UGC = Unsuccessful Grasp for Control
I used to go nuts when clueless folks called site visitors “viewers” instead of “users”.
My point was that if all they are doing is viewing and not interacting, then our product needs to get a little better.
Well, the times have changed and now I agree with Stowe Boyd on the term “User Generated Content” .
He’s got it right. We are all here and the world is flat. So any term that implies a publisher->reader or site->user type of relationship is headed for trouble.
As Stowe says, we are now all participants.
He says we are participants in Participatory Media, but I’m even against the word media.
Media can be disintermediated while participants in a conversation really can’t.
Now I’m fully aware that the term media can be used to mean film, tape and digital rather than Media Companies. But the reason why we call them media companies is because media is the plural of medium.
The web is the first mass distribution medium that isn’t scarce in it’s allocation, either through economics or scarcity of availability, like limited TV frequencies (channels)
By it’s very nature, then, it is qualitatively different from anything else we have ever called media.
But I’m not here to argue semantics.
I only know too well from first-hand experience that many “media” companies still see User Generated Content as some lower form of media species.
Their attempts to exploit it will be as successful as chasing a lizard’s long tail.
UGC = Unsuccessful Grasp for Control.