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Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics
develop user-generated content on cultural websites. There are various possible
reasons.
• Fear to post personal details: social networking sites encourage users to share
their personal information and messages openly, and everyone can see it.
Obviously, many of us do not like that.
• Spontaneous means unfinished: cultural researchers, consultants, professors
and policy-makers create books, articles and research works or write statements
and documents. They are used to publishing final, “ready-to-be-viewed”
materials. Social networking and user-generated content requires spontaneous
reactions, which for many of us might not look like a comprehensive, serious
and elaborated piece of intellectual work.
• Loss of control: since any user can create content it is difficult to control the
quality and the relevance of the content input, therefore it might become
unfocused and unstructured. In some cases user-generated content might cause
content overlap or duplication. Many of us in the cultural and artistic field like to
focus and are distracted by unfiltered information.
• Online copyright mess: there are a lot of unsolved questions about the
ownership of the content generated by individual users, by groups and
communities of users. For example, when users provide commentary using
corporate online resources, will the company or the author own the intellectual
property?
• Social networking seems unserious: we appreciate credible authors. Since in
this case each user can become a content provider and we are not sure who
exactly the person posting content is, we are less likely to be inspired by his/her
thoughts and viewpoint.
• We are afraid that user generated content can be highly inaccurate and even not
appropriate. It can also contain abusive or sexual material. Therefore more and
more sites are setting up editorial control for double-checking against such
uploads.
Websites and portals in the field of new media and arts and technology, as well as
innovative cross-border case studies and projects across Europe, are less fearful and
are based on a higher participation and user generation of content. There are also
examples of cooperative blogs, online discussion forums and groups in the field of
culture and the arts who are open and show the power of sharing and joint
communication online. There is a need to provoke deeper research and debates
among our cultural and artistic circles on issues such as: online copyrights, privacy
policies, openness versus editorial control, etc., so that we can find out how to move
ahead with more strength and less fear.
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