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The “so-called”UGC: an updated
definition of user-generated
content in the age of social media
Marcelo Luis Barbosa dos Santos
Centro de Investigaci
on y Documentaci
on, Universidad Finis Terrae,
Santiago, Chile and
Pontificia Universidad Cat
olica, Santiago, Chile
Abstract
Purpose –When a concept is diffusely defined or, as this article argues, “taken for granted”, it becomes very
difficult to track such concept on the literature and have some continuity as researchers build on top of previous
results. This article proposes a definition for user-generated content, a term that though has lost some saliency,
stands in the center or the social media phenomenon, so it should not be disregarded as an object of study.
Design/methodology/approach –Celebrating 20 years of the concept, this research performs a
multidisciplinary literature review of 61 academic articles on UGC. Through deconstruction of the acronym
UGC, it builds on the present converging, conflicting and diverging definitions and/or approaches to UGC on an
attempt to consolidate a broader definition that encompasses the complexities of the phenomenon in a context
of consolidation of social media, to be applied to social sciences.
Findings –Following the present analysis, UGC is defined as any kind of text, data or action performed by
online digital systems users, published and disseminated by the same user through independent channels, that
incur an expressive or communicative effect either on an individual manner or combined with other
contributions from the same or other sources.
Originality/value –This is the first academic effort that aims to create an in-depth dialogue over the different
approaches to UGC across disciplines on the social sciences field. It should help reignite interest in the acronym,
which got somehow eclipsed by the broader field of social media; whilst without UGC, social media would not
exist or would not have the same social impact it does in its current form. Analogously, UGC as a topic of
research has been deeply affected by the emergence and consolidation of Social Media. As this debate evolves,
this contribution should be helpful as a reference to operationalize UGC on future research.
Peer review –The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/
OIR-06-2020-0258
Keywords User-generated content, UGC, Audiences, Web 2.0, Social media
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Over the last 20 years, social media has exploded as a topic of interest and a word
incorporated in people’s vocabulary, including scholars (see Figure 1), while user-generated
content, or simply UGC, remained perhaps more of a niche term, more commonly adopted on
areas such as computer and information science, communication, business, management and
tourism, among others (Figure 2).
Nevertheless, the very proliferation of social media paves the way to the normalization of
the possibility of making self-created content widely available (though obviously not
necessarily it will be seen, shared or liked) bypassing to a great extent some sort of editorship.
I propose that it is time to redefine UGC to take into account such scenario.
The “so-called”
UGC: an
updated
definition
The author is grateful for his PhD tutors Ray
en Condeza and Sebasti
an Valenzuela for their support and
contributions to the first manuscript and to the reviewers whose attentive reading added so much to the
final result.
Funding: This work was supported by CONICYT-PCHA; under grant Doctorado Nacional/2016-
21160426.
Received 26 June 2020
Revised 25 September 2020
23 April 2021
Accepted 4 May 2021
Online Information Review
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-06-2020-0258
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/1468-4527.htm
The user-generated information systems or UGIS (DesAutels, 2011) are mostly modeled to a
great extent to pursue a “platform”approach (Gillespie, 2010) where they are allegedly neutral
structures that operate as a-political mediators to the publication and diffusion of content. It is
true that there is an ongoing debate to content moderation and platforms’responsibility over
issues such as hate speech, disinformation and so on. Still, the scale of content created and
published by users, be it quality content, junk, entertaining, disinformation and so on, means
0
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“Social Media” versus “User-Generated Content”
Articles per index Scopus and WoS - 1999-2019
UGC Scopus UGC WoS Social Media Scopus Social Media WoS
Source(s): Author, based on data from WoS and Scopus
Figure 1.
Number of articles on
UGC and Social Media
on both Scopus and
WoS indexes
Figure 2.
Ten most frequent
fields where articles
with “UGC”or “User-
generated Content”
appear, excluded the
different meanings
for “UGC”
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scholars are irrevocably called to deal with it, and in order to do so effectively, the underlying
concepts must be agreed upon.
This research departs from a literature review of the 20 first results of the exact query
“user-generated content”on Google Scholar from 1999 to 2019, sorted by relevance, using an
incognito browser (unlogged) to avoid algorithmic bias. It would seem plausible, though, that
indexes such as Google Scholar would tend to assign more relevance to older, more cited
research –actually the “newer”publication with these criteria was 2012. Thus, in order to
include updated research results, an alert was set on Google Scholar with the query UGC OR
“user generated content”from April 2015 to April 2017. The overall resulting sample was
screened and used as snowballing to find other relevant work that either defines UGC or
operationalizes it, resulting in a total sample of 61 articles. Building on that collection of
papers, I propose an updated definition of UGC that contemplates current media
environments, where all variations of digital and social platforms are increasingly relevant.
(UGC is many times and for many disciplines a “taken for granted”concept, frequently
associated with the realms of social networking sites (SNS), Web 2.0 or social media.
Nevertheless, it is used to describe a diversity of phenomena such as the publication of
digitized private pictures of the Second World War (Bull, 2016), an eyewitness citizen video of
a natural crisis –such as a flood (Bruns and Liang, 2012)–or an anthropogenic one –such as
terrorist attacks (Bruns and Hanusch, 2017) or riots (Vis et al., 2014)–or even aggregated
searches by a user logged in Google (Girardin et al., 2008), to name a few.
