UWE project essay (constructed using my comment on "German Pussy")

From my viewpoint, what is the greatest creative challenge the media industry is currently facing and why?

The Internet has revolutionised the media, creating new ways to work, play and socialise, which has led to a massive increase of users worldwide. Although the Internet is a very positive new technology, just some of the problems it has created include piracy, identity theft and a generation gap. However, the issue that is not being given enough thought to is regulation of content.

The Internet is constantly expanding. Thousands of tweets are posted a second, an estimated 200,000 videos are posted on Youtube daily and as new users join the online communities, these numbers continue to grow. How can this amount of content possibly be regulated?

OFCOM and the BBFC are examples of the UK's media regulators, checking suitability of media content before it is released on mediums such as TV, games or radio. However, why bother to create laws preventing minors from watching 18 rated films when they can watch them online by simply filling a box telling the site their age? Even more worrying is the content on sites which would never have been approved at all by an official regulating body, such as real violence, child pornography, even death, simply by typing in the right phrases, and yet only one of these seems to be taken seriously by the government, who I do not expect are that prevalent at tracking offenders, and are worryingly unjust even when they do arrest someone. Recently, a teenager was convicted of downloading child pornography using Limewire over a year ago, and even though he claims it was an accident, and to have deleted the file as soon as he realised what he was seeing, he has been given a prison sentence and a sex offenders record. It has been brought up in court that even art of naked children should be made illegal, which would lead to the removal of hundreds of church statues of angels and famous artist's works being made illegal. Australia, in a similar venture are trying to make pornography featuring models with breast sizes under a certain limit illegal. Is the government too, trying to frighten the world into submission, as with the desperate record labels, suing millions from select people who downloaded music illegally? Either way, the overall effect on the system is minimal. Given how it is impossible for a body to regulate the millions of Youtube videos, would the government prevent illegal footage from being shown by removing the entire website? I would say we have reached the point where this would not be possible, even for the law, given the protests that would break out, defending human rights and the masses of important and informative works that exist on the site. The system continues to spiral out of control for the official bodies, and soon we will not even need ISPs to get us online, breaking the last tie to the legally governed world.

So if this means that power will continue to be stripped from regulating bodies, who will govern the new media world? Will it be possible? There is no class system online, no kings or queens, so the only ruling body online is the users, who are the only people with the power to restrict what gets uploaded or removed. I think the users are the solution to the question which will become more and more important as time goes on and the government realises how much of an issue it faces. 

However, when I hear naive things like this:

"It is great to be able to download programmes from the Internet but there is clearly a very serious gap in the regulatory framework which must be closed if such programmes are currently outside the oversight of Ofcom."

it becomes clear that it could be a while before they start searching for any form of answer.