User-Generated Cinema: A New Way of Consumer Co-Creation?

Introduction

New web-based technologies enable previously passive users to engage as producers and become an active part in the innovation and production of content. They raise the possibilities to articulate oneself, to participate or to balance the commercial coverage. It can be said, that participatory media provides the chance to lower the obstacles of access and to address more potential users. But due to high political and normative demands, such participatory projects often result in insufficient encouragement and popularity. To motivate people to participate, it seems to be necessary to offer not only open access, but also social, interesting, entertaining experiences that result in a high involvement of the (prod)users. Therefore it is essential to find new ways to integrate entertaining tasks and a normative perspective.

But the high potential of interactive and participatory applications via the Internet does not only concern normative assumptions of common citizens participating in the public sphere. It is also worth to be considered in terms of new ways of marketing and consumption, as “participative consumer behaviour is […] fundamental to a modern understanding of marketing” (Lusch and Vargo, 2006).

While several studies show that users have little interest in online participation (especially in terms of political participation), Potts et al. (2008) find that in terms of entertaining media products “consumer-producer interactions are an increasingly important source of value creation” (p. 459), seen as part of the value-added chain (Zerfaß and Sandhu, 2008, p. 288). Following Bourdieu (1993), Potts et al. argue that creativity as the process of innovation is situated within socio-technical networks and arises from creative contexts of social interaction and institutions. Consumer co-creation therefore is seen as a new phenomenon, not as new socio-economic order but rather as “an evolution of the extant economic and cultural order to account for consumer’s greater access to the ‘means of production” (Potts et al., 2008, p. 462) through new technologies.

They state a shift from producer-centric to consumer-centric innovation, where consumer creativity (also ‘wisdom of crowds’, ‘crowdsourcing’, ‘open innovation’; Surowiecki, 2004; Zerfaß and Sandhu, 2008; Chesbrough, 2003) within the domain of new digital media becomes an increasingly important part of the global model of media production. One can state that the new entertaining culture is a part of contemporary digital culture, which includes some ways of participation and involvement of users. This opens up an evolutionary process that requires new ways of thinking – an experimental phase (Potts et al., 2008; Daugthery et al., 2011).

The media evolution (especially the new ways of interactivity online) seems to result in a potential empowerment of citizens in terms of User-Generated Content (UCG) as well as consumers in terms of Consumer-Generated Content (CGC; cf. Daugthery et al., 2011, p. 148). Wang and Rodgers (2011) state that CGC are more trusted by consumers than traditional advertisements and may lead to most effective electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) advertising.