Thinking outside the box?

A number of broadcasters, notably Fox, have got a bit tetchy with YouTube recently for failing to protect their property adequately. People have uploaded entire series of The Simpsons and 24 just as they're being aired.
Auntie Beeb, has taken another angle by signing a deal with Google's video service to promote shows. The mentality seems to be, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Except when you take a slightly more cynical perspective. How much dross is now showing up from YouTube in BBC broadcasts? We now have "news" that a pensioner's video blog has more subscribers than Paris Hilton, or that a couple that imitated Dirty Dancing at their wedding reception. It's just a short step to making video clip shows of stuff that's been uploaded, for people who can't be bothered to go to the site themselves: in fact, I've already seen this on Swiss TV (don't ask me how).
So now, if I'm desperate for TV at any time, I can sneak a preview of what I'd like to watch on YouTube; not sure why I'd rather go there than use the BBC site, which must have enough infrastructure to support this. And if I'm desperate for some user-generated content all I need to do is turn on my TV. Is this what they call channel convergence?

In ourselves we trust

All right, so this is a little old, but the trends identified in the Edelman Trust Barometer are still worth considering and point to how information will be received in 2007.
The biggest finding of the Trust report -- and it's a continuing trend -- is that people have confidence in people like them rather than subject experts. This explains a lot about trends relating to how content is presented both on the web and in other media:

• Increasing use of folksonomy-led news-sharing sites like del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Furl, or Clipmarks; i.e. what people call Web 2.0.


• The emphasis that all media are placing on User Generated Content (UGC) and blogs. Newspapers are relying on columnists who fill space in the demotic of their readership, while TV programmers believe that serious issues need to be commented on and even fronted by their audience, or people like their audience: witness Panorama dropping Robin Day / Dimbleby-like figures of austere knowledge giving way to more vox pop features where people complain about how difficult some part of their life is and demonstrate little hard evidence.


• Why Jeremy Vine's radio show is the worst piece of broadcasting you can imagine: the least-informed sections of society rant about irrelevant matters, interspersed with horrendous middle-of-the-road music.

There's good reason for promoting the people like me angle: you can develop a sense of community, foster ground-up collaboration that business in particular often loses out on, and target relevant markets more effectively. There is one big drawback however: people who are ignorant will increasingly rely on other people who share similar, comforting ignorance, as Richard Dawkins points out.
There's a reason people are experts: they've invested heavily in discovery and have demonstrated a talent for it in their particular area. If we just trust people like me, we risk stagnating in a stew of ignorance and self-righteousness.
And yes, I am aware of the irony of how this has been communicated.

UGC - not the cinema chain

I realise that this entry is contradictory to the precepts of blogging, but bear with me and consider it to be an example of postmodern irony. Or something.
These days UGC is the buzz-acronym for our media, particularly television, and especially on the BBC.
Born of the internet, User Generated Content allows a return path along which an audience can respond to the information provided and contribute to it. On the web it would be through adding comments to this blog, for example, while on TV or radio it's usually via SMS and email, though MMS and video clips are bound to follow shortly.
I have some issues with this.
I don't watch the news to find out what the populace thinks about NHS postcode lotteries: if I wanted to know that I'd go down the pub. I don't care for uninformed opinions on the Middle East from people who've never been there. I'm still more sceptical about how much value there is in the amount of social commentary that you can fit into a text message. Isn't this all just a way of journalists not doing their jobs?
How much investigative research do you need to do if everyone just sends you in text messages some lackey can trawl through? How many five second links in live news programmes can editors fill with a quirky SMS from a member of their audience? And as content is sourced and aggregated from increasingly diverse sources, how long until news broadcasts are just a variant of youtube?
I was wondering if there were fundamental differences between the web as a news medium and television, such as a sense of community. But it's all content for the self-content. There's no reason why TV shouldn't encourage greater interactivity with its audience.
Except that I want substance not opinion. I want curiosity not prejudice. Journalism should be about discovering things that are hidden from the public, not telling the public what it knows already and then what we think about what we know.
Without wishing to sound like a Tonbridge colonel writing into the Telegraph or a self-righteous academic, UGC in television news sounds a death knell for informed journalism and, by extension, a significant shift in the intellectual episteme for the 21st century. In western Europe, we can point to various modes of thought: contemplative theoretical epistemeology through Aristotle, acceptance of scholastic hegemony through Roman Catholic doctrine, a protestant autonomy of thought through empiricism... and now I guess in an extension of hermeneutics it's all about how we each read what we're told and the opinions we form. It's a move away from trying to discover objective truths. UGC reflects a self-confidence about audiences today that we hold the answers to all questions already. But the media should be asking not what we know already, but what we don't know yet. And in a wider philosophy of progress and ambition, we should be asking ourselves the same questions too rather than blogging facile opinions that extend no one, least of all ourselves.