Crowdsourcing and User Generated Content

Crowdsourcing has become a pandemic in many industries, rendering the certifications and degrees of particular professionals moot. Crowdsourcing (in a nutshell) is soliciting a paid or unpaid services of a particular population by way of the internet. Many of the first instances of crowdsourcing can be seen in the Help Wanted or Classified’s sections of newspapers. With the advent of the internet, however, the evolution of both our news sources and sources for inexpensive/free labor has been made easier to attain because of sites such as Craigslist, Angie’s List and Facebook. The concept of crowdsourcing is not exclusive to physical services but to intellectual property as well. As mentioned in the article The Blurring Line Between Amateur and Professional, “One consequence is that the line between professionals and amateurs is blurring. And as the line blurs, the professionals find their once-stable professions turned upside down. Seasoned journalists and credentialed experts have to compete for attention with Daily Kos and RedState.com.” Despite being an option for all necessary services, crowdsourcing can serve as more beneficial in the realm of entertainment and content production. The benefits of allowing for amateurs to cross over into the professional realm of content creation is that it adds to the often repetitive themes and genres that are typically shown in entertainment, adding a new array of more relative and user/viewer friendly themes,

Another downside to crowdsourcing is how easy it is for many of its participants to be exploited. Larger companies such as Wikipedia, Amazon, Apple and Google develop crowdsourced powered programs and technologies that often unknowingly use the information learned from other users to improve and add to the intelligence of programs that we have come to love such as Siri and Alexa. In the WiRED article, The Rise of Crowdsourcing, they introduce the new Amazon technology called the Mechanical Turk a “Web-based marketplace that helps companies find people to perform tasks computers are generally lousy at [such as] “identifying items in a photograph, skimming real estate documents to find identifying information, writing short product descriptions, transcribing podcasts”. While considerably helpful to users of the programs, “they’re designed to require very little time, and consequently they offer very little compensation—most from a few cents to a few dollars.” Considering that crowdsourcing uses the convenience of the internet to provide services, regulation of the tool should be enforced to ensure that it is being fairly used by proprietors, providers and users.

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