User-Created Content

History and Types

The Internet, and social media in particular, was not the beginning of user contributions to public information. Newspapers had published letters to the editor and radio stations had allowed listeners to call in for years before the Internet was invented and widely adopted. Notably, the Oxford English Dictionary was written by public contributions in the 19th century. Amateurs had created their own newsletters, books, and radio broadcasts, particularly before the professionalization and regulation of those media. However, the Internet provided a platform that allowed users to contribute more easily and quickly than before, allowing more people to participate in information creation and leading to a massive increase in user-created content. Manuel Castells (2007) called this “mass self-communication” (p. 238) because every user was able to communicate to everyone else.

Cheap portable cameras, easy-to-use blogging platforms, and other technology made the work of capturing content and putting it online more accessible. From the late 1990s into the 2000s, a great deal of all kinds of content was being created by users. Blogging platforms allowed users to easily post personal reflections or comment on everything from the news to sports to their favorite shoes. Flickr, Snapfish, and other photo-sharing sites provided platforms for users to share hundreds of thousands of photos and even organize them with geotags and other tags that could make them useful to others. Many of these functions were later incorporated in tools such as Google’s image search, which identifies the content in photos without user labor, and Twitter, which utilized hashtags to organize related information. YouTube provided the same possibilities for video sharing, creating a giant library of video content from amateurs, ranging from highly produced and edited amateur movies to recordings of users simply talking into the camera. Wikipedia, launched in 2001, provided a platform for users to collaborate in creating a massive online encyclopedia that was free to everyone and reflected the combined knowledge of users. Advocates promoted the value of mass participation, but most studies have found that less than 20% of users create content, and the vast majority only lurk and consume content.

Some sites allowed users to post links to news stories, creating curated news feeds reflecting the interests and opinions of users, rather than the editorial judgment of professional journalists. Reddit is perhaps the strongest example of a site that is built entirely by users posting stories. On curation sites, users generally do not report and write their own news stories or post their own photos or videos (although that also happens) but post stories or items from professional news organizations’ websites and other online sources. These feeds are somewhat similar to the social media news feeds that users see, which are created [Page 1687]by algorithms that select among the stories posted by a user’s friends and other accounts they follow. Similarly, news aggregators, such as Google News, present users with lists of news stories generated by algorithms’ interpretations of other users’ behavior. In these cases, users are not directly—or even consciously—creating content but are nonetheless contributing to how content is filtered and selected.

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