UGC is many times assumed to have a common sense meaning, not to be defined, as if it were
a primitive concept, that is, “accepted as commonly understood or as given”(Chaffee, 1991,p.7).
But the aforementioned diversity of meaning associated with a concept and the many other
approaches to be discussed on this article demonstrate UGC cannot be taken for granted. As I
see, neither the composed expression UGC or its individual terms user, generated and content
are intrinsically primitive. Though in some contexts that assumption could be acceptable,
whenever UGC is found to be a constitutive part of the research, it must be properly founded.
Wardle et al. (2014, p. 10) criticize the expression, within the realm of journalism: “the phrase
‘user-generated content’is a catchall that can mean different things to different people, even
those working in the same n ewsroom.”Hermida and Thurman(2008, p. 2) use the expression “so-
called user-generated content,”while Van Dijck (2009, p. 41) performs a critical review of the user
as an economic agent of the “so-called user-generated content (UGC) platforms.”Researching on
tourism UGC,Lu and Stepchenkova (2015) and Bourdages (2016) highlight the lack of theory
founding most of the work, the latter stating that nearly 75% of the papers had no theoretical
foundations at all. Dylko and McCluskey (2012, p. 257), after a review on UGC definitions,
identify no less than 43 different expressions that allude to such a communicative practice.
Conceptualizations that revolve around UGC, found in the literature for this research, can be
grouped into four different foci: (1) on the content,suchas“user-created content”(Wunsch-
Vincent and Vickery, 2007), “self-produced media content”(Croteau, 2006), “user-contributed
content”(Bakshy et al.,2009), “participatory news”(Deuze et al.,2007); (2) on the communicative
practice as “citizen journalism”(Gillmor, 2010), “participatory journalism”(Paulussen and
Ugille, 2008), “audience participation”(Kammer, 2013), “conversational media”(Sonvilla-Weiss,
2010); (3) on the user or audience, such as the neologisms “prosumers”(Toffler, 1980),
“mediactive”(Gillmor, 2010), “produsers”(Bruns, 2008,2010), “pro-am”or professional-amateur
(Leadbeater and Miller, 2004); (4) on the platform such as “Web 2.0”(O’Reilly, 2005), “Social
Web”(Gruber, 2008) and the popular expression “Social Media”(Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010)
that points to the convergence of UGC and Web 2.0.
I argue, then, that there is a peremptory need to re-define UGC as a central concept for
social media and for a myriad of studies in different disciplines. This research offers an
updated critical literature review on the concept of UGC in an effort to contribute to overcome
such challenge with focus on the social sciences. I propose an understanding of the concept as
The “so-called”
UGC: an
updated
definition
the entanglement of its constitutive terms and the socio-technical surroundings that allow
UGC not only to appear as a “thing”to the eyes of society and academia but to jump as an
important, if not epicentral, communicational practice in the digital age.
2. Origins of user generated content
In the academic realm, the first articles mentioning user-generated content or UGC (as in
reference to this specific expression) in both Scopus and World of Science –two of the most
important academic databases in Social Sciences and Humanities –date back to 2001: Rhine
and Figall (2001) and Crawford (2001), respectively, both on the same journal Econtent. Some
years later, Wired Magazine published the article “We are the Web”(Felly, 2015) which has
terms such as “user-generated ratings”and “user-created channels.”That was approximately
one year before the first user-generated video was uploaded on YouTube by one of its
founders. Following UGC platforms’success, Time Magazine awarded “YOU”as the person
of the year with a YouTube-like interface in its December’s ritualistic cover (Figure 3) in 2006.
Looking it over time, since the first UGC article in 2001, there has been an irregular rise on
the production of articles referring to the topic as such and it seems to have reached a plateau
in the last few years (see Figure 1). After 20 years, academics seem to have no consensus as to
which could be considered the first UGC. Wardle et al. (2014) tracked the phenomenon of UGC
back as far as Kennedy’s assassination to assert the importance of news content produced by
non-journalists. At the same time, the authors assert that the systematic incorporation of UGC
in journalistic routines is triggered by events like the Southeast Asia Tsunami of 2004 and the
London bombings of 2005. This last event is seen by many as the first acute event to draw
considerable attention to the use of UGC by journalists and media (Allan, 2007;Reading, 2009;
Figure 3.
Time magazine’s
December 2006/
January 2007 cover
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Wardle et al., 2014). That is because the most famous picture of that episode was taken by an
ordinary witness with a mobile phone and published first on a blog (Reading, 2009).
Such events are considered to be the triggers for the establishment of BBC’s UGC Hub to
manage content from audience in 2005 (Williams et al., 2011).
While the creation of socially relevant media content by non-professional users is not new,
the acronym UGC definitely owes its recent visibility to the rise of digital technologies and
especially Web 2.0 and Social Media related standards and practices, which invite the
ordinary user to publish and interact in different ways in user-friendly environments. The
very adoption of the terminology “user”suggests activity (Pavl
ı
ckov
a, 2012, p. 39), as
opposed to what is evoked by other expressions like “consumer”or “audience.”The meaning
of associating the expression UGC to the digital era resides in the juxtaposition of the three
keywords that compose the acronym. Such abbreviation gains much more meaning and
prominence as UGC quickly became omnipresent in the mediated life of the citizenry, through
its plethora of manifestations, from leisure to politics, including many times the news media.
