How Will Smith Helped Me Understand The UGC Debate

 

There is an exchange in Men in Black where Will Smith’s character asks Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) why alien presence on Earth must be concealed:

 

  

 

  

 

 

 

Edwards: Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it.

K: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

It sums up perfectly the debate that appears to underpin Dr Andy Williams’s lecture last week about user generated content (UGC) and the future of journalism. There seems to be a fundamental disagreement between the cheerleaders of participatory journalism, who like Edwards believe that the people are ready for the revelation, and traditionalists, who like K feel that people need to be protected from themsleves.

Dr Williams said that many media professionals recoil at the term “citizen journalist”. Little wonder, considering the connotations of the word “citizen”. For centuries it has been a byword of revolution and its emergence in this context illustrates the ferocity of the passions that are aroused by this debate.

Those on both sides of the fence are trapped in this idea of an old order versus a brave new world, and an imminent apocalyptic clash between the two.

UGC cheerleader-in-chief Dan Gillmor called his book We the Media playing on the famous opening of the US constitution, “We the People…”.His first chapter, “From Thomas Paine to blogs and beyond,” draws an explicit line from the virulently anti establishment pamphleteer Paine to today’s bloggers.

Gilmoor is influenced by the startlingly revolutionary Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) which set out the ways in which the internet would change the world. Firstly there is the title, after Marx, and the organisation of the piece into “theses” ( the form in which Martin Luther presented the formative ideas of Protestantism.) The language swings from pithy to pretensious, mystic to moronic, best illustrated in theses 7 and 95.(Technology journalist John C Dvorak ridiculed “the cult of the Cluetrain” here )

While the rhetoric continues to rant and rave, big media organisations are going to prioritise showing their committment to USG over finding innovative, meaningful ways in which old and new might be assimilated. Rupert Murdoch’s lip service to new media is all very well but attitudes to grass roots journalism can be as patronising as the voiceover in this excellent spoof:

 

Collaboration between the established and the emerging media is crucial. We heard today how moderation (in the technological sense) may hold the key to successful assimilation. Moderation of the debate may be even more important. “Let’s have this conversation, for everyone’s sake,” pleads Gillmor. The world isn’t going to wait for us.

As Agent K points out,”Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”