Web 2.0 :User Generated Content and Why all Men Aren’t Created Equal.

Web 2.0 is commonly hailed as an: “encapsulation of the idea of the proliferation of inter-connectivity and interactivity of web-delivered content in regards to global audiences” (Tim O’Reilly). Web 2.0 does not actually describe any technological improvement of how the internet functions, but instead encompasses the idea that the internet is no longer simply a platform for gaining information but instead is a platform for creation and distribution by any single person regardless of race, creed, or gender. Web 2.0 offers a way for people to interact with one another in ways they never could have previously. Technological strides in databases, content management systems, widespread broadband and wi-fi, and ubiquity of computers has allowed for the masses to take control of not only what the read on the internet, but what, where, and how it gets distributed. Therein that sentence lies the problem with Web 2.0 in relation to user-generated content: it has made all men equal under the sign of WWW.

 

You’re probably asking yourself “But why is the internet which now serves as a representation of all humans as equals a bad thing?” That logic, though morally hard to object to, is easily broken apart when we reflect on humans as a whole and quickly realize two important things: not everyone is as smart as everyone else, and large numbers of people interacting with each other at the same time or in the same place rapidly obliterates all forms of individualist reasoning, logic, and morals. To further this argument, we can look back at the philosopher Nietzsche and his description of the ‘herd mentality which describes these ‘herds’ in the form of two groups of people, “One lends itself to the religious points of views- their beliefs and how those dictated their actions, while the other lends itself to influence by the media…based upon following trends, social norms, etc. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality). I’m not going to touch on the first half of the herd mentality but instead I am going to focus in on the herd in relation to media and trends. The best way to examine this is by directly picking apart the largest online social media platforms (in order of popularity) available to Americans (the country of choice in all of these articles); these lucky websites are: myspace, facebook, digg, and youtube.

 

Myspace:

 

The first, most common, and most hated tool that has clung to life since the beginning of the web 2.0 boom is MySpace. Before any formal or informal critique is given, it is important to see how MySpace chooses to describe itself to the public and investors:

 

“MySpace is an online community that lets you meet your friends’ friends. Create a community on MySpace and you can share photos, journals and interests with your growing network of mutual friends!” – Myspace.com/About

 

Myspace claims to be a space dedicated for singles, matchmakers, families, businesses, classmates and those trying to connect with people from their past. From Myspace’s opening statement and its target audience we can in theory safely assume that the online community is a safe place for respectable people to mingle, interconnect, and establish relationships (plutonic and platonic) on a larger scale than possible without the internet. The target demographic therefore should be males and females between the ages of 15-17 (Highschool), 18-24(Undegrads) and 25-29(Young Business People) The reason I’ve marked these three demographics as Myspace’s target audience of choice is because anyone between the ages of 15-17 is only looking to connect with friends, those between the ages of 18-24 are looking for dating and career advice, and the final age group (25-29) is looking to establish and retain business opportunities. (I should note here that myspace does not claim to service any specific ethnicity over others).

 

Lets take a step back from the description of myspace above and simply throw it completely out the window. Take a look below at the real demographics behind MySpace’s actual audience:

As you can see MySpace actually calls for a certain type of person: a Caucasian female in her late high school years whom rides the paycheck of what is considered in America to be the lower middle class.  Upon closer inspection of these demographics I was able to glean a bit of information about the type of person who comes to MySpace and who they’re really marketing towards.  What the company wants, whether voiced or not, are young women that have no actual knowledge of the real world and seek advice and relationships through an online platform.  Sex sells best (though the price of sex has gone down within the past year) and MySpace solidifies its stance on using sex as the main drive behind the website in the little input forms you have to fill out when making a profile.  Note that it’s the same as filling out a questionaire on a dating/sex website to find your perfect match:

 The biggest, and perhaps most underestimated tool that began to destroy the Internets was not that it fostered any sort of sordid activity, but it gave everyone their “five minutes of fame”.  It allowed a person to feel space, to feel different, and it made anyone who signed up for their service completely unique (just like everyone else).  Profile pages quickly became shrines to a user’s ego, the ability to customize CSS, HTML, and implement flash made using MySpace that much more tempting to anyone who wanted to take part in the internet.  MySpace become a conglomerate of competing egos which did not group themselves in accordance to ethnicity, religion, or creed like in the real world, but MySpace became divided into what I shall refer to as “schools of thought”.  Scene girls, Photoshop Wannabe’s, Garage Band Artists, Live Journal Rejects; there was a place for everyone on MySpace which leads me to point out the company’s most heinous crime: it promoted Content.