Smith et al. (2012) argue that UGC “is what is produced in the moment of being social, as well
as the object around which sociality occurs”(p. 102). In line with that observation, I propose an
analogy with the role of the hypertext to frame the insertion of UGC in the digital media context
to demonstrate its relevance: hypertext, as a concept, is not intrinsically rooted on the internet,
since the idea of nonlinear reading through a text that contains a link to another (potential) text,
may be observed in other platforms such as an encyclopedia or a footnote. It is the widespread
adoption of an explicit immediate link between ideas on the internet platforms that installs a
new dominant writing paradigm, transforming it into a phenomenon inexorably associated
with Internet. I sustain that UGC represents to social media what hypertext represents to the first
era of Internet: the central socio-technical component that leads to the explosion ofa latent cultural
manifestation, key to a digital, dialogical and participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006), that had
been, prior to that, “stuck to analogue cultural forms”(Johnson, 2001, p. 34, my translation) of
unidirectional mass media platforms.
Wunsch-Vincent and Vickery (2007, p. 27) sustain there are four drivers that account for
the “rapid growth and pervasiveness”of UGC: (1) Technological (such as increased broadband
access, better hardware and software); (2) Social (such as the rise of the “digital natives”and
an acceptance of the culture of sharing); (3) Economic (lower cost barriers to related services
and devices); (4) Institutional (such as popular adoption of creative commons licenses). The
result is that the creation of content, as well as its distribution and consumption, has become
interwoven in our society, in what may be called digital ubiquity, when technologies are
implicated in social practices “just as the conveniences plumbing and electricity,”resulting in
an “emerging technological environment, not a particular technology”(Ganesh and Stohl, 2013,
p. 428, original emphasis), turning UGC to a central concept to research in many disciplines.
3. UGC definitions in different disciplines
3.1 Social communication, media and journalism
McKenzie et al. (2012, p. 2) define UGC as “content that is voluntarily developed by an
individual or a consortium and distributed through an online platform.”Sonvilla-Weiss
(2010) define UGC platforms as “conversational media”when analyzing them in relation to
mass media in his approach to the remix culture. Such “voluntarism”is frequently questioned
pejoratively as “free labor”creating analytical tensions around the creative industries that
rely on UGC, as analyzed by Hesmondhalgh (2010).
BBC’s news center has implemented, since 2005, an operation for recollection and analysis
of UGC called UGC Hub. This reveals the relevance UGC earned in the first decade of the
century, at least for this emblematic mainstream media organization that considers it a “vital
missing piece of human interest”(BBC, 2017, par 2). In its terms of use, BBC defines UGC as
“(...) anything made by people using our services.”(BBC, n.d., par 9).
The “so-called”
UGC: an
updated
definition
This former BBC definition reinforces the vision of UGC as something created outside the
institutional borders, i.e. not created by employees, producers or regular contributors. Wahl-
Jorgensen et al. define UGC as “media content produced by the end-users”(2010, p. 178), in a
somewhat paradoxical definition. Wardle and Williams (2010) propose to adopt the term
“audience content”instead of UGC in the context of newsrooms, but the same Wardle,
associated with other colleagues, later pursued a new definition of UGC for journalism,
excluding comments on news articles and circumscribing to audio-visual material:
“photographs and videos captured by people who are not professional journalists and who
are unrelated to news organizations”(2014, p. 10, my emphasis).
Thurman (2008) identified seven categories to classify the content that allowed for “citizen
journalism,”in a somehow text-centered approach: polls, “have your say,”Chat, Q&A,
comment-enabled blogs, message boards and other. To Paulussen and Ugille, UGC is the
material of “participatory journalism,”a term that refers to the “wide variety of initiatives
undertaken by mainstream media to enhance the integration of all kinds of user contributions
in the making of news”(2008, p. 25).
With a telecom-centered approach to UGC videos, Cha et al. (2007) state that UGC videos,
when compared non-UGC, have specific traits: faster production rate and less production
efforts, therefore has a more massive number of different publishers. Additionally, they
present more variability in its quality and a shorter length by two orders of magnitude.
3.2 Business and consumerism
There is also the business-oriented vision by Kaplan and Haenlein (2010, p. 61) of UGC
regarding the content that fills social media up: “User Generated Content (UGC) can be seen as
the sum of all ways in which people make use of Social Media.”Such a proposition seems to
suggest an opening in the spectrum of what may be classified as content, such as little actions
or interactions such as following, liking, sharing, voting and even commenting. Building on
Kaplan and Haenlein’s definition, Estrella-Ram
on and Ellis-Chadwick (2017, p. 957) argue
that UGC “can be developed by individuals or collaboratively, as well as produced, modified,
shared and consumed”pointing to the Remix culture (Sonvilla-Weiss, 2010)orJenkins’(2006)
convergence culture within the branding realm. In line with that, O’Connor (2008, p. 47) states
that business-to-consumer marketing media is turning into a “user-driven”peer-to-peer
focused network, where consumers “can increasingly rely on unfiltered, dynamic and topical
information provided by their own peers”(p. 48).
According to this review, one of the most cited definition was Wunsch-Vincent and
Vickery’s report for OECD, centered in new business models and value creation around what
the authors call “user created content”and the intellectual property problematization, amongst
other issues. The economy/industry focus results in the following definition for UGC: (1) content
made publicly available over the internet, (2) which reflects a certain amount of creative effort,
and (3) which is created outside of professional routines and practices”(2007,p.9).
