"User Generated Content" & Ownership: The User as Citizen

[elements]

Current controversies with both Livejournal/Six Apart and FanLib have one stark issue in common: the conflict between corporate desire to profit from users and the content they generate, and the users' own sense of ownership not only in their content and creativity, but in the hosted services they use to publish that content and to connect with

Comments

[magnetic_pole]

Here via friendsfriends and excited to find this essay, which articulates a lot of what has been bothering me about the events of this past week and makes some viable suggestions for next steps. Would you mind if I linked to it in my journal? Maggie

[elements]

feel free, and thanks for the kind words :)

[dorrie6]

This post blew my mind a little. I don't have real words to respond with, but I'm going to be thinking very hard on this. You rock the house.

[elements]

Wow, that's kinda cool. <3 <3

[dorrie6]

Also, I have already linked this at fandomtossed, and I really hope you don't mind, because I think people should see this.

[elements]

I am happy to have this linked wherever, cos I definitely want more folks in the discussion.

[earth_magic]

It's strange but I've never thought of LiveJournal as anything but 'our' communities. Until now I don't think it's crossed my mind that someone is making money from it and that it might end up 'owned' like YouTube and places such as that.

Without the time and energy we've put in over the last six years, LJ would have been nothing. In fact one of the reasons I'm here and not on YouTube or YourSpace is that it's always felt like Big Brother isn't watching us (well, at least not that closely).

Fran

[elements]

Yeah, that's exactly how I've felt - particularly before the Six Apart buyout of LJ. That was the rude wakeup call for me - and then things seemed mostly OK, except for a few nigglingly non-dismissable issues, and so we all let ourselves relax. And then FanLib, and then Strikeoutgate, and all this stuff I've been worrying over in the back of my brain comes hurtling to the front. I really think this is a decisive time for how web communities like the ones we've come to love in fandom are run, and whether we can be comfortable living in them. It's terrifying but hopefully also an exciting chance for us to claim our own share of ownership, especially over how things are governed.

*hug* I've been reading your journal and meaning to write a long reply just to say hello and how are you and moral support. *more hugs*

[bookshop]

I hope that you won't mind my responding to this and I hope you'll consider extending the dialogue.

unless 6A does something to change my mind about them, I'm fairly sure they would love it if fandom shifted off LJ. Then they could stop being creeped out by their userbase.

I agree with you that that's exactly what they'd like from fandom, yes, but there are millions of active users here on livejournal.

I think that fandom (and by "fandom" in this context I specifically mean "all fandoms with active users"), more than any other subcommunity on LJ, has the resources to mobilize to come together and ask 6A to consider
"us" as investors.

Except when we use the term "us," I believe it needs to mean 'the entire livejournal social network.' In other words, fandom needs to be aware that it can also mobilize to reach out to the greater LJ community. If that greater LJ community can come together, organize, and mobilize to demand that 6A acnowledge and respect its investment, then that would be something that 6A would have to listen

[nzraya]

I totally agree and I think in addition that fandom needs to be not the only constituency extending these proposals to LJ/6A -- not because fandom is too "freaky" to carry weight but because there is a tendency for the language wielded by fan-activists to become a bit fandom-centric, which will make the issue SEEM (to LJ/6A) like a "fandom" issue when in fact it's a community issue. I'm barely even in fandom, and Mr Raya isn't in fandom at all, but you won't find two LJers more radicalized by Strikethroughgate or more enthusiastically nodding along with what elements says above.

In other words, this really does need to be a community effort, not just a fandom effort, and I think it won't be hard to make it so. We have a common cause: EVERYONE here -- even the LJers who actually suspect that HP fans are a bunch of insane perverts who should STFU kthxbai -- has a vested interest in their own freedom of speech (and freedom from molestation by LJ/6A and their advertisers -- and freedom from the sudden changing of the ground rules in medias

[anonymous]

I'm not talking about fandom only though. This would need to be all users. I think there are other non-fen users who would be upset by a Six Apart public IPO that would mean LJ's leadership would be decided by a bunch of shareholders who have even less of a clue than the 6A management does. I've talked with a lot of bloggers and a few of my non-fen LJ friends over the past week and I think the concern is much larger than just fandom.

[nimnod]

Thought-provoking and insightful.

Thanks.