From UGC to Community Originating Context

Alongside putting my longer Facebook posts on here this year, I’m also going to dig into the notes I took during my PhD and share any insights that might be hidden in there. Here’s a thing about the distinction between “user generated content” and what I’ve described as “community originating context”, where what the audience create isn’t just “stuff”, it’s meaning.

(From Sept 2019) While a live recording contains nothing concrete of the experience bar a possible registering of the reverberation via live mics, there is much potential to invest semiotically in the experience of the recording by coupling it to narrative. The narrative may be official – sleevenotes, sanctioned commentary from the artist or a journalist – or it may be in the form of what often gets dismissed as “user generated content” but is perhaps better understood as “community originating context”.

When music is made for a specific and somewhat bounded community, their response to it and the remembering of those who were at any of the gigs released as recordings becomes part of that narrative. In the same way that the history of recording relied on the elevation of studios to sacred spaces in order to tell the story of those records, even to the point where the Beatles named an album after the studio where it was recorded, the story of the origins of a solo recording act as a tool from which to construct an experience. Record listening has always relied on narrative construction – including our relationship with the band, where we bought the record, the equipment the room we’re in, the peers with whom we share this music, the artwork, sleevenotes, format, press/critical reaction and the events in our lives that it soundtracks. Some of those are weakened in the digital but many can be enriched and carried with the work, even if ephemerally as weblinks or known spaces for responding.