According to a study done by Amanda Lenhart and Mary Madden of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 57% of all online teens are "Content Creators." They say this percentage translates into 12 million teens who share their own personal artwork, photos, stories, music, or videos online, or who have made a webpage for someone else.
This statistic is not at all surprising to me--especially because even creating a blog counts as content creation--and i think i have three! New technologies make it so easy to create personal webpages, to share pictures, to "publish" poems, to post videos...and the list goes on.
I'm trying to figure out how this "low culture" expression is actually a threat to "high culture." If the Internet is opening up areas of self-expression that are more accessible to the common person, isn't that a good thing? I suppose this could be eroding standards of what is "good" art or "good" music...but is that really the case? Last weekend, I had the opportunity to visit the Chicago Institute of Art. One of the pieces of "art" on display was a large, red-orange, 3-D rectangle propped vertically against the wall. With all due respect to the artist, if that can be considered art, what else can? We also saw a couple canvases with scribbles, stick figures, and doodles all over them--on display in a very "high culture" art museum! I don't understand how we decide what's "good" and what's not. Who makes the decision? What do they base it on? And how is the rise of self-expression on the Internet a problem for anyone?
If any of you have some answers/thoughts, please leave me some comments :0)
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