Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

Imagine my surprise when I heard a pretty in-depth commentary on the commodification of user-generated content while watching the latest episode of South Park. (I tried to get a clip of this but was only able to find a link to the whole episode, so if you want to watch it click and go the last one. You can also go to 19:25 mins into it and find the clip). Anyway, the boys need to make a lot of money so they try to create a hit YouTube video, and succeed in doing so, only to find out that it doesn’t actually pay. Most episodes end with one of the characters having learned a valuable lesson and sharing it, a parody of the cheesy moralism found in many TV shows. After watching this clip like 20 times, I was able to transcribe it:

“You see, I’ve learned something today. We thought that we could make money on the Internet, but, while the Internet is new and exciting for creative people, it hasn’t matured as a distribution mechanism to the extent that one should trade real and immediate opportunities for income for the promise of future online revenue. It will be a few years before digital distribution of media on the Internet can be monetized to an extent that necessitates content producers to forgo their fair value and more traditional media.”

This seems to me to tie in to a lot of the things we’ve been studying, particularly Julie Levin Russo’s SkewTube presentation. She asks how user production might become more commodifiable in the future, and whether commercial production is the most legitimate type of production. To that last question, she answers with an unequivocal “no”; the boy in South Park (Kyle) however, suggests that commercial production is the most legitimate and desirable mode of production and that it would be best to hold off until user-generated content can be more profitable. I’d like to hear what everyone thinks about this, and if Kyle’s speech can be connected to other material we’ve been studying.