Sunday 5 December 2010

Is reality becoming more real? The rise and rise of UGC

Sara Mills explores the rise of the citizen journalist and considers the impact of user-generated content on news stories, the news agenda, and the role of the professionals.


The main point of the article are listed below: (summarization)

• Now new technologies mean that the audience are no longer passive receivers of news.

• Audience have become ‘users’ and the users have become publishers.

• This shows the rise of UGC as audiences now create their own content. Therefore the old divide between institution and audience is being eroded.

• Audience have more access to technology and new digital media, it allows them to use in a more complex way.

• A major change has been the development of new technologies such as video phones and the growth of the Internet and user-dominated sites. As this content it available a wide range of audience.

• There is a rise of ‘citizen journalist’, as normal people create their own news by the use of media technologies. E.g records an event on their phone + YouTube.

• By 1991 people could afford more new technological devises such as video camera as it become more common and this was the very fist sign of the rise in new technological advance .

• It allows people capture moments which can change their lives, such as the George Holliday case over the ‘Rodney King’ incident.

• This incident was the very first examples of the news being generated by ‘ordinary people,.

‘citizen journalists’, ‘grassroots journalists’, or even ‘accidental journalists’ are other names used for ‘ordinary people’.

• The power to make and break news has moved beyond the traditional news institutions as over the year millions of people has produced their own footage and have become citizen journalists.

• UGC has become the more powerful than ever as people use social media sites such as Bebo, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook to create UGC.

• More and more people use UGC sites to access news such as Wikipedia news, Google news and YouTube score highly in terms of where people go to get their news. This is a much faster way on accessing the news and gossip with a click of a button.

• Social networking site provide world-wide news. This is because everyone wants to have their moment of fame and the desire for everyone to tell their own story may explain the huge popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook.

• In today’s society the news now seems to have become over shadowed and old-fashioned as it lacks the raw, grainy low-quality footage provided by citizen journalists.




Examples of UGC are Youtube,Google and Social networking Sites.

Audience theory: the reception theory is a basic acceptance of the meaning of a specific text, this occurs when a group of readers have a shared cultural background and interpret the text in similar ways. Also the meaning of a text is not inherent within the text itself, but is created within the relationship between the text and the reader.

Audience become more powerful and institutions lose money alongside the journalists as citizen journalist become more popular and a major rise is UGC is produced.



WEB LINK:
http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/mm/subscribers/downloads/archive_mm/_mmagpast/MM30_UGC.html

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