From a marketing perspective, Kietzmann et al. (2011) broadly define social media as the
product of users’creation. Lobato et al. (2010) argue that what defines UGC is the opposition
between formal and informal elements in the media industry. The authors recommend
making a clear distinction between media economy and industry sectors, for while the former
encompass both formal and informal, the latter is highly formal and regulated. Probably due
to intensive focus on marketing, Tirunillai and Tellis (2012) claim “UGC is one aspect of a
broad phenomenon of inter-consumer communication called word of mouth”(p. 198),
situating UGC it under WOM umbrella, as they studied the dynamics between product
reviews in sites like Amazon and stock performance. On the same path, many authors
identify UGC with electronic Word of Mouth, or simply eWOM (Cox et al., 2009;Ye et al., 2011;
Smith et al. 2012;Phua et al., 2020).
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One of the solutions to operationalize UGC in studies both in tourism and in business or
marketing have been by selecting the platform that allegedly channels UGC, such as blogs
(Akehurst, 2009), Social Media (Dhar and Chang, 2009) or consumer review areas on ecommerce
sites (Dhar and Chang, 2009;Ye et al., 2011;Tirunillai and Tellis, 2012). Dhar and Chang (2009)
go as far as to define UGC as the “conjunction of blogs and social networking sites”(p. 300).
O’Connor (2008, p. 51) situates a specific type of UGC, user reviews, as the most relevant topic
within the broader Web 2.0 realm, and defines it as “when individual consumers are solicited to
provide both quantitative and qualitative feedback on destinations, hotels or other travel
experiences that they have visited.”Similarly, Zhang et al. (2016, p. 119) have studied UGC as
synonym for “feedback on products and services,”dividing UGC into “structured type, such as
numeric ratings, and/or unstructured type, such as textual comments.”
Still in the tourism realm, Girardin et al. (2008) employ the terms “digital footprint”and
“user-generated electronic trails”to refer to data published both in an active mode (such as
photos published consciously on social media) and in a passive mode (such as information
collected by Google after tourism-related searches). This conception of passive user-
generated data is also shared by Haklay and Weber (2008, p. 18), as the authors study
User-Generated Street Maps, referring to the specific kind of UGC in such context as “user-
generated mapping”and “user-generated geographical information.”They include passively
generated content such as GPS data and user searches in their understanding of UGC.
Both passive-active and structured-unstructured dualities represent dilemmas to be
solved in order to circumscribe to what extent should an interaction be considered “content.”
3.3 Information Science
While Cha et al. (2007) refer to YouTube and similar applications as UGC sites or UGC
services, DesAutels (2011) proposes the idea of User-Generated Information Systems (or
UGIS), which are the outputs of information management work mediated by software,
performed by users who do not need to have the technical capacity to program. Susarla et al.
(2012, p. 23) highlight the “dual nature of user participation, in content creation as well as
opinion formation”on YouTube while studying contagion impact on the trajectory of UGC
diffusion on such platform.
Hagemann and Vossen (2009, p. 1) build a categorization of UGC that expands the idea of
content including programming pieces of software such as API’s and even tags, arguing that
“there is more UGC than is commonly understood.”In the same direction, Krumm et al. state
that “user-generated content comes from regular people who voluntarily contribute data,
information, or media that then appears before others in a useful or entertaining way, usually
on the Web”(2008, p. 10, my emphasis), pointing to (1) the definition of user as a regular
person; (2) the voluntary nature of the communicative act; (3) other forms of content other
than media, referred to as data and information, probably related to less obvious kinds of
content than pictures or videos published in social media; and (4) possible social functions of
UGC (“useful or entertaining way”).
Within a patent to a method and system to analyze UGC, Bandaru et al. (US Patent No.
7,930,302, 2011) distinguish four types of relevant information, again particularly focused on
customer reviews: “(1) general sentiment indicators on a specific attribute for the product or
service from all the reviews; (2) a summary of most relevant aspects (...) (3) location indexed
information (...) and d) personalization of content.”
3.4 Humanities
In the cultural production realm, Kevin McDonald (director) and Ridley Scott (executive
producer) created Life in a Day in 2010, a sort of a user-generated movie, where people sent
footage of one day of their lives to a channel on YouTube following some very broad
guidelines, except for one vary strict: that day had to be July 24, 2010. To the lenses of Lobato
The “so-called”
UGC: an
updated
definition
et al. (2010), that could be interpreted as a call to “unformalize”the formal (movie industry). At
the same time and perhaps paradoxically, they are industrializing artisanal UGC and
“artisanalizing”Hollywood.
From a structural perspective, using Social Network Analysis, Ingawale et al. (2013) have
evaluated the quality of UGC created at Wikipedia, using as criteria those of the platform
itself: Neutral point of view, verifiability and stability –as in content supported by
established sources more than original studies or theories. Manovich (2016, p. 1) defines
cultural analytics as “the analysis of massive cultural datasets and flows using computational
and visualization techniques,”a definition inclusive from studies from classic UGC sites such
as Flickr, Instagram, YouTube, etc. to those that deal with users’interactions with such
content. The author argues that “social computing studies the non-professional, vernacular
culture by default”(Manovich, 2016, p. 3), changing the scope of traditional humanities
studies from the few special cases worth studying to “the unprecedented opportunity to
describe, model, and simulate the global cultural universe.”Or, as the author puts it: “Cultural
Analytics is interested in everything created by everybody”(p. 8, original emphasis).
