"user submitted" content
Take a look at the image on the left. "Brace yourself," it reads. You have stumbled upon Imgur's inverse-chronologically ordered "user submitted" gallery. It's quirky, often times it's irreverent, and it's always completely user determined. It has the power to evoke nostalgia, anger, and all around random enjoyment. To the digital media scholar, a mere glance at the structure of "user submitted" as well as an overview of its content provides one simple conclusion: Imgur's "user submitted" is most certainly representative of the evolution of the purest digital media that scholars Murray and Manovich discussed in their works "Inventing the Medium" and "The Language of New Media," respectively.
Since it is called "user submitted," the best way to approach analyzing this site is by studying the users (of which I am one). In a way, the participants in "user submitted," whether they are actively voting on the content presented or if they are merely watching the content pass before their eyes, are becoming more like the medium itself, to a higher degree than internet users that do not frequent such sites. As Murray discusses in his chapter "Affordances of the Digital Medium," the digital medium allows for the medium to "represent and execute conditional behaviors" (51). Any simple program could go through a set of images, memes, or .gifs and upvote or downvote them at random, but the fact that the populace of "user submitted" proceeds in such a manner shows that they are adapting to the medium itself, or rather, are taking advantage of this particular affordance of the digital medium. If they enjoy the image, they upvote it. If not, they can choose to move on or downvote. It is conditional on the user, though it is also conditional on the content during a given period of browsing. This relationship to artificial intelligence places the actual users in "user submitted" under the umbrella, in a way, of one of Manovich's principles of new media: automation (32). While Manovich leaves this principle of automation mostly to the computer, AI, and AL, I argue that users that adhere to the policies and codes (discussed later on) of upvoting and downvoting, commenting, and reporting images that are Not Safe For Work are just as close to pure automation as the computer players that Manovich himself dueled against in Virtual Reality that he could not tell apart from a real human being (34).
Other ways that users mimic their inhabited medium come in the form of various in-jokes. Such examples include using a banana for scale to give a better sense of size in your image, commenting "why not both?" on images that offer a choice between two things, or commenting "+1" to indicate one's approval and upvoting of a bit of content. Such reappearing jokes and comments become part of a site-wide lexicon of approved verbiage to keep everyone moderately happy, not unlike code in a computer language that keeps a program running smoothly. Just as there is an unwritten list of approved comments and remarks for users, there is also a general nebula of rules dictating acceptable images. Anything dealing with cats, nostalgia posts, Safe For Work photos of attractive people (though this can be dicey), poignant reaction .gifs, and certain re-posted images are fairly safe bets when it comes popularity. While this prescriptive, rule based nature certainly fits into Murray's procedural affordance of digital media, it is more indicative of his assertion of a participatory affordance of digital media (55).
Without participant users, "user submitted" would cease to exist. Certain posts beget sequel posts, comments demand the OP (original poster) to deliver on promises s/he has made that the OP then delivers on in time, etcetera. Not only is it simply important "that the actions of humans and machines are important to one another," but further still, Imgur's "user submitted" simplifies the machine's role, facilitating pure interaction between users (Murray 55). This is pure participation, especially since it furthers the website by allowing users to both follow and break the codes of automation mentioned earlier to make a more diverse site. Each day brings new in-jokes, "user submitted" celebrities, new references that reflect what is going on in the real world and online elsewhere, and, more significantly, new users. These new users must quickly adapt to this participatory nature by stepping into line with the rest of the "user submitted" masses or else, in internet parlance, become forever alone, and downvoted to oblivion. The learning curve is steep, but the payoff for users that do remain around is great. They may, someday, even become the content themselves, as, for example, username Razor10000 has. His simple, albeit vulgar gimmick is to comment "I always upvote a**," without the asterisks of course (if you'll pardon the language as well as the pun), on images with said subject . Somehow, Razor, as the user is affectionately known, has become quite popular, and predictable. Users typically bait Razor into coming out of hiding to comment on their image as if to earn a sort of seal of approval from his authority. Other times, users comment "In before Razor" to tout their speed in recognizing what images Razor may approve before he himself can get there. Razor, though a user, is a veritable legend to "user submitted," as he has become part of the lexicon of "user submitted," has become the content of "user submitted." When users become content, there definitely seems to be a melding with the medium itself. No longer is there a sense of a linear relationship between user and content, but Murray's participatory affordance of the digital medium inevitably leads to this point (not end) that Imgur's "user submitted" has reached.
Linearity does not stop at a relationship between user and content, but expands in a fractal sense to include relationships between content, which turns out to not be linear after all, which cements Imgur's "user submitted" as a chief example of what Manovich's principles of new media and Murray's affordances of the digital medium have evolved into. A recent College Humor article placed Imgur on a plane lower than that of Reddit and similar websites. However, in the time since said article appeared, eerily close to the time that I myself began to browse and contribute to "user submitted," somewhat of a chasm has appeared between the two sites, as if Imgur now, with the rising awareness and popularity of "user submitted," regardless of how inexperienced the user, has become a viable alternative to Reddit, rather than simply a storage house of information, though some may disagree with me. In this manner, the linearity abhorred by the theories of both Murray and Manovich disappears because neither Reddit nor Imgur can declare the other subservient to itself because of their participatory natures. Both websites merely occupy a nebulous space on the World Wide Web, an actual web of the in-jokes, references, reposts, and codes mentioned before. Imgur, therefore, was prefigured, in a way, in the works of inventors of computers, technicians, as well as in the works of Murray and Manovich. "User submitted," therefore, is definitely an evolved form of the theories of Murray and Manovich, because of how seamlessly it incorporates the user into the medium so much so that it's difficult to tell them apart.
