Claiming content & constructing users: user-generated content and BBC Blast

This chapter utilizes key findings from a research project investigating teenager user generated content (UGC) in relation to creativity and learning on BBC Blast (2004-2010). The chapter draws on this research to critique three key issues in relation to new media. The first is the widely constructed conception of the user of new media in individualized terms, a construction that is doubly exacerbated by the discourse of the digital native found in youth studies (and beyond). The second issue relates to the value afforded to uploaded content, which is often taken as evidence or affirmation of creative ‘autonomy’ (Castells, 2009: 129), thereby resonating with the construction of the user of new media noted above. Both these constructions (of the user and the content) are not only compounded by the discourse of young people and in particular that of the digital native, they also heavily rely on a dichotomous understanding of new media and its’ users as (more) active, representative, interactive than ‘old’ media/audiences. Consequently, our third argument is that these constructions offer a blanket approach to both content and users, one that tends to conceptualize new media in singular terms, where uploading becomes a linear action into and onto the technology.