Month: October 2014

Mixed Media Essay

Angus Strachan

In Adrian Miles excerpt I have chosen to explore the following notion:

‘ What underlies such change, however, are the principles of distributed content production and sharing, folksonomies, trust networks and having access to skills that let you collate and build’.

I wish specifically to explore the way that Folksonomies have changed the way that we conduct ourselves, and how learning to master them is helpful in my future career. Folksonomies, otherwise broadly known as tagging, is a feature in Web 2.0 that has really changed the way that we conduct ourselves online, both socially and economically. “Tagging is a promising informal and simple mechanism to collaboratively add (mostly incomplete) order to a wealth of data, objects and resources” (Derntl et al. 2011). I have specifically set out my essay in separate blog posts to demonstrate to you how tagging works and how useful it can be. Each separate blog posts has a number of tags that connect themselves to other posts that have similar information; for instance there might be a blog post about the history of folksonomy, with a tag of “history of folksonomy” if you were to click on that tag then all other blog posts with a similar topic will collate themselves together. There is also a main tag that connects all these blog posts so that you may read the essay in its entirety before shifting it around with other tags, something I suggest the reader should do.

Angus Strachan

Folksonomy is a phrase coined by Thomas Vander Wal who is currently a Senior User Experience Designer and Strategist at Design for Context in Bethesda USA (Vander Wal 2014). He runs a blog of his own that ‘notes changes to in the web design development world”. Vander Wal Describes folksonomies as:

“the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a URL) for ones own retrieval. The tagging is done in a social environment (usually shared and open to others). Folksonomy is created from the act of tagging by the person consuming the information.” (Vander Wal 2014)

Angus Strachan

Thanks to the introduction of Web 2.0 and its “constant evolution”, “an increasingly large number of websites have successfully implemented systems that allow collaborative tagging” (Mican & Tomai 2010). And why exactly is implementing tagging such a good thing? Because it allows users to “interact not only with the application but also with other users, and to communicate and collaborate with the members of the community that they are apart of”, “[a]dditionally, Web 2.0 offers them the opportunity to express themselves freely” (Mican & Tomai 2010). So if in the future I wanted to write movie reviews and make that my living I would incorporate tags into the construction of my website so that I can create an inclusive community where everyone can have their say. This then insure that I have an audience for my reviews in order to make it a plausible career path.

Angus Strachan

Probably the best know type of tagging in the world to date is the hash-tag, and the most well known platform for using the hash-tag is Twitter. Twitter is “a fast growing social Web application allowing its users to publish and communicate with very short messages” also known as a micro-blog (Poschko 2011). At the beginning of 2010, Twitter had 100 million users registers, this number composed over 65 million tweets per day (Poschko 2011)! With such massive amounts of information being uploaded each day to the ‘twittersphere’ the system of hashtags helps the user sort through it all. This form of tagging has even made it to professional use in the media; it is now not uncommon to have talk shows and the like have tweets from their viewers pop-up on screen. This can bee seen in figure 1, a screen shot of ABC’s QandA:

Screen Shot 2014-10-23 at 12.25.30 pm

Source: Q&A – abc.net.au

Angus Strachan

The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon hosts a segment called hashtags. Jimmy Fallon goes onto twitter and starts a hashtag in order to receive humorous stories from other users on twitter, all you need to do to send it to him is write your story and follow it up with the hashtag that Jimmy Fallon creates. From there Jimmy Fallon can then search through all the stories with ease thanks to the tagging system. To show you how big this community is, listen to the introduction of the segment – “within 20 minutes it was a world-wide trending topic”.

Angus Strachan

So how does understanding the use of tagging so critical in my potential future career? Lets go with the idea that I want to start my own production company, this may not be what I end up doing, I might work for someone else’s but lets dream big for the sake of this essay.
Before I can make a big blockbuster hit and sell out and become just another famous celebrity (I’m speaking with a hint of sarcasm) I first need to make a name for myself, how do I do that? By making cheap movies that hopefully enough people will want to watch to get me some start up funds for my big blockbuster. Because I plan on making as much money as I can from them I don’t want to be spending a lot on them so where is the cheapest place to show media? The Internet is the cheapest by far, as long as I have connection to the Internet I can upload a video for the bargain basement price of nothing. The next step after this is advertisement and that’s where understanding the internet and tagging is going to help me get my films out there. As you can see in the Tonight Show post, if there is enough hype about something on social media it can reach the whole world within minutes thanks to the simplicity of a hashtag! This is obviously a very favorable scenario here but because of the change in technologies such as the internet and introduction of folksonomies I’m now better equipped then any classical Hollywood director from the 50s to get my product out to the word, now that is definitely a change!

Angus Strachan

As a producer the creation of a social tagging system will help dramatically for an ongoing product such as a Television series, or better put as an online series or a web series. Imagine the amount of discussion and following that you would get if you allowed the fan base to decide what was to happen next, obviously not give them full control because then they would expect everything but still have a say. Or be able to know exactly what your audience wants and be able to riff on that to give them something completely unexpected. Being able to create such a community online would mean that a lot of the hard work and guess work would be taken out of the equation because all of that can be done for you and sorted out plainly by the use of tagging. Even if I weren’t to go this way in the future there is definitely the possibility that someone else will using the technology of folksonomies. Even as a consumer I think to have a say as to what happens in my favourite TV series is definitely something new and exciting that hasn’t yet been offered to the masses.

Angus Strachan

So, have folksonomies changed the way that we interact with each other? Yes, most definitely, it is such a big change that the inclusion of folksonomies can create a whole new community, one without restrictions of country boarders. Like we’ve seen on twitter, tagging is now a worldwide phenomenon and ideas are able to move freely from one place to another, like we’ve seen in Jimmy Fallons Hashtag segment on the tonight show. In fact the use of twitter and hashtags are so wide spread that a multitude of talk shows and opinion driven discussion shows have a live twitter feed on the screen so that the person watching the show from home can also have their say, like the example of QandA. And as the technology grows so too will the use of tagging in order to bring about new concepts such as those in my potential future career.

References

Angus Strachan

ABC 2014, Q&A, abc.net.au, viewed 23 October 2014,<http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s4088125.htm>

Derntl M, Hampel T, Motschnig-Pitrik R, Pitner T 2011, “Inclusive Social Tagging and its Support in Web 2.0 Services”, Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 1460-1466

Jimmy Fallon 2014, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Youtube.com viewed 23 October 2014, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IHghYQrFU4&index=16&list=PLykzf464sU99HVFTMNPjNLWLqPSJAzEDN>

Mican D, Tomai N 2010, “Web 2.0 and Collaborative Tagging”, 2010 Fifth International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services, pp. 519-524

Miles A 2007, “Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge”, Screen Education, Autumn.45, pp. 24-30

Poschko J 2011, “Exploring Twitter Hashtags”, Computation and Language, pp. 1-12

Vander Wal T 2014, vanderwal.net, viewed 20October 2014, <http://www.vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html>