2016 is coming to close, and it's been quite the year. From the entertainment legends we've lost to the election results that tore our nation apart, it's clear that there is a lot to reflect on. If there's one theme which has seemingly reemerged again and again in recent years (and especially this year), it is that the line between being a content creator versus a content consumer on the internet has grown very blurry. While there's obviously the threshold of who originally put a piece of content out there, there is an argument to be made that the experience another person has with that content may be effected by added context, additional elements, or other factors outside of the control of the original creator. Many of these factors are in fact influenced by consumers, who not only engage in an alteration process which gives them partial ownership over the content in question, but more importantly makes them feel ownership which may be disproportionate to their actual ownership.
To give a topical example, the concern about fake news stories on Facebook has been swirling around the internet ever since such information may have helped elect our new President. Importantly, the worry isn't that news sites widely considered fraudulent (such as Breitbart) are themselves pushing their own content on large numbers of readers (consumers). It is that consumers of their content are sharing that content, thus creating an exponential growth for what may have initially been small scale operations. These consumers blur the line between creation and consumption because they intrinsically view the spreading of this information as how their consumption is fulfilled - in other words, their role as consumers begins to overlap with the goals of the creator. This isn't something specific to political news articles, either - the idea of participatory advertising is fundamental to how most social media advertising operates these days (including the very platform I write for, Odyssey).
How does this impact the future of media? Consider one of my favorite forms of art: Video games. The real revolutionary quality of this form of media was it's introduction of a new element to it's artistic experience. Prior forms of art, such as literature or visual art, was caged within a simple formula centered around observation. The consumer could only get as much out of this art as their observation allowed them to. Video games empowered the consumer to engage experientially by creating a feedback loop. In some ways, video games actually originated our modern understanding of participatory culture. In the incredibly short span of about 40 years, video games exploded out of a deeply niche obscurity to one of the leading artistic industries in the modern world.
I predict the problems we've encountered with this consumer/creator blur are not merely an irritating byproduct of current political climates. They are actually a fundamental change in how we consume media which accompanies the increasingly democratized systems of communication the modern world hosts. We can't ignore these problems - we have to immediately begin learning how to mitigate them, because like the extremism on both sides which spawns them, they aren't going anywhere no matter how hard we passively wish them to.
