And a Farting Preacher Shall Lead Us

摘要

Until I heard that preacher fart, I was never much of a believer in user-generated media. I don't mean garden variety user-generated content (UGC), which embraces blogs, a few digital photo postings, and the endless scrolls of reader comments. I've always believed that community interaction is a more important part of the online mix than most traditional publishers admit. I'm talking about the more ambitious amateur media making, that vox populi revolution the Internet was supposed to spark. I was here in 1998 to see the crash and burn of so many attempts to organize garage bands and personal Webcam shows into populist big media rivals. The eternal democratic fantasy was that accessible digital media and free distribution would at long last unleash the people's (always, the people's) creativity in personal media-making. How oppressed we had been by some media industrial complex. Generally what we got instead was a lot of crappy music, animation, and Web shows that circulated among a small network of ueber-geeks. Perhaps one or two (remember that dancing baby?) popped up for a nanosecond of mainstream fame.