Post over at Penguin UK blog: Why Most User-generated Content Isn't

The folks at Penguin UK invited me to put up a guest blog post on some of the themes in the book, and I decided to excerpt the section explaining why the label 'user-generated content' doesn't make sense in a lot of cases:

Most user-generated material is actually personal communication in a public forum. Because of this personal address , it makes no more sense to label this content than it would to call a phone call with your mother "family-generated content." A good deal of user-generated content isn't actually "content" at all, at least not in the sense of material designed for an audience. Instead, a lot of it is just part of a conversation. Mainstream media has often missed this, because they are used to thinking of any group of people as an audience.

Read the whole post here.