ABSTRACT
The industriousness of ‘amateur’ creative users suggests that self-made media content has already disrupted the expert paradigm that dominated media production during the broad cast era. Firms produce goods or services, while ‘industries’ are abstract aggregations of firms, actions, prices and the rest. Creatives are organised into a market that services giant corporations. Whether user-created content is critiqued as a corporate ruse or celebrated as an opportunity for ‘digital democracy’ – whether one can see a glass as half-empty or half-full – the fact remains that the rise of self-made media poses important questions for ‘media industry studies’. Creative industries are the generative engine of emergent knowledge. The desire to enjoy creative content within a social network is the mechanism through which learning occurs. These social networks are given life by individual desires, daydreams, mischief-making and play.
