User Generated Content over history

Reading through Lobato et al.'s article on User Generated Content (UGC) over the Years, I have to agree with them that the activities surrounding contemporary user-generated content are more complicated and nuanced than the dichotomous discourses framed by academia, media and government alike (Lobato et al., 2011, p.900). Their discussion of UGC's cyclical movement from informality  to formality over time is something I had not thought of before, at least not in those terms. I do think their discussion of formality and regulatory practices in user-generated content (p.905), as well as previous class discussions on the regulatory practices of social media platforms like Facebook help complicate the notions of the revolutionary or disruptive qualities often attributed to user generated content (p.900). As a student of information and communication, I found the attempts to control and criminalize informal activities interesting ( p.910). Like the "Happy Birthday" example mentioned in the article (p.910), an aspiring musician singing a Christmas Carol like "Winter Wonderland" may not have been criminal in the privacy and informality of the home but when uploaded on YouTube, it becomes a third party violation as a result of copyright issues (Arango, 2009). One way to prevent situations like these is drawing attention to the nuances in not just discourses about UGC but also on the relationships between formal and informal activities as well.
                                                      References
Lobato, R., Thomas, J. and Hunter, D. (2011). Histories of user generated content: Between formal and informal media economies. International Journal of Communication 5(2011) 899–914.

Arango, T. (2009). Rights Clash on YouTube, and Videos Vanish - NYTimes.com. The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. Retrieved November 28, 2015, from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/business/media/23warner.html