Thanks to tech journalist Mathew Ingram for flagging a post by Ethan Kaplan that laces into the received wisdom about DIY media, “user generated content” and big media’s attempts to adapt to this new environment.

The essence of Kaplan’s argument is that thinking about media created outside of the corporation as “user generated content” presupposes, and thereby reinforces, the traditional media hierarchy of professional creator/owner/producer at the top and consumer/user at the bottom.

It’s a point well taken and well made:

The whole concept behind “User Generated Content” as a means of describing content created by and for the People is flawed in that it simultaneously is presupposing a hierarchal difference — subjugating the “User” as a different class — as its maintaining this hierarchy by virtue of a disingenuous altruistic elevation of said content to that of Corporate under the guise of Marketing.

Kaplan, who is senior director of technology at Warner Brothers Records, focuses his discussion almost entirely on video, and he has nothing nice to say about things like the Modest Mouse/MTV video contest that invites fans to create animation that will be inserted behind the band in a video (To older readers the contest will be reminiscent of Winky Dink, our formative experience with interactive video, a cartoon in which children were expected at some point to lay a transparency over the TV screen and draw props for the characters to use at key points in the plot development):

Is it really UGC if all the User is doing is generating content as a way of offsetting cost and onsetting “hipness” through the proxy of adoption of an organic concept by what in the end are marketing departments at big companies (and I do understand the intentional irony here, being where I work and all)?

Kaplan’s repose is a call to action:

Take back the media! Do not partake in systems meant to enforce hierarchy, and instead embrace those that seek to diminish and eliminate it.

Remember: nothing stands between the quality or distribution of you and the media companies except the cost of the toys. The quality is not quantifiable different, neither is access.

I think that kind of response is a little facile, neglecting to deal with the diverse motives people have for creating online content, the honest-to-god difficulty of drawing attention to one piece of content in a infinite-channel universe and the ease with which traditional media can co-opt DIY media (as TV news organizations did very effectively in covering the Virgina Tech massacre). But certainly Kaplan’s piece provides food for thought.
Akamai Launches BitTorrent Add-On: The embedding of social functionality into the Web browser continues. Red Swoosh, which Akamai purchased a few weeks ago for $15 million, yesterday released FoxTorrent, a Foxfire BitTorrent add-on that theoretically allows media streaming from torrents.

I remain skeptical about BitTorrent’s potential as a mainstream consumer media distribution technology. In it’s wild west, user controlled form it’s clunky and unreliable. In the controlled centralized form (a la BitTorrent Inc.’s store) it offers users few advantages over other P2P technologies. And the need for a client limits the number of consumers who will be willing to try it. But if BitTorrent has a future, a browser plug-in that enables streaming is an important step forward (even if the streaming functionality remains limited because of the way BitTorrent distributes data). Can’t wait to try it out.