Content is an amazing thing, it can be used to bend search engines like Google to your will and it can foster and promote a positive discussion which would tie into a larger community with diverse, intelligent, and progressive opinions.  But ideology rarely falls in line with reality, and what MySpace promoted was instead a bog of egotistical journal entries, pictures of non-existent cleavage line of fourteen year old girls, and a cesspool of people who thought that they deserved to have their opinion heard by the masses.  And the masses did hear.  They Responded.  And they agreed.  And it is with something as trivial as MySpace, that the masses began to learn they could control the flow of information and trends if they stuck together and had one solid voice. 

 

 Youtube:

You will be quick to yell hypocrisy if you look to my sidebar and see that I’m using an embedded video from Youtube but let me explain myself.  What you see is one of the few proper uses of YouTube: Youtube as a video search engine.  The company does not describe themselves as a multimedia search engine, though Google would say differently, and identifies themselves as the:

“YouTube is the leader in online video, and the premier destination to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips on www.YouTube.com and across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email.

Everyone can watch videos on YouTube. People can see first-hand accounts of current events, find videos about their hobbies and interests, and discover the quirky and unusual. As more people capture special moments on video, YouTube is empowering them to become the broadcasters of tomorrow.” (http://www.youtube.com/t/about)

Let’s disseminate the information; Youtube is a place where anyone can upload videos of anything within a set of loose guidelines (that aren’t usually upheld) with no buffer to stop a single video from being viewed by millions of people.  Amateur film-makers, fresh motion graphic artists, and small-time cinematographers rejoiced around the globe; finally their intellectual views on the world of film and cinema could be heard and creativity could pour forth unto the masses.

But the masses had a very different feeling about Youtube.  I’m going to focus on two of the most heavily viewed sections of Youtube to clarify what I mean when I say the masses quickly assumed control of the online video sharing service.  The first is Reaction Videos and the second is Idiocy.  The latter category might not seem like a logical or educated choice, but after my explanation you’ll understand why.

 

Reaction Videos / ReMixed Videos:

If you search any major film or comedy skit you’re likely to have trouble finding what you’re searching for. I’ll reference the video in my sidebar again.  It actually took me time to find a video that should have been ranking first for the keyword I used: Quantum of Solace Intro.  But what did I find?  Reaction Videos.  These can be accurately described as videos made by the masses documenting their reactions to other videos (sometimes reaction videos) so that –everyone- can know how they felt about a major event (usually a movie).  Here’s what I got when I searched for the lovely intro movie to the new James Bond Movie:

 A quick glance says the result is the fourth one down from the top; but on closer inspection we find that a user took the motion graphics intro to the movie, and swapped out the music track for the music from the video because he “felt it suited it better”.  An average user who blatantly disregarded the video cuts made specifically to “Another Way to Die” by Alica Keys.  Instead he slapped over an unedited track without even bothering to cut the intro movie to the new music. 

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjiqF9JbppI]

To simplify this for you: imagine taking the Mona Lisa, cutting it apart, and turning it into a collage that you throw into the trash when you’re bored of it. 

*Note: The video was met with nothing but applause and compliments of the new version by the masses.

A strong example of a reaction video is found with the famous “Dark Knight” movie that came out recently. Here is the result I received from “The Dark Knight”.

 

Take a look at the number of hits for a spoof of a scene in the movie versus the Dark Knight Teaser Trailer. Complete obliteration by at least 2 million views.

 

Idiocy:

To best describe idiocy click HERE and look at the Youtube video.

Though I will quickly admit that I found this hilarious when I first saw it, I also was part of the crowd on /v/ and /b/ long before the masses had even stumbled onto the video.  At first I thought something as stupid and silly as the above video could never be popular.  People are smart right?  Why would they even waste their time laughing at something some user uploaded with little intellect behind it.  But I was wrong, horribly wrong.  The masses ate it up with over 11 million views and it quickly becomes a long standing meme associated with the internet.

(If you haven’t noticed by now you’ve been Rick Roll’d.)

But as we know, Idiocy sells just as well as sex does.  There’s a reason fart jokes will always topple political ones.  The human brain would much rather comprehend a short joke over one that could possibly require a few more currents along our brain synapses.  Other famous examples of Idiocy and the Masses:

 

Chocolate Rain – Addicting, homemade, quality rap.  It even managed to score itself a soft-drink deal.

