There were a few major things I took away from this week that I think relate to the course prompt:
- In 2016, the UN declared access to the internet to be a basic human right and integral to allowing individuals to “exercise their right to freedom of opinion and expression”. (For which I am eternally grateful right now considering the globe has officially been put on house arrest)
I’m having a bit of déjà vu…
3. The internet and the Web are not the same thing.
The internet is a global network comprised of billions of computers around the world and the Web is a collection of information accessed via the Internet. Important to note that you can have the Internet without the Web but you CANNOT have the Web without the internet. I liked how these guys described it: the Internet can be viewed as a big book-store while the Web can be viewed as collection of books in that store.
Oh but wait, there’s more…
4. Once there was Web 1.0 and now we have Web 2.0
Web 1.0 was the early stages of the web where users had to be highly skilled and know things like coding and have knowledge of hosting and servers just to be able to to share content online. Nowadays on Web 2.0, software is designed to be easy to use and provides everyday people the ability to use the Web as a tool for sharing and creating online content. There are now plenty of websites and software available that make it easy to build your own website, or share an image or a video such as Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, etc and these websites then encourage users to contribute their own content.
Extending on all of the above, our reading this week, New Media: A Critical Introduction, introduced the term User- Generated Content (UCG). UCG is defined as any type of content that has been created and posted onto an online platform – it can refer to images, videos, texts, audio files, and everything in between and is the act of users promoting a brand rather than the brand itself.
Ah, why does that sound so familiar…
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Oh, that’s why. Every instagram influencer is a by-product of UCG.
Lister, M et al 2009, New Media: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, 2009. (Sections: Networks, Users and Economics pp 163-169; Wiki Worlds and Web 2.0 pp 204-209; The Long Tail pp 197-200; User-generated content, we are all users now pp 221-232.)