The New York Times’ Jon Pareles has this longish, free-floating think-piece today that meanders around the topic of user-generated content. The two seminal media deal of the past two years centered on an “ever-expanding heap of personal ads, random photos, private blathering, demo recordings and camcorder video clips” (News Corp.’s $580 million acquisition of MySpace) and “a flood of grainy TV excerpts, snarkily edited film clips, homemade video diaries, amateur music videos and shots of people singing along with their stereos” (Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube.)
In short, today’s hot media properties deal with user-generated content. Pareles asks “now what?” What do we as a culture, as a society do with all this crap floating around the Internet? How do we decide what’s valuable and what’s worthy of jettisoning without the “supposedly wrongheaded gatekeeping mechanisms” of record companies, movie studios and TV networks?
That’s no easy question to answer and Pareles thinks that user-generated filters are taking the place of the old-time entertainment cartels and worries about whether the common man is any better than the common media mogul at choosing what passes for worthy content.
The open question is whether those new, quirky, homemade filters will find better art than the old, crassly commercial ones. The most-played songs from unsigned bands on MySpace — some played two million or three million times — tend to be as sappy as anything on the radio; the most-viewed videos on YouTube are novelty bits, and proudly dorky. Mouse-clicking individuals can be as tasteless, in the aggregate, as entertainment professionals.
There’s no real answer to this question. It’s possible that record companies, movie studios, cable chieftains and other gatekeepers of old were as tapped into the public’s taste as much as the public is. So, the result is the same.
But what is different is the expanse of choices. It used to be (and still is to a very large degree) that big companies selected what we watch and listen to, and that was that. End of story. Our choices didn’t extend beyond what was feed to us.
Now, even if the resulting “hits” reflects the same old dross, at least we have the option of watching or hearing a few gems that we might never had known existed. Pareles spins this choice as a case of sifting through more junk than ever before to find the one bit of genius.
Unlike the old media roadblocks, however, their filtering can easily be ignored. The promise of all the self-expression online is that genius will reach the public with fewer obstacles, bypassing the entrenched media. The reality is that genius has a bigger junk pile to climb out of than ever, one that requires just as much hustle and ingenuity as the old distribution system.
At least now, however, that one bit of genius stands a chance, however small, of getting discovered.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:48 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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