A reading we had for the week was ‘What is Collaboration Anyway?’ in The Social Media Reader (Hyde et al), which if it’s not clear enough in the title, is about collaboration.

Because what better way to learn about being a team player than to read about how to be one.

Sharing Is the First Step

That’s what the reading begins with, and what better way to start it. Sharing is the first step to a lot of things — not just collaboration. But in a way, relationships are a form of collaboration anyway. If you really think about it. Anyway, the reading does argue that though sharing is how collaboration begins, it doesn’t necessarily means that it is collaboration. It uses social media as an example to showcase how it can blur this line a little bit.

Tweeting about your time at Coachella is the start. But tweeting to your followers to ‘use the tag #(insert name)forCoachella16 to get it trending today’ would be considered as a form of collaboration. Everyone who uses the tag will be a part of a group, or rather metadata, which turns the hashtag into ‘a new social object’. This type of coordination shows how social media can become more than just a sharing platform, but also a collaborative platform that allows people from different sides of the world to come together for one project.