Narratives

Describtion of the shift from content consumption to content creation

INSPIRING ARTICLES

Narrative 1: Chico Bongalar

"Chico Bongalar is a tubby twenty-something guy - real name Grant - and he likes making videos. At the moment Chico is the No 1 attraction on Trouble Homegrown, the UK television channel's attempt to mirror the runaway success of web sites like MySpace and YouTube.

Chico talks about his life, getting a suntan and eats a slice of bread. Doesn't sound like much, but he created a bit of a buzz. Chico is part of a new wave of amateur vi-deo talent that includes the Beijing karaoke champs, aka the Chinese Backstreet Boys (sponsored by Coca-Cola), the folk singer Sandi Thom (now with a Â£1 million recording deal) and the Arctic Monkeys, who went from obscurity to the Brit Awards, all kickstarted by the web.

Chico and millions of others who upload amateur videos to the growing number of user-generated content sites such as YouTube have sent shockwaves through big media companies - and executives are sitting up and paying attention.

It's not just for the size of the audience; there's the increasingly contentious issue of content ownership and control.

Chico's video narratives are free online, just like all MySpace and YouTube content, because people like Chico create this stuff mostly just to share ideas and get atten-tion. Until recently, online fame and the potential of discovery seemed enough, and the commercialisation of so-called user-generated content (UGC) sites was not an issue - because the sites were startups and below the radar of big media organisa-tions. But that's all changing.

Sites such as YouTube are growing up. MySpace is now owned by News Corpora-tion. Trouble's Homegrown and MTV Flux have been created by publicly-listed, bot-tom-line-oriented media companies. They may be interested in nurturing new talent, but the MTVs of the world also want to profit from this new creative pool.

"YouTube and MySpace are all about community, and I don't believe that their initial plans were to commercially exploit uploaded material, but rather only to build busi-ness models based on ad revenues," says Alexander Ross, a partner at Wiggin LLP, a media and technology law firm. "Contrast that with an MTV and some others, who appear to be approaching the model more from a broadcaster's perspective."

Literally citation from "The Guardian: Whose content is it anyway?" (2006)

Narrative 2: The Phenomenon of YouTube

"When two twenty-somethings posted a home-made video on YouTube last week they initially attracted more than 1.3m views, but they didn't earn a cent for their efforts. This didn't matter to them because the two in question, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, owned the company and had just sold it to Google for $1.65bn. But the fact that they didn't get paid is still a matter of some interest. We are at the start of a creative revolution on the web, enabling millions of people to publish their own videos, music, photographs, books, blogs or whatever, and it is important to make sure it doesn't turn into a rip-off for a new breed of intermediaries. Content is king, but the king has yet to be voted a stipend.

The curious thing about YouTube is that the people who ought to be paid (individual content creators) aren't actually campaigning for it, while corporate providers are threatening legal action over clips pirated on YouTube - even though normally they are only too happy to pay a media platform to show clips of films or TV shows to generate interest in watching the whole thing or buying it as a DVD.

The creators of YouTube have done a great service in bringing video creation to the masses. But it was not because their technology was superior to others in the field (it wasn't), but because they were in the right place at the right time when, unpredictably, YouTube suddenly attracted critical mass. This was a huge victory for garage start-ups over the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, which found to their cost that the mighty leverage arising from their big market shares in existing products buttered no parsnips in the new world of web creativity."

Literally citation from "The Guardian: We really need some discontent creators" (2006)

Problems

Most exciting narratives (with regard to digital creativity) tell rather about digital immigrants than about digital natives...

Solutions

Structure

Introduction (Narrative)

Description of the Shift from content consumption to content creation

What is user generated content?

Definitions, Characteristics, separations, forms of UCC/examples, shades of creativity incl. copy right, Jatalla

Reasons/Drivers for the phenomenon of digital creativity

Technological Drivers

Social Drivers

Economic Drivers

Legal/Institutional Drivers

The business with digital creativity

The case of YouTube, Grouper, etc.

Future

Prognosis for future relevance/importance of digital creativity, future scenarios Impacts on education, social life, business architectures Opportunities and Threats (transition to III.B. Digital Piracy)