technoculture314-09

It's a universal truth that anyone with access to the internet has the power to create and share content. This has left the traditional cultural gatekeepers – the television executives, newspaper owners, book publishers, record companies and movie producers under siege. There's no denying that Web 2.0 has been a bonus for budding film makers and musicians, or more appropriately the produser and cocreator. Take amateur filmmaker Jason van Genderen who last year won Tropfest New York with a 3 ½ minute short film about homelessness, which was shot on a mobile phone and made with a budget of $57. Forget the traditional distribution channels, just put your movie up on YouTube for free. It's a huge finger wag at the traditional gatekeepers who have until now controlled the tide of talent; now culture has been liberated and democratised. The downside is that you have to wade through a lot of D-grade content to find the gems. It may sound patronising but can readers, viewers and listeners be trusted to identify the best content without the guiding hand of authoritative gatekeepers? I think it's more likely that users themselves will sift through the dross and establish a list of people whose opinion they trust. The amount of unsubstantiated content online is annoying, even for user-generated sites like Wikipedia, the so-called poster-child for Web 2.0. In a move that caused a lot of flak, the board recently announced an editorial review system. At this stage these “flagged revisions” apply only to articles about living people but may conceivably be extended to other topics. The Sydney Morning Herald reported Wikipedia's board chairman as saying: “We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks.” It's sparked a heated debate about the “purity of Wikipedia's original charter as a fully open user-generated reference work”. It's obvious that user-generated copy is here to stay and the traditional media gatekeepers have to adapt. Is it possible for there to be a hybrid model of both? Jose van Dijck comments in his essay Users like You, that Hollywood producers “hesitate whether to see YouTube-Google as a friend or foe:either they go after them and use their historic prowess to impose their old (content-protection) rules on this newcomer, or they side with them in creating new business and marketing models to create buzz for conventional broadcast products.