16-01-2013, 12:49 PM
SHARING EXPERIENCES WITH SOCIAL MOBILE MEDIA
INTRODUCTION
Current advancements in wireless and sensors technologiescombined with the rapid adoption of sophisticated mobilemultimedia devices and applications have created new social software tools for people to connect and interact; therefore changing the ways we communicate and collaborate. Mobile users are now creating and sharing increasing amounts of media content, thus generating large volumes of rich data sets. This latest fact indicates that mobile social media is about to become anintegral component of distributed environments and applicationsof the mobile web. Currently, many applications of mobile socialmedia can be found in areas such as leisure and entertainment. However, recent developments indicate that social media isstarting to be adopted by companies as well [14]. In addition tolife publishing, life-logging is also finding its way to mobilephones [16] with applications such as Nokia Sports Tracker [1].The aim of this workshop is to introduce, present and discussconcepts and applications related to current research efforts in theemerging field of social mobile media.
BACKGROUND AND DEFINITIONS
Social networking and networks have become a major newcommunication and networking mechanism in various fieldsincluding among others entertainment, education and business.
Several large social networking tools and sites can be found in theweb including many blogging sites such as Blogger, image andvideo sharing sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, and Kyteand mobile oriented social media applications for microblogging[4] such as Jaiku and Twitter. People are now sharing theirpersonal media including photos and videos among friends ormore publicly with unknown users. Östman has characterized thisphenomenon as life publishing, which includes all the means usedby people willing to publish events of their lives in the Internet[17].One of the first reported studies about the use of camera phoneswas published by Okabe and Ito [8]. These authors claim that“unlike the traditional camera, the camera phone is an intimateand ubiquitous presence that invites a new kind of personalawareness, a persistent alertness to the visually newsworthy thatmakes amateur photojournalists out of its users.” Van House &Davis [9] have defined four higher-order social uses of personalphotography, namely creating and maintaining socialrelationships; constructing personal and group memory; selfpresentation;and self-expression. In addition, based on theirresearch they also found three interpretations of the usage ofCopyright is held by the author/owner(s).MobileHCI09, September 15 - 18, 2009, Bonn, Germany.ACM 978-1-60558-281-8/09/09.camera phones: as memory-capture devices, communicativedevices, and expressive devices. Thus, we would like to suggestand extend these social uses and camera phone roles by claimingthat these notions can be applied also in a broader context, namelysocial mobile media.Social media is a combination of people, technologies, new richdigital content and practices that enables users to share theirexperiences with other users, thus building a shared meaningamong communities. In fact, experiences are mediated bytechnologies as a form of content; i.e. the real world experience isreflected as a blog note, a set of images or video clips. Mobilityadds the freedom of time and place – A user can share his/herexperiences from wherever there is reasonable network access. Inaddition, social mobile media may support the automaticgathering of contextual information, for example by addinggeotags to images.
CURRENT RESEARCH EFFORTS
The amount of research efforts reporting various uses of socialmobile media to support sharing experiences has been rapidlyevolving in the last few years. For example, Koskinen [7] have
studied how people use camera phones in communication andaction. Koskinen studies “technologies that enable people tocapture, send, and receive photographs, sounds and sometimesvideo” from an ethnomethodological standpoint. The concept ofEthnomethodology was first introduced by Harold Garfinkel [3] inthe late sixties. This particular discipline aims at describing howpeople produce orderly social conduct.Mobile video as such has not yet been studied extensively. Jokela,Karukka and Mäkelä [5] have designed video editing tools to beused on a mobile phone. Based on their study, video editing onmobile devices is feasible despite of small displays and limitedinput devices. In addition, Jokela, et al. [5] suggest that there is atrue need for a video editing application on mobile devices.Multisilta and Mäenpää [11] presented a social mobile mediaservice, where users can upload video clips they have taken withmobile phones, and create stories using either their own clips orclips from the community. Their study showed that, it is possibleto let several authors to compose a video story or produce acommon storyline shooting video clips independently fromdifferent place in different time. They also showed that this kindof social mobile media service can be used in mediatingexperiences. Multisilta has also presented a design framework forsocial mobile media applications [12].Reponen, Huuskonen and Mihalic [15] have studied howvideophones will affect the way people perceive video-recording,in terms of privacy, transparency, and the notion of context. They
have defined primary and secondary contexts for modeling andanalyzing different mobile video usage situations. They define theprimary context to be the “immediate surroundings; a situation
where people can communicate I n shared time and space withouthelp of technical devices” and the secondary context to be “any(remote) situation where the recorded video is used” [15].