User:Lisanalia/sandbox

User-generated content (UGC) is a term used to describe media content created by commoners instead of paid professionals, which is primarily distributed on the Internet. Nowadays, the term UGC is often narrowly used to describe content that an individual or a group of users produce and distribute through an online platform. The term "users" itself refers to non-professionals who are active and creative in contributing to the internet. Users as producers of user-generated content engage in "creative activity, communication, community building and content-production".

Earlier Forms

Although currently the term User-Generated Content is more commonly used for contents created by general public in the online realm, forms of amateur and semi-professional “user-generated content” have existed way before the Internet was invented. For instance, before internet nineteenth-century U.S. women did not just passively read or listen to news stories; they create conversations surrounding news stories, and create scrapbooks by clipping newspaper, magazines, or other periodical articles and put them on the refrigerator or in an album as a way to archive them, and even share them to others by mail.

Platforms

Despite the fact that forms of UGC have existed even before the Internet Age, the rise of UGC in this digital era is facilitated by Web 2.0 and other common World Wide Web (WWW) applications which enables users to create and share content more easily, such as: social media (Facebook, YouTube,blogs, Twitter), text-based collaboration sites allowing users to log in and work together on the editing of particular documents (wikipedia), sites allowing feedback on written works (forums), group-based aggregation and social bookmarking sites, virtual world content (second life, and file-sharing sites.

Potentials

Decentralization of media landscape

With the increasing amount of regular internet users actively producing user-generated content rather than professionals, the media landscape is shifting from a centralized model of “filter then publish” towards a decentralized “publish then filter"; content filtering which used to be done by editors of media publisher companies is increasingly done by fellow users.

Dangers

"User-generated content" versus "user-generated data"

Despite having potentials for democratizing the media landscape, the rise of UGC provides potential commercial dangers as well, as media corporates are gaining profit from turning ‘user-created content’ that user provides into ‘user-generated data' that they later sell to advertisers. For instance, before users can contribute to a UGC platform by uploading contents such as video, text, or pictures, in general they would have to sign-up to the site using their email address and other more personal details such as name, gender, age, or birthday. These personal data, users' behavior on the site, and their IP Addresses—which connects to a user’s name and address—can be collected and used by platform owner through data bots for commercial purposes such as targeted advertising without limit, since they already received a permission from users to do so by previously accepting their Terms of Services that usually are too long to read. In other words, on one hand users have an active role in producing and sharing their own content, but on the other hand they have no control of their own data as they voluntarily but unknowingly provide important data about their profile and behavior to platform owners and metadata aggregators such as Google.