“Why Getting the User to Create Web Content Isn’t Always Progress” – COMPARED TO WHAT?

Elmer points to an article from the Wall Street Journal website with the snarky title … "Why Getting the User To Create Web Content Isn’t Always Progress".

The author, Lee Gomes, complains that user-created content on the web…

"…You can spend 10 minutes and take in all of it. Spend much more, and you start feeling guilty about the time you’re wasting…."

…which is how I feel watching television all the time and about 75% of time when I am at the movies. Popular media is full of dreck.

Gomes also states…

"…It is an odd state of affairs when books or movies need defending,especially when the replacement proffered by certain Web-orientedcompanies and their apologists is so dismally inferior: chunks andlinks and other bits of evidence of epidemic ADD. …."

You bet that books and movies need defending. What Gomes does not admit is that the vast majority of books and movies are just as bad as the "dismally inferior chunks" offered up by the pastiche of the Web.

I can’t count the number of times I wish I had my money and 90 minutes back after a particularly bad movie. Even with millions of dollars and marketing focus groups out the wazoo, the popular culture industry serves up a fast-foot buffet of unmitigated crap – for the most part. I would rather surf for my own entertainment because what is slickly shoved at me in advertising-laden glitziness is so chokingly bad that I can’t breath.

Our expectations are lower for Web-produced content because we know that it is amateur-produced. When we find something genuinely good – it’s double-good because its genuine – produced for the love of it and not for the product placement. Perhaps I ascribe too-noble motives to UGC, but at least I didn’t waste 9 bucks.

I would rather that people spend their time mashing up UGC (user-generated content) than wasting their time with most popular culture. Creation of your own content, self-expression, experimentation with ideas and presentation is infinitely better than being a couch-yam.

Rant mode off.

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