Hollywood Disrupted

This is a GREAT summary on GigaOm of an LATimes OpEd on the shifting cultural influence between Hollywood and UGC (User Generated Content). The whole article (and the OpEd, I imagine) is a rich illustration of the disruptive potential of New-Media so go read it for yourself, but if not, here are some takeaways:

“All of this has been hastened by the fact that there is now an instrument to take advantage of the social stratifications. To the extent that the Internet is a niche machine, dividing its users into tiny, self-defined categories, it is providing a challenge to the movies that not even television did, because the Internet addresses a change in consciousness while television simply addressed a change in delivery of content. Television never questioned the very nature of conventional entertainment. The Internet, on the other hand, not only creates niche communities — of young people, beer aficionados, news junkies, Britney Spears fanatics {GREENS, cb.]— that seem to obviate the need for the larger community, it plays to another powerful force in modern America and one that also undermines the movies: [digital self-expression]. It is certainly no secret that so much of modern media is dedicated to empowering audiences that no longer want to be passive. Already, video games generate more income than movies by centralizing the user and turning him into the protagonist. Popular websites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, in which the user is effectively made into a star and in which content is democratized, get far more hits than movies get audiences. ...

"At the end of the day, what we’re talking about is the emergence of a new medium with its own art form. And whether Hollywood will remain at the epicenter of future cultural production is the big question. For the first time, Hollywood should be concerned like never before simply by virtue of the fact that, this time, the means of production are now in the hands of the audience itself. What this implies, at the very least, is that the studios will have to increasingly democratize their business model."

GigaOM � Hollywood Disrupted