I didnt say anything about Coronation Street or things being popular being uncreative Im saying it doesn't take anything exceptional to produce much of the media content we have today. Most people could step into a media role and produce work that is as good as what we are served up with today.
That fact is borne out by the growth of the net and by ordinary people having a say and doing their own things: a lot of the stuff read, listened to, watched, etc today isnt being produced by media people it is being produced by regular people who now have access to tools which allow them to record and share their work. The media may consider its skills as being scarce and valuable, but they re deluded if they think that. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Ian Betteridge Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2007 5:10 PM To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: Re: [backstage] www.FreeTheBBC.info On 14/06/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> < [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: Most of what the media produces isn't creative: it is formulaic and componentised in much the same way as any factory that assembles work on a production line. Of course, media production needs to be financed, but it isn't a scarce resource and it does warrant disproportionate returns. I think that's your opinion, but it's not one that's shared by the market. After all, the appetite of consumers for content of all kinds has never been greater - people spend more and more time listening to music, watching video, reading web sites, interacting via MMORPGs (etc). Where 50 years ago, "consuming media" meant an hour reading a paper and two hours listening to the radio, now media consumption is pretty much constant outside of work contexts (and even there...). What's more, when people aren't consuming media, they're creating it - from camera phone images to blogging to YouTube. By saying "that stuff's not creative, it's just repetitive" you're basically saying that consumers of media are suckers and stupid. That's not an opinion I share. If you think, for example, that "Coronation Street" isn't creative I have serious doubts over your ability to judge what creativity is. You're betraying, basically, a highly snobbish attitude towards anything that's popular.