Does “everything created by everybody”include old, digitized material? Project
Europeana [1] supports research over digitized content, previously restricted to the local,
domestic or personal use, such as files from libraries, museums and even personal content
such as photos of the Second World War, characterized in the project’s blog as “the new
history”(Bull, 2016).
The examples lead to a couple of dilemmas to be addressed further on. First: is UGC
restricted to digital creation supported by natively digital devices? Does the value of novelty
reside simply in the accessibility enhanced by digitization or is it more than that? Secondly, if
this kind of content authored by an ordinary person is circulated through mainstream media
–such as news outlets- or amplified by some hot Hollywood executive producer like Ridley
Scott, should it be called UGC?
3.5 Political science
€
Ostman (2012) researched the relationship between UGC creation and political involvement.
The author distinguished two characteristics common to the UGC: (1) amateur production of
original content or editing of existing content and (2) the act of sharing such content, publishing
in different platforms such as websites or blogs, linking content generation with its publication
and even its active dissemination. Leung (2009) combined five UGC-related activities (personal
webpage,blogs,forums,videos on YouTube and Wikipedia contributions) into a single measure
named “overall user-generated content online”(Leung, 2009, p. 1335). Dylko and McCluskey
(2012, p. 257) built the concept of Political UGC, operationalizing it on top of Wunsch-Vincent
and Vickery’s(2007)definition, adding that it should be “thematically focused on politics.”Such
definition builds upon four themes found in their literature review on UGC: (1) an active user
with (2) different degrees of activity, who creates content with (3) some level of “authenticity”
that is (4) made available to anyone (Dylko and McCluskey, 2012, p. 257).
Mortensen (2015b) elaborates theoretically on the idea of connective witness, pointing to
the crossroads of digital visual culture with personalized political participation through the
creation of testimonial content, exemplifying with cases of a CNN.com citizen reporting
channel called Ireport. The author develops other researches related to the phenomenon and
operationalizes the concept of “eyewitness images”(Mortensen, 2015a,c).
4. Deconstructing UGC
Wardle and Williams (2010) developed a critical reading of the concept departing from its
composing terms, in the context of BBC’s journalistic routines, concluding that they should be
named “audience material”as they point out what they see as serious limitations to the
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acronym within the newsroom routines and practices. This section aims to follow the same
path deconstructing the acronym from its three constituting terms but elaborating it further.
In the present section, I will go through each of the terms amalgamated in the acronym UGC
and circumscribe the limits that serve best the concept.
4.1 User
4.1.1 From audience to user. Rosen declared in 2006 the end of the audience such as media
professionals had known, referring to them as “the people formerly known as the audience”
(2006, par 1). The idea of an active user as a content producer has been discussed by many,
such as Enzesberger (1971), who argued more than 40 years ago that the radio was as much a
means of production as a means for consumption of media. McLuhan (1999, p. 248) claimed in
the 1960s that “electric media instantly and constantly create a total field of interacting events
in which all men participate”where “participation”can be understood as a shared cognitive
mediated experience on a global scale. Lazarsfeld (Otero, 1997) and Katz (1957) had
previously discussed the limitations of mass media effects and the conceptualization of an
active audience from a cognitive perspective. In the realm of media activism, for Downing
(2001, p. 8) media audiences are “users”in opposition to “consumers,”referring to an active
cognitive behavior as opposed to “noncritical.”Such perspectives, though, stand in the
reception side of unilateral communication, referring to an introspective process instead of
media production, regardless of the term: audience or user.
Toffler (1980) coined the term prosumer in reference to a proactive consumer. Fiske (as
cited by Livingstone, 2015) proposed in the 1990s to convert the noun into a verb: audiencing.
Leadbeater and Miller created the neologism Pro-Am, which stands for Professional-
Amateurs, defined as “innovative, committed and networked amateurs working to
professional standards”(2004, p. 9). Bruns (2008,2010) uses the expression produser as a
criticism of a sort of “econocentrism”embedded on Toffler’s (1980) definition, pointing to the
fusion of producer and user, in processes of active collaborative content creation.
Amid the proliferation of neologisms, Ridell criticizes these sort of hybrid labels, arguing
instead that what is new is the interchangeability of the roles assumed by the same individual
when interacting with digital media, but insisting on the validity of the maintenance of the
original categories, such as audience,producer,consumer and so on. Van Dijck identifies three
levels of user participation in social media, namely the roles of creator,spectator and inactive
(2009, pp. 45–46). Livingstone criticizes a linear approach to the communicative process,
problematizing the adoption of the expression “end-user,”recognizing the importance of
individual and collective experiences of “ordinary persons”in the digital realm (2015, p. 442).
In the same direction, Bruns states that in such digital realms, where collaborative creation of
content is the reality, “the role of ‘consumer’and even that of ‘end user’have long disappeared,
and the distinctions between producers and users of content have faded into comparative
insignificance”(2008, p. 2). In light of the above, it seems that “user”embraces in a neutral
form the range of roles discussed above, reinforcing the pertinence of the acronym UGC
within the digital content creation realm.
