Cluetrain Again, User Generated Content

Powazek suggests we drop the term “User Generated Content.”

[from Powazek: Just a Thought: Death to User-Generated Content]

Calling the beautiful, amazing, brilliant things people create online “user-generated content” is like sliding up to your lady, putting your arm around her and whispering, “Hey baby, let’s have intercourse.”

They’re words that creepy marketeers use. They imply something to be commodified, harvested, taken advantage of. They’re words I used to hear a lot while doing community consulting, and always by people who wanted to make, or save, a buck.

I have been railing against the term “content” for years. It’s writing, the authors are artists, and all the mechano-media metaphors are wrong. The Web is not a pipe pushing bits to “eyeballs” — it’s an enormous chatroom, where we are engaged in endless conversation amongst ourselves.

Umair Haques suggests that this metaphor is also dangerous since…

it is a huge block to thinking strategically about the future of media.

But it is just another case of a battle for perspective. Media companies aren’t prepared for grassroots media, for people deciding to make their own art, people turning away from centrally-controlled media. They want to coopt it, and one trick is to call it something that makes it sound less than it is.