Consumers, Users or Slaves?

Posted on November 11, 2005

What is the correct term for all the citizen created content? Is it user generated content (UGC), citizen journalism, consumer generated content or something else? Robert Scoble doesn't like the term "user generated content" -- to him this sounds like "slave generated content."

It's because whenever I hear that term I always translate it to "slave generated content." Here's why: there's a lot of companies who are expecting you to help out their business models (including the one I work for - I'm challenging everyone I talk to inside Microsoft to stop thinking about monetization - except for the teams who are building monetization systems - stop thinking about "user generated content" Those thoughts will lead you down a bad path).

Mary Hodder at Napsterization blogs that Users is better than Consumers.

Users are people who go out, find stuff they like, publish, remix and create a new. They are smart, they are proactive. They don't take being marketed to, but would rather either discover or get more real information from people they trust. Users have been operating digitally since the advent of the internet.

Consumers are those whose mouths are wide open, pointed toward the sky, so they can't see what's going on, like baby birds, helpless and clueless and waiting to be marketed to, while information or products are spoon-fed to them by marketers. Consumers are so 1980's.

It's Users. Get your ticket now on the cluetrain. If you keep talking about consumers, the users will pass you by as they take control of their own media, product interests and activities.

In the important Tron film we learned that Users are good -- they are the people who create the programs.

Master Control Program: He's not any kind of program, Sark. He's a User.
Sark: A user?
Master Control Program: That's right. He pushed me... in the other world. Somebody pushes me, I push back. So I brought him down here... What's the matter, Sark? You look nervous.
Sark: Well, I - it's just - I don't know, a User, I mean... Users wrote us. A User even wrote you...
Master Control Program: No one User wrote me. I'm worth a couple million of their man-years!

In the real world users are not the creators of programs. Users use the computers, iPods and the Internet and developers and programmers write the code. In the past few years the new publishing tools have made it easier and easier for people to publish different forms of media. Users have become creators and have acquired power (see the Businessweek's "The Power of Us" article). Words like Us, Users and Citizen are becoming the most frequently used terms to refer to mass amounts of content created by people. People who think negatively of the UGC term better move fast to derail it. Google shows over 240,000 results for "User Generated Content." By comparison, the less appealing term "Consumer Generated Content" only has about 25,000 results. UGC wins for now.

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