The Internet: How We Communicate

The Institute for Education and the Arts is sharing an entry from the Good Morning Silicon Valley blog about the societal effects the creative and communicative ways in which the masses are using the internet and technology.

You kids just go ahead and entertain yourselves

By JOHN MURRELL

Let's talk for a few minutes today about how you're trying to take my job. By "you," I mean all y'all, the vast public throbbing with creativity and wired up with broadband. And by "me," I mean me and JP and countless writers, photographers, filmmakers and artists who historically have constituted the class of Professional Creative Types. These latter folks used to be identified by their trade names, but starting with AOL's growth surge in the early '90's, accompanied by the birth of the Web, they became known collectively as "content providers," the people who were paid to produce the editorial material in between the ads. That's how it worked with newspapers and magazines and television, and to media companies that's how it looked like it would work on the Web. Silly media companies.

Take a gander at what's happening, as illuminated in the latest report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. It found that 48 million American adults -- 35 percent of Internet users -- have contributed some form of user-generated content to the Internet (that's adults -- you'll have to factor in all the kids posting to MySpace and the like). Of those users, 36 million posted their own artwork, photos, stories and videos. Empowering this urge to share is broadband penetration -- of those who contributed content to the Net, the report found, 73 percent had high-speed connections. The Web is "shifting now to user-generated content," said John Horrigan, associate director of research for the project, "It shows people engaging with the Internet in a number of different ways in their lives. It shows that people are pretty interested in using the technology to put something of themselves on the Internet, not just pull down information from the Internet."

Bingo. This is the rude awakening awaiting any media company that's still snoozing. Consumers are no longer restricted to consuming. "It's the mass talking to the mass," said Jesse Drew, associate director of technocultural studies at the University of California-Davis, specifically talking about video-sharing site YouTube but laying out the general principle. "Now there's no central spigot that everything comes out of." Writing in GigaOM, Robert Young says, "Today's social networks (along with other forms of social media, like blogging and online video-sharing) are just the tip of iceberg when it comes to the long-term potential of digital self-expression. ... To some extent, self-expression should be viewed as a new industry, one that will co-exist alongside other traditional media industries like movies, TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. But in this new industry, the raw materials for the 'products' are the people." Young goes on to make the case that the primary job of a successful social networking site will be to manage the relationships among users who both consume and produce.

Well and good, says Nick Carr, but he raises two concerns about what he calls "the global karaoke machine": Is there any money to be made serving as a user-to-user clearinghouse? And how close is this to a zero-sum game? "If people are busy creating their own private reality shows, how much time and interest will they ultimately have for reading newspapers or going to the movies?" Carr asks. "Self-commoditization is in the end indistinguishable from self-consumption. And narcissism is a very deep well. Young may be right that 'digital self-expression' is an iceberg. But if that's so, the traditional media business may be the Titanic."

Read more here.

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