Content and connections

Steve Anderson questions whether corporate ownership of citizen media outlets may hurt participatory media in the long run:

Current TV is far from the only corporation in the participatory media game. Fox Interactive Media recently spent $580 million to acquire MySpace.com. Google, a large and ever more powerful media corporation, owns one of the most popular blog platforms: BlogSpot.com. Furthermore, YouTube — the most popular online video site on the Internet — has now partnered with Time/Warner/AOL (the largest media company in the world), and is seeking other such partnerships (YouTube is also a private corporation).

The fact is that because these corporations are operating to make a profit, they simply want to have a popular website and then sell our eyeballs to advertisers and marketers. As Wired magazine put it, “Rupert Murdoch is betting he can transform a free social network into a colossal marketing machine.” It's no wonder that going to the homepage of many of these corporate participatory communities often slams an ad, trailer or product placement in your face.

The more these sites bow to advertisers the less exposure users will have. This flies in the face of everything these websites are supposed to be about: an open space for citizens to communicate and share media. The basic openness of these sites is now the bait with which these corporations have caught a large audience.

These sites are starting to feel like newspapers that have front pages filled with ads, with the opinion section way in the back. Citizen produced media is often buried, their voices largely unheard, while paid content enjoys everyone's attention. How far can this process go before citizens move on and create a new place to openly communicate?

Anderson's commentary does appear to miss some of the benefits of the commercial site in providing a simple content-delivery system whose users can then link up elsewhere. While sites such as Blogging Dippers and Progressive Bloggers may be required in addition to a corporate site to facilitate connections among people of similar interests, it's equally clear that the amount of content available for linking would be far lower if Blogspot didn't enable users to put up their own content at no cost and with little requirement for technical knowledge.

Of course, ownership may matter to some extent, particularly where corporate media interests may seek to limit the content accessible through their sites. But thanks to the ease with which connecting sites can be set up, the issue of "front" or "back" is essentially irrelevant as long as content is still available. Which means that while the participatory sites mentioned by Anderson are likely worth a look as well, we're still a long ways away from having reason to think that corporate ownership is significantly curtailing individual participation.