Participation and You!

So according to Time Magazine, You are the 2006 person of the year. But how did we all do it, how did we get there?

Of course Time Magazine was calling attention to the increase of user-generated content online. Sites like Youtube, Myspace, Wikipedia, Forums, Blogs, all revolve around user-generated content.

An issue that van Dijck points out in the Users Like You? article is that these sites are all mediators of content. Sure, I can upload a video to Youtube, but will anyone watch it? It depends on what Youtube decides to do with it. Will it be a featured video, or will Miley Cyrus be featured instead? Will it be 'recommended' to certain users? Well, that depends on "high-tech algorithms".

What van Dijck is suggesting here, is that user-generated content is still at the mercy of the commercialised leanings of these sites (well, perhaps not Wikipedia). Youtube, Myspace, Blogs, and much other site hosting is for-profit, either through advertising or data-mining. Even now, as I use InternetExplorer (because Firefox was having issues with Blogger), my default search engine is Bing; even the interface through which the internet is accessed is influenced by commercial, parent company, interests.

I guess what I'm getting at here is the myth of the democracy of the internet. Sure, everyone can have their say, can generate a video, or post a comment, maybe even contribute to a blog. But who is reading? What determines redirections from (default) search engines, to access the site? And once on a site (such as Youtube) how is the user-generated content orgainsed and advertised? We can all contribute online, that is not the problem. The problem is in how the viewers access; who determines how the viewers get linked through the masses of user-generated content.

Online then, where free-speech and user-generated content is widespread, (to the point of 'over-filling' online environments,) power comes not from controlling who says what, but from controlling who hears what.

So according to the Time Magazine cover, we "control the information age". Well, maybe. But if so, it's a control mediated through Google search algorithms, data-mining, user-specific advertising, and economically orientated content promotion.

(But hey, we still made the cover of Time Magazine!)