Miguel posts on Wordpress stats & Ed Mitchell on YouTube/flickr - the takeaway being that there really aren't that many users generating User-Generated Content.
Which in the wide world of the World Wide Web (1 billion with access and counting) isn't a problem. 1% of people create stuff? That's still 10 million people.
For comparison purposes, the IFJ estimate that the world has 1.5 million plus journalists. Technorati estimates that there 15 million active blogs out there (although the true number is certainly lower than that). Are all those blogs fact-based & well-written? Nope - there are plenty of people out there writing badly-spelled, incoherent junk like me. But are all those journalists turning out Pulitzer-ready reportage? Or are there a few articles about last Thursday's flower arranging festival slipping through the net?
Of course, this low level of user generation becomes important if your population of potential creators is less than 1 billion. In fact, probably if it's less than a few thousand (creation levels for a lot of these sites seems to float around the 0.1% - 0.5% mark). But let's not talk about Enterprise 2.0 for the moment.
However where I am going with all this is that the power of social media does not lie only in those we badge "creators" - the people uploading blog posts or photos or videos or podcasts. We have tended to view creativity as personal act. The creator sits in their garret (or mansion) & comes up with the goods. As the previous posts on work by Bob Sutton, Teresa Amabile et al indicate, I believe more and more that creativity is a social activity. The relationship between a creator (be they professional or amateur) and their audience is not one way. Comments, references, tags, bookmarks, private emails & words face-to-face can all feed into the outcomes (a post, a video). But we only see the tangible outcome not the intangible exchanges between participants in the creation conversation.
To understand the inputs into and impacts from social media, we have to see these invisible ecologies of creation that form & reform. These ecologies have long pre-dated the internet but now we see them more.
To repeat, co-creation is not an option, it is the default...
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3 comments:
That's an interesting perspective. Indeed any creation is co-creation in one degree or another, but I'm not sure the importance of "creators" (or "catalysts" if you prefer) is understated.
We're attempting to build a "knowledge economy" in an environment that is positively skewed towards recicling ("knowledge is neither created nor destroyed, just cut and pasted") and not evolution ("now, how about trying it a this different way to see what happens")... while repeating the mantra that it isn't. Looks like something worth exploring much closer.
Best regards,
Miguel
Co-creation is the default. I like that, and have had the pleasure to experience it in an internal application development recently. The system is being well received because 'we' created it together.
Miguel - I would argue that the importance of creators is "overstated". Hence my suggestion that we look at ecosystems rather than individuals.
I'm not sure that our environment is skewed towards recycling rather than evolution - I think it depends which environment you are talking about.
Definitely agree that we need explore this further.
Andrew - And you know I'm looking forward to your guest post on that topic...
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