4.1.2 Who or what is user?. Smith et al. (2012) consider “user”the author of content
“produced by consumers and [that] did not have an apparent commercial objective”(p. 106),
that is, not professionally related to the product, in line with Cox et al. (2009).Kim (2010,2012)
opposes User- (UGC) to Professionally-Generated Content (PGC), as the author analyzes the
institutionalization of YouTube, pointing out the tensions on such distinction and on the
tendency to professionalize the channel’s content. In that line, what happens if a journalist is
creating non-news content such as sharing on Facebook pictures of a touristic attraction
taken during a family vacation? This leads to the question of visibility, which can be
appreciated in terms of the user and/or the content. It is interesting to analyze separately the
value of the individual that creates the information and the information value per se.
The “so-called”
UGC: an
updated
definition
Therefore, a content that becomes popular because it was produced and/or shared by a public
figure with a lot of media exposure –a movie celebrity, a politician, a TV anchor –has
necessarily a different reach than the same content by an ordinary user with not as much
visibility, reflected for instance, in the amount of expected retweets (Suh et al., 2010). On the
other hand, communicational technical knowledge, even without the formal training, would
result in a sort of “newsy”content outside news media outlets, following the Pro-Am logics.
If UGC is to be understood as a relatively new phenomenon that pertains to the digital age,
it is because the value of the opportune content itself could –or even should –be able to gather
visibility “bypassing domestic choke-points of censorship and reach for global attention”as
Tufekci (2013, par. 20) suggests on her analysis of the role of social media in the context of
protests in Tahrir square. I will discuss the content later, but it is important to remark at this
point that the privileged access to traditional media as the unique diffusion platform available
is no longer, in an UGC perspective, the sole path to make a content visible, as ordinary
individuals with average number of followers may play important roles in digital social
networks (Bastos and Mercea, 2015; Author removed) and may be as valued as celebrities
when authoring content (Phua et al., 2020).
Nevertheless, considering the interchanging roles of users on digital media (Ridell, 2012),
journalists, politicians or celebrities in general, are no less of ordinary people when they are
off the spotlight, just as the example above. To solve that innuendo, I suggest two dimensions
that help define what is a “user”in a UGC perspective: the role played by the author of the
content (which are inclusive of the different roles played by people as ordinary or public
figures) and the professional competency (associated with the communicative practices). The
former varies in most cases, since roles are usually context-dependent, so most of the authors
could be “users”at some point –such as a journalist outside her professional routine, an
activist on a sports event and so on- create media content. Professional persona is not
perennial; it is interchangeable with individual social persona. The latter should be
historically situated (Polydoro, 2016, p. 164) for not only the professional media standards are
variable through time, they have gotten frequently blurry with amateur-created content
(Leadbeater and Miller, 2004), due to, perhaps, amid other plausible causes, growing
centrality of digital and visual culture as well as technological advances of regular consumer
media devices –as opposed to professional –that allow untrained people to produce high
quality content, either by luck, talent or plain persistence.
Contextualizing to the present research, to be discarded as UGC, in the realm of a protest,
a user must either publish through organizational channels –such as a journalist or even an
ordinary citizen that sends content to a media outlet- or the individual channel is used
professionally, such as an activist’sorapolitician’s Twitter handle. Whenever a digital
media user plays a role as an ordinary citizen and as such creates content, then publishes and
publicizes it through independent, non-editorialized channels -instead of professional or
organizational ones- we should be talking about a communicative practice that could be
classified as UGC.
4.2 Generated
The due appreciation of what means to generate content in the context of UGC leads us to
question the myriad of ways one can participate in digital media and which ones we should
consider in the definition of UGC. €
Ostman distinguishes UGC from UCC, or User-Created
Content, defining the latter as “content originally created by users”(2012, p. 1,006), while the
former encapsulates a broader spectrum of creative activity, “ranging from encyclopedic
entries on Wikipedia and blogging to posting of music videos on YouTube”(€
Ostman, 2012,
p. 1,006). Wardle and Williams (2010) state that comments on social media should not to be
considered UGC, but a video uploaded to YouTube should. Dylko and McCluskey, in their
OIR
study on Political UGC, define the “degree of ‘activity’of the user”as a measurable variable that
should be significant (2012, p. 257). How to assess what content qualifies as “significant,”
though, is not a simple matter, as the work of Zhang et al. (2016) on structured and unstructured
UGC reveals. Furthermore, significant to whom: the user, the platform’sadsystem,the
communityof users? In the same paper, Sunstein is cited by Dylko andMcCluskey (2012, p. 256)
suggesting that “small acts (e.g. rating content and commenting on a blog) by large numbers of
people can produce meaningful outcomes.”It is not clear, then, if Dylko and McCluskey’s
“significant degree”of activity implies intensive individual participation or if it is inclusive of a
massive collection of small contributions.How different is an intensive participation by one or a
few committed users from a subtle participation from a large group of users?
4.2.1 Participation and authorship. There are obvious differences between “liking”or
“sharing”something created by someone else and publishing a content in a more authorial
mode, such as a text or a video. Nevertheless, there are many little footprints and trails left –
conscious or unconsciously –by users of different data systems that are captured and to
which a significant meaning can be attributed.
Van Dijck (2009) highlights the uneven distribution of users’contribution on social media,
exemplifying with YouTube, which has an impressively low rate of active users –meaning
those that currently publish videos –versus passive ones –that just navigate, consult,
comment but do not upload. Less than 5 in every 1,000 users are within the former group,
according to a study by Li cited by the author (Van Dijck, 2009, p. 55). This figure leads us to
ask if the interactions of the other 99.5% of YouTube users are discarded from the concept
of UGC.
