For some, these grassroots cultural productions are understood as offering a radical alternative to dominant media content. Various minority groups to tell their own stories, question hegemonic representations.
The Web has become an important showcase for productions of film school students. Still others understand their cultural productions in the context of building social ties within a virtual community defined around shared interests.
Such groups seek not to shut down the corporate apparatus of the mass media, but rather to build on their enjoyment of particular media products, to claim affiliation with specific films or TV programs, and to use them as inspiration for their own cultural production, social interaction and intellectual exchange.
Turn back toward a more folk-culture understanding of creativity. Historically, our culture evolved through a collective process of collaboration and elaboration. Folktales, legends, myths and ballads were built up over time as people added elements that made them more meaningful of their own contexts. The Industrial Revolution resulted in the privatization of culture and the emergence of a concept of intellectual property.