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Anthony Lilley, As one of the UK's leading experts on interactive media, do you have any worries about the cultural impact of crowd-sourcing and user generated content?
Asked by iberian on Aug 29 2007 7:39:21 PM and supported by 18 members
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Answer

Crowd-sourcing and user-generated (I prefer the term “homemade”) content take up a lot of my thinking time. I’m reading Cass Sunstein’s book on the impact of the web on democracy and it has lots to say about how our societies need to come to terms with the shifting balance between mass and social media. Big media companies need to change their way of looking at the world to combine their skills with the conversation which takes up most of the web. I read “The Cult of the Amateur” over the summer – which I recommend as a way of testing your own assumptions about where things are going – but I don’t think the reduction in the power of elites which it describes is either as big or as important as the author makes out. Then again, I don’t subscribe to the post-modern position that the act of communicating gives equal value to everything that is said. That point of view just isn’t borne out by my day to day experience of how ideas impact on and stick in the culture. MORE!

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