Works Cited
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001.
Murray, Janet H. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2011.
Since it is called "user submitted," the best way to approach analyzing this site is by studying the users (of which I am one). In a way, the participants in "user submitted," whether they are actively voting on the content presented or if they are merely watching the content pass before their eyes, are becoming more like the medium itself, to a higher degree than internet users that do not frequent such sites. As Murray discusses in his chapter "Affordances of the Digital Medium," the digital medium allows for the medium to "represent and execute conditional behaviors" (51). Any simple program could go through a set of images, memes, or .gifs and upvote or downvote them at random, but the fact that the populace of "user submitted" proceeds in such a manner shows that they are adapting to the medium itself, or rather, are taking advantage of this particular affordance of the digital medium. If they enjoy the image, they upvote it. If not, they can choose to move on or downvote. It is conditional on the user, though it is also conditional on the content during a given period of browsing. This relationship to artificial intelligence places the actual users in "user submitted" under the umbrella, in a way, of one of Manovich's principles of new media: automation (32). While Manovich leaves this principle of automation mostly to the computer, AI, and AL, I argue that users that adhere to the policies and codes (discussed later on) of upvoting and downvoting, commenting, and reporting images that are Not Safe For Work are just as close to pure automation as the computer players that Manovich himself dueled against in Virtual Reality that he could not tell apart from a real human being (34).
Other ways that users mimic their inhabited medium come in the form of various in-jokes. Such examples include using a banana for scale to give a better sense of size in your image, commenting "why not both?" on images that offer a choice between two things, or commenting "+1" to indicate one's approval and upvoting of a bit of content. Such reappearing jokes and comments become part of a site-wide lexicon of approved verbiage to keep everyone moderately happy, not unlike code in a computer language that keeps a program running smoothly. Just as there is an unwritten list of approved comments and remarks for users, there is also a general nebula of rules dictating acceptable images. Anything dealing with cats, nostalgia posts, Safe For Work photos of attractive people (though this can be dicey), poignant reaction .gifs, and certain re-posted images are fairly safe bets when it comes popularity. While this prescriptive, rule based nature certainly fits into Murray's procedural affordance of digital media, it is more indicative of his assertion of a participatory affordance of digital media (55).
Without participant users, "user submitted" would cease to exist. Certain posts beget sequel posts, comments demand the OP (original poster) to deliver on promises s/he has made that the OP then delivers on in time, etcetera. Not only is it simply important "that the actions of humans and machines are important to one another," but further still, Imgur's "user submitted" simplifies the machine's role, facilitating pure interaction between users (Murray 55). This is pure participation, especially since it furthers the website by allowing users to both follow and break the codes of automation mentioned earlier to make a more diverse site. Each day brings new in-jokes, "user submitted" celebrities, new references that reflect what is going on in the real world and online elsewhere, and, more significantly, new users. These new users must quickly adapt to this participatory nature by stepping into line with the rest of the "user submitted" masses or else, in internet parlance, become forever alone, and downvoted to oblivion. The learning curve is steep, but the payoff for users that do remain around is great. They may, someday, even become the content themselves, as, for example, username Razor10000 has. His simple, albeit vulgar gimmick is to comment "I always upvote a**," without the asterisks of course (if you'll pardon the language as well as the pun), on images with said subject . Somehow, Razor, as the user is affectionately known, has become quite popular, and predictable. Users typically bait Razor into coming out of hiding to comment on their image as if to earn a sort of seal of approval from his authority. Other times, users comment "In before Razor" to tout their speed in recognizing what images Razor may approve before he himself can get there. Razor, though a user, is a veritable legend to "user submitted," as he has become part of the lexicon of "user submitted," has become the content of "user submitted." When users become content, there definitely seems to be a melding with the medium itself. No longer is there a sense of a linear relationship between user and content, but Murray's participatory affordance of the digital medium inevitably leads to this point (not end) that Imgur's "user submitted" has reached.
Linearity does not stop at a relationship between user and content, but expands in a fractal sense to include relationships between content, which turns out to not be linear after all, which cements Imgur's "user submitted" as a chief example of what Manovich's principles of new media and Murray's affordances of the digital medium have evolved into. A recent College Humor article placed Imgur on a plane lower than that of Reddit and similar websites. However, in the time since said article appeared, eerily close to the time that I myself began to browse and contribute to "user submitted," somewhat of a chasm has appeared between the two sites, as if Imgur now, with the rising awareness and popularity of "user submitted," regardless of how inexperienced the user, has become a viable alternative to Reddit, rather than simply a storage house of information, though some may disagree with me. In this manner, the linearity abhorred by the theories of both Murray and Manovich disappears because neither Reddit nor Imgur can declare the other subservient to itself because of their participatory natures. Both websites merely occupy a nebulous space on the World Wide Web, an actual web of the in-jokes, references, reposts, and codes mentioned before. Imgur, therefore, was prefigured, in a way, in the works of inventors of computers, technicians, as well as in the works of Murray and Manovich. "User submitted," therefore, is definitely an evolved form of the theories of Murray and Manovich, because of how seamlessly it incorporates the user into the medium so much so that it's difficult to tell them apart.
Works Cited
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001.
Murray, Janet H. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2011.