User Generated Content

User generated content has never been as easily accessible for both brand marketers and consumers as it is today. The prevalence of smartphones and tablets makes it easier than ever to take photos, make videos, draw pictures, and otherwise broadcast our thoughts and opinions instantly through numerous social channels

From social media to video games and from online fan production to machinima the phenomenon of user-generated culture has secured its position in the mainstream during the last few years. This shift has resulted from the blurring boundaries between media production and consumption as well as between professional and amateur authorship. The phenomenon is claimed to be characterized by collaboration, accessibility and democratic potential. During the You, Me, User Conference we approach the user-generated culture, or in other words, multiple situations where culture becomes modified, produced and distributed through everyday practices, social and new media

Technological developments and changes in the communication through Internet have produced significant changes in production and fruition processes of cultural objects as well as, more generally, in the relationship between both the private individual sphere and the participatory collective dimension. From some of the most reliable theories about new media and Internet, the author intends to focus on some reflections and questions that affect the sociological research applied to the study of cultural practices through new media and Internet. Furthermore, one specific attention is given to new forms of artistic and musical creativity fostered by the development of online participatory culture and characterized by the spread of user-generated content, by which concepts such as “producer”, “product” and “user” have lost their traditional boundaries in favour of new types of actors and new forms of culture.

User-generated content (UGC) covers a range of media content available in a range of modern communications technologies. It entered mainstream usage during 2005, having arisen in web publishing and new media content production circles. It is used for a wide range of applications, including problem processing, news, gossip and research and reflects the expansion of media production through new technologies that are accessible and affordable to the general public. All digital media technologies are included, such as question-answer databases, digital video, blogging, podcasting, forums, review-sites, social networking, social media, mobile phone photography and wikis. In addition to these technologies, user-generated content may also employ a combination of open source, free software, and flexible licensing or related agreements to further reduce the barriers to collaboration, skill-building and discovery(“‘UGC’”) has also gained in popularity over the last decade, as more and more users have begun to flock to social media and “‘content-based’” sharing sites.

India of Convergence:

Media convergence is more than simply a technological shift. Convergence alters the relationship between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres and audiences. Convergence refers to a process, but not an end point. Convergence will be a relation between view technologies rather than an integration of systems. It represents a reconfiguration of media power, and reshaping of media aesthetics and economics. The French cyberspace theorist Pierre Levy uses the term “Collective intelligence” to describe lage scale information gathering and processing activities that have emerged in web communities.


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