I’m wondering if the whole User Generated Content meme is getting played out?

Modest Mouse, and now Brett Ratner are getting in on the whole “if the populace does it for us, its UGC and we’re viral and hip!” train. Is it really UGC is all the User is doing is generating content as a way of offsetting cost and onsetting “hipness” through the proxy of adoption of an organic concept by what in the end are marketing departments at big companies (and I do understand the intentional irony here, being where I work and all)?

The whole concept behind “User Generated Content” as a means of describing content created by and for the People is flawed in that it simultaneously is presupposing a hierarchal difference — subjugating the “User” as a different class — as its maintaining this hierarchy by virtue of a disingenuous altruistic elevation of said content to that of Corporate under the guise of Marketing.

We like Users so much, they can replace us (but only if we control it)!

Here’s the thing: the best of what we now call UGC, and I choose to call GOOD FILM/VIDEO came from subversive desire and goals, as well as the desire for uninhibited creative expression outside of the confines of economics and hierarchy which define the media industry.

I refer to:

Superstar - the Karen Carpenter Story
Spin - the film by Brian Springer
The Barbie Liberation Organization

The movement of UGC is caused by three distinct things: Flash video, broadband market penetration and the default ability of new computers to edit video digitally. Thats it.

However, its presented a threat to the media elite in that the hierarchical differentiation that was defined by the concepts of Quality and Distribution cease to be a factor. Flattening of media hierarchy, and the removal of morphology as a means of quantifying the difference between two forms of media has in the end brought the worst McCluhan-esque, Media-Theory-101-at-college-in-the-70’s fears (which ironically were once idealistic hopes, until money entered into the equation) to life for those with the big, mahogany desks.

I love the fact that cell phones, digital video cameras and Final Cut Pro have created a movement of “take back the media.” I’m slightly worried and bothered that we (as the collective) use these tools only to bolster the ideologies of the very old-school media empires these devices have threatened.

So here’s a proposal to you all:

Take back the media! Do not partake in systems meant to enforce hierarchy, and instead embrace those that seek to diminish and eliminate it.

Remember: nothing stands between the quality or distribution of you and the media companies except the cost of the toys. The quality is not quantifiably different, neither is access.

The Aura, as it were, is not there anymore at any stage in the production flow.

Walter Benjamin is dead.
Long live mechanical reproduction, and may the work of art be free.