One Big Worldwide Conversation?

User Generated Content (or UGC for the technical savvy, of which I now belong) has always been around. It is just that today people have the ability to send it via mobiles or post it on the web, as opposed to ringing up the local paper to complain about Miss ASBO living next door.

If we are to believe the hype, supposedly everyone is jumping on this online bandwagon, making digital stories and joining in on one big, happy conversation.

But is this actually the reality?

How democratic is the media and online world?

Rupert Murdoch stated in his speech back in 2005, that news services have to be more interactive, to enable users to contribute. It seems that several big media took this advice to heart and created websites such as CNN's iReport and the BBC's Have Your Say to help encourage the 'conversation'.

As it turns out, the conversation isn't quite as big as we might believe, currently being more of a back room natter than worldwide discussion. Why is this? The simple answer: people still do not have access to the internet. It comes as no surprise then, that the main UGC contributors are young and economically advantaged. And even then, the number interacting is miniscule, when compared to the number using the internet for consuming news.

How can this be called a conversation when all that is going on is a whole lot of reading and not a lot of writing?

It is true though, that citizen journalism is on the rise. From citizens being the first people to get footage of disasters such as the London bombings , to bloggers tapping away on their keyboards up and down the country. And as I have mentioned before, online papers written by citizens, such as the South Korean Ohmynews , have been a phenomenal success.

On the surface the media has never seemed so democratic since it went online. However, there is still a long way to go before we have the whole world in web conversation with one another. 

The era of the citizen journalist is yet to come.