The Hype With Instagram

The popular photo-sharing app Instagram has become such a huge social networking medium through which users can apply filters to pictures to share with their followers. According to the website: “Instagram is a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures. Simply snap a photo, then choose a filter to transform the look and feel. Pictures are shared on Instagram, and can be easily uploaded to other social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.”

So many smartphone users are branding their identities in different ways through sharing photos on Instagram and use it as a more live stream of things people are doing.  Therefore, people have transitioned from posting their real-time photos on Facebook to editing one creative one by applying the filters and blurring tools on Instagram.  Lisa Chandler and Debra Livingston explain, “these apps are creative tools and thus the final outcomes are affected by the photographer’s creative thinking and the meanings they wish to convey” (12).  Piers Dillon Scott, co-editor of sociable.co argues that these apps have forced a decrease in the need for digital cameras, since this is an instantaneous photo-sharing through the one object, a smartphone, that users always have on them: “Photographs have always been for sharing and smartphones have made this easier and instantaneous; in fact, selecting the Instagram filter is probably the task that takes the longest time on a smartphone (Scott, 2012).

Below is a link to our Prezi about our research project revolving Instagram that Cara and Ariana put together.  We divided up the work evenly throughout the project.  Cara and Ariana conducted video interviews, through which Ariana edited the videos seen in the presentation(click the play button to watch them!).  Sammie and Katie conducted interviews over email and other digital outlets.  Each of the group members researched a couple of the topics.  Overall, we found the basics of how college students are using this digital media platform to share their photos.  There is way too many areas that we didn’t have time to fully explore, but the presentation shows “why” Instagram has become such a hit over the past year. We also concluded with a section about how the app is becoming a useful journalism tool and being featured throughout different media.  What truly is to come for Instagram is unknown as all other new media, but it definitely has become a popular social medium. Enjoy!

Click to view our “The Hype with Instagram” Prezi!

#Waywire The voice of a new generation?

#Waywire – The voice of a new generation?

A new start up, brought to us by Newark Mayor Corey Booker, is aiming to decentralize major news and media conglomerates as a means to give the Millennial generation their own voice/speak to them. According to Booker, “Traditional news sources aren’t in any way talking to millennials”. He also later was quoted as saying “There are practical solution to [creating] more jobs, lower crime, better education. If more people could find their voice and be part of the national dialogue, we could solve these problems.”

Reading Summary: Bruns, Rosen

Axel Bruns- The Key Characteristics of Produsage

Key Term: Produsage- combination of Production and Usage, “The collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement.”

Key Characteristics of Produsage:

1) Open Participation, Communal Evaluation.
Everyone can help solve the problem or achieve the goal, and the more people that help the more likely it is they’ll get it right.

2) Fluid Hierarchy, AD Hoc Meritocracy:
Users all have equal potential to contribute. Most communities have loose leadership, but individual users standings change depending on the quality and frequency of the their contributions.

Key Term: Equipotentiallity- skills and abilities of users vary, but they have equal ability to make a worthy contribution to the project.

3) Unfinished Artifacts, Continuing process.
Projects are continuously being critiqued and improved. Therefore they can never be finished products, so they are referred to as artefacts. An artefact is a snapshot of a project in that moment, which is likely to change and eventually improve.

4) Common Property, Individual Rewards.
Community and belonging rather than money drives participation. Instead of focusing on monetary rewards, participation in the produsage is motivated by contributing to a communal purpose. Individual rewards come in the form of social capitol and community standing, occasionally leading to outside benefits like professional recognition and even employment.

Impact and Implications of Produsage

Commercial embrace of produsage is broken down into models:

• Feeding the hive- intellectual contributions from public domain to support produsage.
• Helping the hive- services aimed at the produsage community
• Harboring the hive: hosting services to the produsage community. (like Flickr or Youtube)
• Harnessing the hive: non commercial ways to use the produsage artefacts
• Harvesting the hive: using produsage artefacts for commercial purposes.
• Hijacking the hive: focused only on financial gain, attempting to strip users of their rights to the artefacts.

Jay Rosen- The People Formerly Known as the Audience

The people formerly known as the audience, defined as those who were on the receiving end of a formerly one-way media system who today are not. Now called “former audience”- defined as owners and operators of tools that were once exclusively used by media people to capture and hold their attention.

Examples: Freedom of the press is distributed to the people through blogs, radio is now accessible through podcasts, video shooting and editing is more accessible, the people can now edit and choose the news most important to them, and spread the word horizontally amongst ourselves as efficiently as big media.

Edit:
Discussion Questions:

What do you think the most important characteristic is of Produsage? Least Important?
Do you consider yourself a member of the “former audience”? How do you participate in active use of media tools?