The Discourses of Empowerment and Web 2.0: The Dilemmas of User-Generated Content

Introduction

The new forms of user-generated content on the Internet have in recent years heralded a plethora of academic writing on the reconfiguration of the role of the audience in the new media landscape (see Jenkins, 2006; Bruns, 2005; Morris & Ogan, 2005; Deuze, 2006). From a media studies perspective, the audience as prolific producers raises new ways to theorise the interactive audiences who were previously seen as recipients empowered to only interpret messages but not to create their own due to the political economy of the media and knowledge industries. Undeniably, with the Internet the traditional notion of ‘audience’ has been muddied with features of interactivity and the formation of niche communities which enable narrowcasting (Downes, 2002). Additionally with the convergence of technologies the term becomes inadequate to capture the complexities of the Internet and the range of activities and behaviour it can enable. The possibility of creating unlimited user-generated content undoubtedly circumnavigates many of the ‘gate-keeping’ features of the traditional media without completely diminishing their power. The increasing incorporation of user-generated content into mainstream media portals is evident as news and content generation becomes an open-ended phenomenon in the new media environment.

Jonathan Zittrain (2006) moots the notion of ‘generativity’, where the technical architecture of the web makes it consummately generative and the grid of the PC connected to the Internet has developed such that there is little centralized control. Consequently, it is nearly completely open to the creation and rapid distribution of the innovations of technology-savvy users to a mass audience who can partake in activities without having to know how they work (cf. Naughton, 2006, p.8). This participatory turn in web business models that the business and web design communities refer to as Web 2.0 is characterised by the convergence of social networks, online communities and consumer-created content and is synonymously referred to as ‘social media’ (Burgess et al., 2006).

The proliferation of user-generated content has often been associated in our consciousness with issues of empowerment and discourses of ‘democratization’, where user-generated content is seen as reconfiguring and re-negotiating conventional ways of producing knowledge and in the process it is seen as entering new forms of power arrangements, conventions, and information hierarchies on the Internet.

This chapter examines how the notion of empowerment is entwined with the features of Web 2.0 which stress ‘participation’ and ‘collaboration’ whilst integrating notions of ‘community’, ‘identity,’ and the ‘performative’ in the online environment thus blurring the lines between private and public as well as truth and fiction. By analysing the theories of empowerment associated with consumer-generated content in the Web 2.0 environment, this chapter explores the emerging social and ethical challenges, whether they be information overload or the issue of trust in the Internet. The audience of consumers and citizens inevitably mediates many areas of human activity including policy making, the formation of public opinion, as well as the fostering of communal and individual identities in the postmodern world. The chapter appraises the problems, the potential and the processes that are unleashed through the proliferation of consumer-generated content in our globalized world.