Does user-generated content have a diluting effect?

Over in our news section, Matt reports that Tiger Aspect chairman Peter Bennett-Jones has warned that user-generated content could lead to a decline in quality talent and see the “amateur taking over”.

There is so much trash out there and such a danger of a dilution of standards. User-generated content is 99.9% rubbish and there is a danger of the amateur taking over.

Which is a familiar argument to anybody who’s spent even the slightest bit online, especially in the world of blogging. Blogs are 99.9% rubbish, say journalists (predominantly those in print). But clearly some blogs have risen to the top, being read by thousands every day, and making money as they go. So why, when the number of revenue-generating blogs is so small and the chances of making a profession out of blogging so small, are so many people starting blogging?

The simple answer is that they’re not doing it for the money. The vast majority of blogs aren’t intended for a wide audience; most of them will have an audience in single figures. They exist because when the economic barrier to publishing is effectively zero, it appeals to people who aren’t interested in its economic value.

Clay Shirky coined the phrase mass amateurization in his 2002 essay, Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing:

The search for direct fees is driven by the belief that, since weblogs make publishing easy, they should lower the barriers to becoming a professional writer. This assumption has it backwards, because mass professionalization is an oxymoron; a professional class implies a minority of members. The principal effect of weblogs is instead mass amateurization.

Mass amateurization is the web’s normal pattern. Travelocity doesn’t make everyone a travel agent. It undermines the value of being travel agent at all, by fixing the inefficiencies travel agents are paid to overcome one booking at a time. Weblogs fix the inefficiencies traditional publishers are paid to overcome one book at a time, and in a world where publishing is that efficient, it is no longer an activity worth paying for.

Then, in 2003, Tom Coates expanded upon the idea in (Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything):

It’s not just publishing or journalism that are going through a process of mass amateurisation at the moment. In fact over the last fifteen years or so pretty much all media creation has started to be deprofessionalised. We only have to look around us to see that this is the case — as individually created media content that originated on the internet has started to infect mass media. Hard-rocking poorly-animated kittens that once roamed e-mail newsletters (http://www.b3ta.com) are now showing up in adverts and credit-sequences, pop-songs written on home computers are reaching the top of the charts, weblog commentators in Iraq are getting columns in the national and international newspapers, music is being hybridised and spliced in the home for competitions on national radio stations. The whole of the mainstream media has started to look towards an undercurrent of individual amateur creation because of the creativity that’s bubbling up from this previously unknown swathe of humanity. Mass-amateurisation is EVERYWHERE.

But does all this amateurisation really threaten professionals? I think it probably frightens those at the lower end of the scale. The economic barrier to becoming a professional — both in terms of equipment and production costs, and in formal training — acts not only as a barrier to entry, but also as a safety net, guarding some professionals’ heels from being snapped at by young upstarts. Once that safety net falls away, some will surely have to raise their game or risk falling by the wayside.

But for many professionals, any fear of amateurisation will be unfounded. As with blogs, most people uploading their own content to YouTube are’t doing so with a viewing to making a career out of it, and are certainly not to make money. They’re doing so because it’s fun. Recent TV shows have shown that, for example, the public desire for new West End blood is best satisfied by professionally trained talent — be it Lee Mead, Connie Fisher, Susan McFadden or Danny Bayne; four performers ‘elected’ to West End leading roles by the public, and each with a professionally trained background. Britain’s Got Talent winner Paul Potts may not have earned a full-time wage from his voice before Sunday’s final, but he has been professionally trained and has competed in other singing competitions before.

The threat, if threat there is, will not come from those creating amateur content. It may come from over-eager television executives, wanting to be seen to be onto the ‘next big thing’, overplaying ‘user-generated content’ because they think it’s cheap and/or cutting edge (see my post from a year ago on this same subject).

But you know what? I quite like the idea that professionals are scared by the rise of the amateur. The ones that take that fear and use it to raise their game will be the ones who are truly worth watching.

• TV Today will be at UGTV’07 tomorrow. If you’re there too, do say hello!