Social Media Producer – Jonathon Hutchinson & There’s No ‘Me’ In Social Media! – Alex Gibson

Jonathon’s presentation describing his experience in researching social media was quite interesting and insightful.

Jonathon’s point about “listening to your crowd”, was something that I took from it, as he discussed how important it is to know who your audience is, what they want, what you are doing that is engaging them and how better you can engage with them. Researching your audience is definitely important in knowing how best to approach them with your work.

I also found it very interesting that the audience helped him decide on his project and that the way information was conveyed was two-ways and not just from him to them. The audience’s feedback was what fed into his work and helped him decide how he would approach it.

Another point he made was about a continuation of stimulating the project through twists and turns and creating plot developments out of the process of creating the project as this helps to keep the audience engaged. He discussed utilizing multiple formats for different purposes which I found interesting as we tend to think of Facebook and Twitter as the main forms of social media platforms which are used to give information to the audience and create a community, however there are many other platforms that could be used for different reasons, while still keeping the community together.

Jonathon also discussed how the social media producer becomes the curator of ‘prosumer works’, meaning works that have been created by the consumer or audience via social media. Thinking about audiences as users and creators is a good way to approach them as they feel more involved in the project.

The crowd-sourcing ‘By Design’ talk discussed the motivation of users becoming involved in online projects, with the main answer being that it is for the ‘attention economy’; meaning that people promote their own work through other people’s projects in a wider community and have a better chance of becoming noticed.

Alex Gibson’s stance on social media from an artist’s point of view was very interesting as he discussed how crowd-sourcing helped him fund his creation of ‘The Artbox’ which allows for looped art content to stream and connect with different technologies which previously didn’t occur.

I found his description of the ‘California Utopian version of social media’ really interesting as it is true that what most people contribute to social media is to make it seem like their life is better than what it actually is when in reality it can be compared to a ‘Greek tragedy’.

His point about social media facilitating people to have anything that they want and creating a psychotic nature in people was also interesting as he says that on social media people can enact all of their fantasies.

He was surprised by the way in which social media could facilitate artists in creating online communities and even funding his own technology, which goes to show that you should never underestimate the power of social media.