - for instance, graphic design, visual effects)
- what are the shapes of diffirent long tails in terms of quality? 
(or: popularity; "quatability," "remixability" - how much elements of a particular piece of content is copied / re-used by others)

to be able to adequatively analyse global culture (the numbers of professionals, prosumers and users continuosly growing) - global patterns of creation, consumption, circulation and remix of content - we need new tools

quantitative analysis of culture  ("big humanities"; "humanities 2.0")

- analysis which can deal with the scale of contemporary global culture - patterns, vectors rather than individual works 
(yet also taking a cue from software also allows traversal of different scales)

- bridging the gap between cultural tools and  the tools used in industry, science, etc. (such as data mining, visualisation, simulation, large displays, multiple representations of data)

My proposal: CULTURAL ANALYTICS:
-scale up already existing work in this area
-ask more challenging questions
-create tools which can be widely used and further developed by other people