Present analysis leads me to disagree, therefore, with Dylko and McCluskey in the sense
that I do not consider that “increased user control and engagement (in the sense of interaction)
with content should be essential to any conceptualization of UGC”(2012, p. 256). Perhaps it
could be peremptory to political activity, but UGC should include content whose authorship is
problematic and even impossible to be attributed to an individual, either due to its implicit
(Girardin et al., 2008), passive (Haklay and Weber, 2008) or aggregate nature such as ratings
(Zhang et al., 2016) and other quantitative inputs (O’Connor, 2008). Such type of collaborative,
large scale systems, lead to multiple authorship –or none at all –as artist-researcher
Beiguelman states regarding creative process in digital media: “authorship, endangered
noun”(2003, p. 35).
Diffusion. Prior to the popularization of UGC, content generated by people with no access
to mainstream media either had to pass mainstream media’s gatekeepers’approval or
circulated in alternative media. During the industrialized media era, post-Gutenberg, in which
media that just transmit content one way acquire a “machinic”scale, a certain distance
between content creation and content production processes, between creator and publisher,
was imposed.
Bruns (2010) states that the content generated by an active user that he calls produser
must be “publicly accessible,”suggesting perhaps that the content earns meaning through
sharing. Wunsch-Vincent and Vickery state that the content must be “publicly available over
the Internet”(2007, p. 4). The diffusion, within a culture of sharing, seems to be inextricably
attached to the process of creating the content, operating under the logics of dissemination,
diffusion, that is, what Jenkins et al. (2013) call spreadability: a content’s trait or tendency to be
spread.
I argue, supported by these and other reviewed definitions of UGC (Daugherty et al., 2008;
Dylko and McCluskey, 2012;Girardin et al., 2008;McKenzie et al., 2012;€
Ostman, 2012) that
one (generation) without the other (diffusion, publication) is not UGC. Therefore, the
expression generated, in the context of UGC, implies necessarily publication/diffusion as an
inseparable step of the process, pointing to a virtuous interdependence, proper from digital
realm in the post Web 2.0 era which simultaneously makes it novel and defines it. Moreover,
The “so-called”
UGC: an
updated
definition
as stated previously, not through any channel; through channels that offer a high degree of
operational and editorial autonomy, that is, ease of adoption and no gatekeeping,
respectively. At least not in the traditional sense, though there are the declared terms of
use the content’s author must comply with, and its design and compliance in the form of self-
regulation is a matter of criticism (Hintz, 2015;Kumar, 2019).
4.2.2 Intentionality and awareness. The commercial value of metadata has long been
source of debate. Van Dijck (2009) highlights the economic relevance of metadata left as
digital footprints by users of UGC platforms analyzing YouTube’s evolution after its
acquisition by Google. Drawing a balance, the author states “the user’s role as a data provider
is infinitely more important than his role as a content provider”(Van Dijck, 2009, p. 49). One of
the issues that stand out is: to what degree is it transparent to the user that he/she is actually
producing content that will be used in some manner, even if in the form of aggregated
metadata that renders the individual users anonymous? In other words, to be considered
UGC, must content be self-contained? That is, must it be meaningful by itself?
Though the ethical component of such discussion is not the direction of this research –in
spite of its importance –it triggers questions related to it, mainly to the definition of UGC
regarding intentionality and awareness. That includes the awareness of the final meaning that
users’interactions will contribute to, such as quantitative statistical analysis, data mining
and big data analyses. These two dimensions evoke the variety of processes of content
creation discussed so far: (1) those that are and are not intentional and (2) that the user has
more or less awareness of the meaning given by third parties –or at least disclosed by the
hosting platform.
Girardin et al. (2008) propose research methods for an object they call digital footprints.
They may be explicit (like photos on Flickr) or implicit (map consultations, calls, SMS
messages, etc.) alluding again to the myriad of ways user-generated data of different forms in
different scales may be interpreted as meaningful information even when they are not
necessarily generated intentionally. Otherwise, this kind of content is the result of using
digital media or services that allow, through the terms of service, not only the storage of
personal data or metadata, but also its analysis, such as in the case of Facebook’s unpublished
status updates (Das and Kramer, 2013).
Digital ubiquity leads to an unprecedented frequency of creation of UGC that enhances the
chance of capturing extraordinary content. At the same time, many eyes look at such content,
recontextualize it and find new and unintended meanings to it. In the context of UGC, then,
to generate content includes data created and publicized by users on digital environments that
can be interpreted in a meaningful way by the same user or third parties, even though might
have been collected or grouped together for analysis in absence of intention and/or awareness of
the same user.
4.3 Content
4.3.1 The boundaries of content. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Social Media, content
is “Any material made available for sharing online, including photographs and videos, news
and entertainment”(Chandler and Munday, 2016). Social media and digital media in general,
in that sense, bring along a plethora of media formats that fit that description, that “contain”
within some clear borders, some sort of content: blog posts, animated Gifs, URLs, geolocation,
pictures, videos, tweets, video streaming, etc. What they have in common is that they’re
usually recorded in databases. Even streamed media is recorded most of the times, which
makes them transmittable and accessible from different locations and in asynchronous ways,
as long as one is connected to the internet.
