Derek Powazek explains why the term "user-generated content" feels so icky. It's marketing-speak applied to an activity (creating writing, photos, artwork, and other original stuff and contributing it to the Web) that people care deeply about.
I agree that the phrase is icky, yet I have caught myself using it on occasion -- because I have not found a good replacement shorthand term that says "stuff people contribute to a Web site or service that is created by visitors to said Web site or service rather than its proprietors."
Derek proposes:
| | Let's use the real words. Those people posting to Amazon pages? They're writing reviews. Those folks on Flickr? They're making photographs. And if we must have an umbrella term to describe the whole shebang, I have a suggestion. Try this on for size: Authentic Media. |
Well, I'm sorry, but "authentic media" is a problem, too. For one thing, it's oxymoronic: "media" refers to the middle-man, yet this stuff is ostensibly authentic because it cuts out the middleman -- as Derek suggests when he says, "Authentic media is what happens when the mediators get out of the way." Furthermore, if "user-generated content" carries a whiff of contempt for unwashed amateur contributors, then "authentic media" is vaguely discourteous to those of us in the other, older-fashioned media who still aspire to some level of authenticity ourselves, and believe that it might be attainable, even if we don't always achieve it. The label a priori rules out that possibility.
There are several different axes or spectrums at work here -- inauthentic/authentic; professional (paid)/amateur (unpaid); one-to-one / one-to-many / many-to-many; and no doubt others I'm missing.
I'm happy to strike "user-generated content" from my vocabulary. But I still think we need a term for distinguishing those reviews and photographs and other works that are contributed by people "out there" from those created by people "in here." Maybe some day the old-fashioned media model with wither and disappear, everyone "in here" will end up "out there," and then the distinction will become meaningless. In the meantime, it remains of some use in our conversations, whether we are believers in or skeptics toward the Phenomenon That We Should No Longer Call "User-Generated Content."
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