User Generated Content

User generated content(UGC for short) has many effects on our current political and social spheres, with many media professionals questioned on how to control it, if at all possible. In the article written by Anna Maria Jonsson and Henrik Ornebring, they discuss that UGC gives consumers a false sense of interaction, that in reality all they are doing is taking a reactive stance in what the media feeds the consumer. However, a contrasting opinion by Melissa Wall and Sahar El Zahed, state the opposite-UGC gives consumers and users a proactive stance in media. Yet, both articles both have a common point in which they agree UGC is a very successful venture. Both articles are centered on UGC and it’s effects on society as a whole however their

Jonsson and Ornebring believe that it brings a false sense of empowerment and that the media or producers still control what content is shown and what is not shown. They back their point using examples of current online newspapers and offline newspapers, stating that UGC such as polls and comments all rely on what information the newspaper already provides. The two writers state that: “We note that user-produced news texts, interviews and other types of news materials are virtually non-existent. Forums, comments and discussion boards are common forms of high participation activities in the sphere of information, but still most often “parasitical” on existing news content.”(Jonsson & Orngebring,

In both articles it is very apparent that a bigger party attempts to control what media goes through and what media does not go through. Because Jonsson and Ornebring believe that media is proactive, they also conclude that UGC is reliant on the interactivity created by newspapers, and because the newspapers decide on what type of interactivity they would like users to partake in, they can also effectively control what sort of UGC is created by users. This allows the media outlet to control the level of participation. Unlike Jonsson and Ornebring’s article however, Wall and Zahed, talk about a different type of UGC that can not be controlled by a larger media or government, one that isn’t participatory but instead bordering the line between UGC and professional media. They discuss using the tools of online networking to distribute their content because that allows them to bypass the existing problem of getting their media out there. Through successful manipulation of websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube’s recommended/suggested content. Activists and amateur journalists can easily bring their content to light resulting in a proactive role in UGC, without being participatory. This in turn created a pop-up news system, which came from activists recording or taking pictures from their phone, and would simply upload to their already successful user created