Imagine a place where people can share their wealth of (mis)information, stories of their lives (because there is someone who will care or can pretend to care about how cool you were in high school like a prospective employer weaving through your drunken escapades in your facebook photos), or even sell you stuff. Well friends, that dark place exists. It has forever carved itself a niche in the dark world of the Internet dubbed user generated content.
Do you really trust this guy to contribute useful information through user genrated content? If you haven't already, think twice.
Sure kids. It sounds pretty freaking awesome to be able to share content with random strangers who you’ll never even meet (like youtube pages. You can share knowledge with people about cool things such as how amoebas reproduce, show strangers pictures of your cute kids, or even market things to a targeted audience. For example, Domino’s Pizza now uses facebook and twitter to inform customers about upcoming events and special offers. What makes it kind of intriguing is that random people can discuss how much they love Domino’s Pizza and share information about the pizza company.
In fact, some may argue that if Domino’s had been in the loop of user generated content, they could’ve prevented the crisis that occurred when two employees posted a youtube video that depicted them doing unsanitary things to a pizza. So, now that they are down with the new generation they can monitor viral situations such as that. Further, I will admit that their use of facebook is clever. In fact, when you click on their fan page, you aren’t even taken directly to their wall. Instead, you are taken to marketing tab titled “stop the puffery” which basically bashes the competition’s use of inflated language in their digital media campaigns. Also, their page is full of cool stuff like coupons and daily special offers.
Yet, even with all of this cool stuff, I’m not completely sold on user generated content. Imagine a world where you could fabricate something believable, publish it online, and have millions of people believe it instantly. Well, that world exists. Check Wikipedia. I bet you could find in one of their sections about Dr. Dre that he is a critically acclaimed medical doctor. Thus, one could say that with user generated content, history and reality are both written by those with power (which has become virtually everyone). For example, I could create a facebook page for a fake person and friend everyone that I could find. That would not make my fake person real just because their image is on the internet.
Contrary to popular belief Dr. Dre is not a trained health professional. However, he does carry a dual degree from the School of Hard Knocks in Kickin A** and Taking Names
To conclude, user generated content is great to a point. We must, however, take it with a grain of salt.
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