I'm so sorry I've been MIA for over a month. I'm working 10-12 hours a day at my internship, and I just don't have time to post. I've still be reading all the stuff I used to read, however, and after reading this article in the journal I felt I had to respond. Below is the e-mail I sent to the author of this awful article.
Lee,I think that you, like many other old media commentators, miss the entire point of UGC or the book-is-dead argument (I'll use BiD to save me typing, although I've never heard that acronym used).I'll start with the BiD argument first. Every single person coming out against this argument makes immediately clear that they don't understand it. Let's assume 50 years from now, the book - as in printed pages bound between hard/soft cover - is gone. That doesn't mean the only way to consume Shakespeare is to read every single comment made my every single idiot who has an opinion. There will still exist the discrete text of Hamlet, untouched by other's words. Now while it is ridiculous to contend that the only copies that will exist on the Internet will be hyper-linked, tagged, and commented, even if that were true, you're still free to ignore the links, tags, and comments. Links merely turn words blue and underline them. Comments and tags always appear after a text, not in the middle of it. Nothing will stop you from just reading Shakespeare and tuning out every other opinion on the planet.So, I think it's clear that the so-called "downside" of BiD, that "comments from friends and others would be just as important as the original material being commented on," is ridiculous, unfounded, and ignores the fact that the Internet does not force complexity, it merely offers it as an alternative. Thus, for those too civilized for the opinions of others, BiD does not have to change what they read one iota.Now how about the "upside" of BiD? You're absolutely right when you say that "reading some stray person's comment on the text" is pretty useless. I agree. But one common, and rapidly expanding tool of tags, comments, UGC, etc. is rating content, and showing users only the most relevant information. While I don't care what my fraternity brother thinks of Hamlet, wouldn't you agree that having the ten greatest critical works written by academics about Hamlet immediately accessible before, during, or after reading the play might be useful? Maybe? Does it hurt to have the option?I have to get to work, so I'm going to make my point about UGC very quickly. While there is plenty of error in your article that I could argue with, I'll stick to the main point that you're missing with both UGC and BiD: the function of the Internet to provide options.The point of YouTube isn't to produce the next Oscar winner. No one claims that their ninja imitation video is an acclaimed production. The point is that ever since man begat entertainment and media production and consumption, production was expensive, distribution was expensive, and marketing was expensive. To make a creative work (whether good or bad is both subjective and beside the point) cost money in equipment. To make copies of that work to give to people cost too much money, and had to be paid for prior to each sale. To tell millions of people about that work, and get a buzz about it going cost a lot of money. Thus, with all these expensive barriers to entry, control over what people watched was decided by others. In 1950, you could watch whatever the National Broadcasting Company, or the American Broadcasting Company, or the Public Broadcasting Company decided everyone should watch. Since then, cable television, DVDs, OnDemand services, and TiVo have allowed us to at least be able to choose which media conglomerate product to watch, and when. However, the who never changed. We still had big media companies to make entertainment, which we were happy to consume. But production, distribution, and marketing were all still too expensive.With the growing adoption of the Internet and the proliferation of sites like YouTube, the costs of production, distribution and marketing have plummeted. You can make a video with a home camera for a couple hundred dollars (granted this is not that new of a phenomenon), thus cutting production costs. An additional digital copy can be served up for no incremental cost, thus cutting distribution costs. Finally, all it takes to make it to the front of YouTube (where the top ten videos each have been seen over 5 million times) is to make a video that people want to watch.YouTube isn't meant to replace HBO or Dreamworks. I still watched the Sopranos finale last Sunday, and I saw The Break-Up with my girlfriend last Saturday (which, by the way, was much less entertaining than the boatloads of free stuff I can find on the Internet). The difference is that I'm not forced to anymore. I can go over to archive.org and find Destination Earth, a 50's propaganda movie made by Big Oil, and a classic piece of Americana if I ever saw one. Or I can go to YouTube and watch someone express themselves creatively in a way that they never could before. Or I can go to iTunes and download the latest episode of Lost and watch it on the subway on my iPod (or on my TV at home, which is connected to my computer).The great distruption of the Internet is that it creates options. It destroys the monopoly that big media had over eyeballs, because it destroys the economies of scale involved with creating entertainment, and it removes the barriers that big media tried to place on when and where we could watch their entertainment.If you don't see more choice, more options as a good thing, I have no idea why.
-Michael
Again, I'm sorry I haven't been posting. I'll do my best to change that. Among the questions I'm currently exploring:
A revolution is brewing in Latin America. Can it gain legs and once and for all free those countries from 400 years of foreign domination, either de jure or de facto?
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