Frivolous Friday, 08.21.2009, Content as an ecosystem

*** Cheesy metaphor alert ***

You remember middle school Biology, where they talked about the functions of ecosystems: 1.) Producers (plants), 2.) Consumers (animals), and 3.) Decomposers (mushrooms)? It occurs to me that ideas, art and other content form their own ecosystem within a culture, or even across cultures. Web 2.0, in my opinion, highlights this more starkly than the offline world.

The online ecosystem's roles function more or less along these lines:

1.) Producers are the bloggers and micro-bloggers, the folks uploading their photos and videos, adding and expanding Wikipedia entries, and so forth.

2.) Consumers are the search engines, the aggregators, the taggers, the portals, the re-tweeters and cross-posters, etc.

3.) Decomposers are the folks who blindly forward emails and links without checking their provenance, much less validate anything against snopes.com or factcheck.org. They're the ones who don't back up their assertions or "facts" in forum food fights or cite their sources in their own content. They can, at worst, strip all the nuance and/or context from a well-reasoned, well-grounded discussion.

If it sounds like I'm dogging on the Decomposers, I'm really not. Well, sorta-kinda not. Because most of us spend the bulk of our "communication" time in an off-the-cuff mode, relying on our personal credibility to set the value of the content we're creating or passing on. So, even in cases when the content is complete garbage (e.g. regurgitated talking points) or plagiarized, revisionist, or whatever, it trickles into the zeitgeist, where some of it is picked up in the next wave of content that's produced.

As the number of Producers (and content they produce) explodes, it will of course take more work to be a successful "Consumer" of information, particularly if you're looking to make your meals in that niche of the ecosystem.

Decomposing, on the other hand, just sort of happens, as if the concept of entropy from Physics also applies to information and entertainment. In any case, mushrooms are an acquired taste for me, so I'm sort of biased against that role anyway. ;-)