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The online power of users and money: can culture gain?
• ClickZ network (www.clickz.com) is the largest resource of interactive
marketing news, information, opinions, research and references.
• Slideshare (www.slideshare.net) is a large community for sharing presentations
on the Web.
• Podcast.net (www.podcast.net) allows users to record a story, a presentation, a
lecture, or a radio programme and then to create a podcast for listeners.
• Nokia Concept Lounge (www.thesedays.com/conceptlounge) invites users to
share their thoughts on the future of mobile communication.
• Orange’s Talking Point (http://talkingpoint.orange.co.uk) is a place where users
can say how they feel about a lot of things, not just telephones.
Not without reason, Time Magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year was “You” and the
reason was the phenomenon of users’ participation in generating content and
self-promotion.
The social networking phenomenon went even further, “decompressing” our daily
life and breaking it into pieces. One example is the Twitter (http://twitter.com)
service that allows users to send short messages to their family, colleagues and
friends, telling others what they are doing – eating, walking, thinking, etc. It started to
raise diverse reactions – from happiness because of the possibility of finding your
friend to join you for a party or being connected to your beloved ones at any moment,
to a sadness about too much connection for not very important things, such as what
you are having for dinner, what kind of chair you are sitting on or what shampoo you
are using to wash your hair. This website also raises the question of security
vulnerability as everyone knows what everyone else is doing at a certain time.
The phenomena of websites and portals driven by users raise numerous
discussions about user-generated content, its value, level of professionalism and
quality. This is because such content is usually created by non-professionals, with no
expectations for profit or direct financial benefit and, in most cases, it does not have
an institutional context. Users are motivated to participate in order to connect, to
share, to get visibility, to express opinions and viewpoints. Content generated by
users is, in most cases, the result of a collaborative effort – every next user contributes
to what the previous one has said/uploaded/written.
User-generated content: why culture doesn’t gain enough
It seems that cultural professionals involved in cross-border cooperation, cultural
networking, cultural research, policy making for the arts or managing artistic
organizations and projects in Europe are not profiting enough from the opportunity to
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