"Are you a member of a 'powerless elite'?"

All media has some kind of powerless elite to some extent. You will always find fan-made stories, art and videos all over the internet and in various formats. It's one of the great things generated from good storytelling, original ideas and interesting concepts that are presented to us in everyday life through the various mediums we encounter day to day.

I believe myself to a member of a powerless elite simply in the way I take influence from different media when I am making a film for my course or when I am writing a song for a band I am in. I want to do those things in a certain way because it interests me, but I can't be a part of that media as it is already been created, so to take influence from it is to make user generated content, thus making me part of powerless elite.

This is not a bad thing though, nobody is stealing ideas or claiming them as their own. It is merely another way of consuming media content, by expanding on the point already addressed by shows or songs or films and creating something new as a way of appreciating the media they have grown to become a fan of.

Nowadays, this kind of community effort from different fanbases is being used to the advantage of the producers, with new styles of advertising becoming more popular. Most notable is viral advertising or 'Guerilla marketing'. A good example of this is the film Cloverfield by JJ Abrams. He deliberately with-held the appearance of the monster that appears in the film and any significant details about the origin of the creature to arouse public interest. There were many websites and forums dedicated to discovering the 'secrets' of the film, even by sifting through Abrams' other works and trying to piece together 'clues' to unlock these so-called secrets. It was a brilliant marketing trick and the film was a big success partly for this reason.

Without the powerless elite, the user generated content, the fan-made content, a lot of media just wouldnt work and wouldnt generate much interest. Nowadays, it is getting increasingly difficult to draw people into media products, more and more of the masses are becoming desensitized to conventional advertising, even ignorant of it, as they have seen it all before. On the other hand, people are also now gaining the kind of technology needed to make this kind of content, stuff that looks as though it could have been used in the film itself (if it were a film that was in question). With the power of websites such as youtube, twitter, facebook and myspace, as well as the increasing amount of technology in the form of hardware and software, the powerless elite are gaining more power. Some day, they may even be the people who generate the original content.