Hagemann and Vossen (2009) propose, as previously discussed, unorthodox formats such as
tags, code, mashups or applications as content. Also, other types of very small contributions, in
forms of content that collectively acquire relevance -such as marketing platforms that aggregate
OIR
user-generated opinions of products (Flanagin and Metzger, 2013). Even individual metadata
represent small bits of data coupled with media that, even though in incomprehensible or opaque
ways to its creator, allow platforms –from social media platforms to search engines to
advertising servers- organizations and/or people to fulfil a series of different tasks, frequently
supported by data mining and data aggregation operations. This aligns with the previously
mentioned idea of “meaningful outcomes”proposed by Sunstein as the result of “small acts”by
many users put together and should be taken seriously, especially considering the growing field
of big data research.
UGC may also be result of the combination of different sources: a person, a group of
persons, a multitude, a topic (such as a hashtag search) or even automated gathering and
generating mechanisms (such as bots, crawlers, algorithms, feeds etc.) could be behind the
generation of content. In other words, an individual content, in order to be considered UGC,
not necessarily must be meaningful on its own, it may be the result of different combinations
that might involve different bits of content or different formats (or both). In the end such bits
of content are meaningful to someone or something. On accepting such a form of content,
there is a demand for a more inclusive definition of the expression content in the context
of UGC.
4.3.2 Types of content. Differences lie behind the type of content, though. In a study about
the value given to UGC by audiences of BBC, Wahl-Jorgensen et al. (2010) find that there is a
radically different valuation of testimonial content versus opinion: while the former is very
highly esteemed, the latter is even despised. That discussion leads to another variable to
consider: the motivation behind the creation of UGC. Exclusively social content –such as
phatic conversation –fulfil a very different communicative function than cultural creation,
political debate or criminal denunciation. Kammer (2013) classifies content as conversational
when its purpose is merely the social interaction. Nevertheless, such distinction is less
relevant if we consider the variety of attributes that may be source of knowledge from a social
sciences perspective –and other fields as well –such as metadata of place, time, choice of
words, frequency of interaction and so on. It seems unfair to decide a priori which forms of
content should be valid as research advances in so many ways in this ever-evolving digital
content creation field.
Jenkins (2006) states that in a culture of convergence, content ceases to be the end of the
cultural production and becomes one of multiple dimensions of transmediatic activity
(Jenkins et al., 2013) that gathers different types of interaction. Such interactions transform
metadata into an important part of the content. In light of that, the number of hits, likes,
shares, etc. become part of the content’s value chain and should be considered integrating
part of UGC reality. This calls for a dynamic, fluid interpretation of the concept, apart from
the static, perennial content of industrial media, restrained to the materiality of its analogue
immutable forms. Metadata becomes, in that sense, as much of a content as text.
In sum, “content,”in the context of UGC, stands for not only standard media creation, but
also collaborative content in forms of very small individual contributions -such as metadata,
ratings, “thumbs up”–and even unintended contributions to some unnoticed or opaque
database for its cumulative result might be meaningful in different ways for different people or
organizations.
5. Toward an updated and unifying definition of UGC
My final proposition of UGC, based on the previous developments, should encapsulate the
dimensions presented on each of its constituting terms: User must contemplate the idea of an
ordinary user as a role –among so many possible roles –rather than call for neologisms or
hybrid definitions. Generated must include diffusion as an entangled action of the digital creative
process and must refer both to individual or collective, intentional or unintentional content, as it
has meaning to someone or somebody in some form –for example, individually or in an
The “so-called”
UGC: an
updated
definition
aggregated form. Content must contemplate not only media, but also other types of interaction
that have an effect on meaning. A content in social media is not just the file uploaded, it is the
orbit of metadata that accumulates around it: likes, shares, angry faces, comments. A definition
must be guided not by principles of media forms, but rather those of meaning-making. Finally,
the diffusion is aninherent part of digital culture and which means are used are not indifferent in
the context of UGC. I argue that in the age of UGIS and Social Media, UGC must be narrowed
down to content published on independent channels. Independent channels should be
understood here as means to publicize content that are not moderated by any interested
parties. Though independent is never an absolute concept and Social Media, User-Review pages,
Blogs and so forth are definitely political and economic actors, they usually do not operate as
gatekeepers or editors in nearly the same level as in legacy media.
In light of the above, I propose that User-generated Content is any kind of text, data or
action performed by online digital systems users, published and disseminated by the same user
through independent channels, that incur an expressive or communicative effect either on an
individual manner or combined with other contributions from the same or other sources.
As previously stated, though many authors across the span of disciplines in social
sciences and beyond have adopted the term UGC, there has been little consensus to its
meaning since the roll-out of social media platforms, the major host for such kind of content.
This research is an attempt to overcome such gap in the field, by (1) critically reviewing its
applications, operationalizations and definitions, and (2) deconstructing the acronym and
analyzing it individually but not separately, to finally be able to (3) synthesizing what I hope
to be an updated and unifying definition that could be adopted by such researchers in their
foregoing studies and stands as a starting point for future researchers that might find the
need to update it due to other socio-technical disruptions such as social media advent.
Note
1. Website of the project: http://research.europeana.eu (Accessed June 24, 2016)
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Further reading
Lazarsfeld, P. and Merton, P.R. (1985), “Comunciaci
on de masas, gustos populares y acci
on social
organizada”, in de Moragas, M. (Ed.), Sociolog
ıa de la comunicaci
on de masas, Editorial Gustavo
Gil, Barcelona.
Corresponding author
Marcelo Luis Barbosa dos Santos can be contacted at: msantos@uft.cl
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The “so-called”
UGC: an
updated
definition
