infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

Jon Udell has a post today that criticizes the industry term “user-generated content,” which is used to described the content on sites like Flickr, MySpace, and just about anything else Web 2.0 related. On these sites, users upload photos, blog entries, and otherwise produce content that draws an audience. I’ve long resented the term as well, and I’ve been meaning to blog this similar item that relates Derek Powazek’s objections.

Both Jon and Derek despise the use of “user” to describe both active participants and more passive audience members. Jon says it’s dehumanizing, while Derek doesn’t like the drug-culture connotations the word evokes. Frankly, I don’t really have a problem with “user” I like it better than the alternatives in the same way that some media studies folks prefer “work” to “text” to describe a movie, TV show, or other cultural artifact. “User” implies a greater degree of activity and investment than “viewer,” “reader,” or “audience member,” just as “work” acknowledges labor, while “text” does not. Shoot, I’d call members of TV or film audiences “users” if I thought I could get away with it.

Jon doesn’t voice any objections to the use of “generated,” but Derek criticizes it for its mechanistic implications, that the content comes from an engine or robot. This is probably my greatest objection to the term. “Generated” lacks an acknowledgment that the people contributing to a site are doing work, and this work is hopefully meaningful to them in some way. I can just imagine some MBA leaning back in his Aeron chair saying, “All we have to do is turn on the Wiki, get us some of that user-generated content, and we’ll never have to pay a writer again! Bwahahaha!”

“Content” reminds Jon “more of sausage than of storytelling,” suggesting that the textual matter is more than just stuffing for a business model. Similarly, Derek thinks of “content” as “something that fills a box” like packing peanuts. I don’t disagree, but I’ll add that content seems to be pretty agnostic about what the content actually is. Are the contents stories or videos or photos? Are the contents any good? These things matter to your audience and they should matter to you.

My greatest objection to “user-generated content,” however, is its framing. What it describes is not a thing, but an activity, a mode of production. (Sorry to use a somewhat awkward Marxian turn of phrase.) As Derek points out, the people engaged on these sites aren’t “generating content,” but making something meaningful to them. By saying “user-generated content,” observers neglect the emerging systems of production that surround these projects, whether or not the purpose of the site is to take people’s contributions and commoditize them. To fix the problem with “user-generated content,” we have to shift perspective and think of it as a mode of production. Yochai Benkler’s formulation “commons-based peer production” is an attractive, if awkward, way to describe the phenomenon, except it’s used to describe projects like the Linux kernel or Wikipedia, where a group of contributors work on the same product in a coordinated way. Perhaps we can pare it down to “peer production” to describe what goes on on Flickr or blogs or Indymedia. And if you really need to talk about what’s on Flickr, you could say “peer-produced content.”