 

 

Party Boy – The world’s sexuality was called into question by amount of hits this young man bouncing around in a thong to techno music received.

 

 

Lonelygirl15 – Not only do the masses enjoy men in thongs, they seem to enjoy video blogs of young non-existent females.

 

 

Deviant Art

The subject of debate between everyone that works for me over at the Creative Fluff Design Magazine and Blog.  Half of us believe that Deviant art promotes creative content and gives the creative community an outlet for their work with the chance of it being seen by the masses; the other half of our team argues that Deviant Art promotes trends and gives the idea that anyone can become a professional designer/artist without formal training.  I’m currently leaning towards the latter.

 

Deviant Art is an online community for artists, designers, writers, and photographers looking to get exposed to the art world, garner feedback on their work, or simply to have a place to hold their precious art pieces. An analogy can be made to MySpace in that it falls prey to the same disconnect between ideology and reality.  Deviant Art quickly became a place where the masses swarmed and uploaded every bit of work from MS Paint stick figures to pictures of themselves in scene girl poses.  Extremely poor examples of literature run rampant throughout the online community and once again, Photoshop is treated as a device that when once mastered, enables a person to the idea that they deserve to be paid for their work.  Before I continue I should note that simply because you are on Deviant Art, does not mean you fall into any of my characterizations, there are amazing artists, designers, and writers who provide critical feedback, and amazing work.  But the few -never- outrank the masses on the internet.  As much as I love Neitzsche’s view on social hierarchy, it didn’t work with humans in the real world, and it definitely does not apply on the Internet.

 

Having given a very liberal disclaimer, let’s analyze why it’s important to understand that everyone might be creative, but it doesn’t make them worthy of getting paid for it.  Three things are important in any field.  Find something you’re good at, find something you love doing, and find someone who’s willing to pay you for it. Unless you have all three, you might want to re-think your field and this holds true here.  Deviants (I like that name) might be good at Photoshop, and they might love doing it, but how many design studios or firms are going to hire someone without formal training who produces a portfolio hosted on Deviant Art?  Not many and I wouldn’t like to meet the firm that does.  Once again, I have no problem with designers and artists who do not receive formal training, but their self-teaching should be able to match the level of education that a design/art student would receive at a university.

 

What Deviant Art offers is a place where instead of work being received and commented on by professionals/educated individuals it is seen by the masses whom have received not only no education in art and design, but have most likely not even received education on formal and informal critiques and constructive criticism.  Another problem caused by this artistic online community is that they over-saturate creative fields across the board and devalue the worth of decent, hard working designers.  If artists, designers, and photographers on Deviant Art seriously consider themselves halfway decent, then they should be hosting their work on their own websites, writing to blogs on their own domain names, and competing in contests held by the AIGA, CommArts, Metropolis, and The One Show.

 

Digg

Instead of describing what Digg is, I’m just going to show you a screenshot of the homepage:

 

The most popular, and most dugg articles at the moment start off with: “IRONY: Ann Coulter’s Mouth Wired Shut”.  I don’t think the masses have ever had a more accurate banner to fly under than that title.  Digg is social bookmarking and article sharing website that bases how well an article survives on the website on a system called “Diggs”.  Diggs are votes, the more digs an article has the higher of a ranking it receives on the website.  Being on the front page of Digg is essentially the same thing as being God for a day.  At its heart, Digg is a popularity contest where users constantly compete to get their article noticed above anyone else’s.  The best way to do this, of course, is to form what resembles political bodies I.E. Schools of thought(likeminded individuals).  These groups get together and constantly promote anything made by one member of the group.  Digg, which runs itself on the premise that quality content will get the most digs couldn’t be further off.  Poor content, promoted by the masses is what sells.  It’s kind of like Wall Street.  Everyone’s buying the same stock, and when economies fail, people wonder why everyone’s going bankrupt at the same time; this is why.  The internet through these websites, which boasts individuality have done the exact opposite, it has created a place so free, so unadulterated that the uneducated masses have managed to usurp control under the notion that everything they have deserves to be heard.  In the Declaration of Independence it states that All men Are Created Equal.  On the internet it should be wise to remember that All Men Aren’t Created Equal and Some People Are More Important Than Others. Your opinion doesn’t ever matter unless you have the research and verbal prowess to support yourself.

 

Conclusion:

Conclusions will only be drawn at the end of “The State of the Internets” and will be the final 20th installment to the series. I will be constantly revising these essays so do not expect this, or any of them to be in their final states.  All feedback is critical and welcome.  Enjoy!