ashe, iasha, marcus and me got together and decided to do a mock-umentary as our PP1 content producing project. We wanted to focus on the idea of a tribe within a close-knit group of colleagues (a-la the office + IT crowd) but still be able to poke fun at the idea put forward by jenkins and the idea of tribe in general.
we placed the premise in a call-centre, think cubicles and headphones and banal sales speak. the four "tribe" members/colleagues work pretty well as a group, socializing between calls and in a pantry, laughing at the inept (and oft unseen) boss of the call-centre.
we'll be putting it up on a website, where people can click and view mini-episodes of the mock-umentary. in addition, each character will be given their own blog where they will "blog" during office hours, fleshing out the characters and giving even more backstory content to the storyline.
our production schedule is (likely) as follows:
wk 5: script writing session
wk 6: casting
wk7-8: script done, pre-production
wk9: shooting
wk 10: upload onto Pool raw cuts, editing to final work
My main task within the MyTribe tutorial group is to develop effective links between our tutorial and the other groups (namely, the FB, Fed Square and Radio 360 groups), to form a cohesive message throughout the entire production. The secondary SMP task is fostering and recruiting members to join the MyTribe group on the Pool website.
Details of SMP role:
I would approach vloggers on YouTube to join MyTribe and contribute media works to the site, seeing as they are already adept producer/consumers on the video-sharing website.
Send emails explaining MyTribe and intent to collaboration
Continue feedback and encouragements, with bcc links to our tutorial’s relationship officer.
Involve them in any MyTribe campaign to build sense of belonging
I would also approach my friends within the media industry, both abroad in Singapore and within Australia, along with media students from the School of Film and Media Studies in Ngee Ann Polytechnic (Singapore).
Appeal to portfolio and exposure needs to elicit response
Continue providing feedback and encouragements through email and face-to-face interactions.
Be involve in their productions in some small way to build sense of belonging and camaraderie.
Details of Tutorial Liaison role:
As tutorial liaison, I need to be accessible to the various representatives and be updated upon any pertinent developments.In lieu of time-table clashes with the other reps, the best idea is use email and msn/gchat to do the bulk of our discussions and meet face-to-face once every week, when possible, indiviually with other representatives.
I would also require 5-10 minutes of time within our own tutorial to hear and brief any new developments or hear concerns that other members need to articulate back to the other tutorial group.
My role would also be to facilate any connections that need to be made between tutorial groups. This will be done by letting me know whom the person needs to be in touch with, giving about a day or two to get the contact and response back to relevant parties.
Proposed Timeline:
March 28 – Send emails (with official letterheads) to vloggers and contact lecturer from Singapore
March 29 – Symposium
April 1 – April 9 – Plan camera shot list and develop script for mockumentary
I’m actually more psyched than expected about this gig, and have been trying to rack my brains over how to dazzle and wow people into going onto mytribe, and participating in our little diabolical experiment.
unfortunately, the flu robbed me of my zest and i skipped last week’s class. big huge ass mistake. i went from on-top-of-things to lagging behind playing catchup.
sorry, jess, it’s my bad.
i had this nutcase idea to approach my favorite australian vloggers and ask them if they would like to collab on mytribe. some of their work is pretty fantastic, and we need people like these, the grassroots movement where it’s bottom-up driven, and not dicated by some ominiscent god of media.
Here’s communitychannel aka natalie:
And thehill88, aka catalin
Ok I got a thing for cute aussie girls. So sue me.
my other idea is approaching my old school lecturers back in singapore, at ngee ann poly’s school of media, and try to work out an arrangement with them to collaborate on a volunteer basis.
i also have a couple of professional photographers and media professionals that might be interested in putting contributions down onto mytribe, so that is three groups of potential victims, no, I mean “volunteers” for our cause.
the best way we can recruit people is to create buzz around the mytribe project.
Buzz = eyeballs.
I was thinking we can start a ‘who is my tribe?’ campaign, provoking people to think about their identities, sense of belonging, and post them in video format up onto our website or a video-sharing site like youtube, with links back to mytribe.
this sort of recruitment drive might reach a larger audience than just talking to friends of a friend of a dogwalker we used to know back in high school while on weed.
and maintaining that level of communication is important. We should try to keep in email, msn and facebook contact, and try to give feedback as pseudo-professionals on their contributions.
their contributions can range from simply logging on to the site and viewing others’ work or contributing themselves to mytribe HQ and work-in-progress.
Interaction amongst the members would also be a good aim, forming a real community, instead of isolated relationships between members and us.
a real community can accomplish so much. look at this. a bunch of students collaborated on a googledoc and produce this awesome video....
To start us off, I would like to contribute a series of photographs on the idea of tribe, and how that fits into the modern 21st century society. These photos can act as seeding material, to be morphed, commented on, or even just to inspire others.
I like to start a youtube account, linking back to mytribe, and start making videos exploring the idea of identity and tribalism, aiming to provoke a response from youtube.
a sort of viral campaign. (see below for awesome example)
honestly, I don’t know if all these ideas will work.
And I don’t know whether I am biting more than I can chew.
i really need help with the timeline, and I’ll continue working on the personal goals bit, because I’m still a little fuzzy about the whole mytribe project.
-Convergence is a paradigm or attitude shift. From medium specific to multiple channels, towards interdependence and multiple access points, and a complex relationship between organisation and bottom-down movements
Media industries are embracing convergence in some cases, because it benefits them in terms of economic reasons. Convergence creates multiple ways to sell content to consumers
-Early adopters are outpacing technological developments. They are prone to tinker, change, adapt and mod new technologies to better push it towards a more Linux-environment.
Television industry is faced with an environment when consumers – from the highly valued 18-27 demographics – are born within a world of cable tv, the internet, where they don’t need to live with unattractive content and take a more active role to their media choices. They shift from tv to more interactive participatory media channels.
For example, I don’t watch tv any longer. I stream, I download, I watch what I want when I want to. I wiki shows and movies afterwards, and read fan fiction about it.
Consumption is more a networked practice than individualised.
The 1990s: existing thought were that digital media would liberate us from tyranny of mass media. Instead, what has happen is not individualise content but more participation and collective intelligence.
But we’re still figuring out how this new relationship between the mass media and us as consumers and networked producers work. We still have to figure out how to make use of this power more effectively, and it’s not a guarantee that we can act more responsibly than governments and businesses.
Fan culture has become a way to see into the future. From the fringe of the media industry, fan culture has become a way to look into the structure of how communities are form within new media, as well as rethinking ideas on citizenship and collaboration.
Jenkin’s admits that it is not inevitable that new media will democratise our media consumption. The tension of both our fascination and frustration with our current media content is what gives rise to want to change the way media is produced.
He argues that we should fight against copyright regime, against censorship and moral panic, publise the best practices of online community and expand access to groups of people that are being left behind.
Greater bargaining power in consumption communities. Sequential Tarts, a group formed online to showcase female consumers of comics, and how females are portrayed in the comics.
Instead of just voting with our pocketbooks, the new model si that we change the very nature of the marketplace, and pressure companies to change their products, and ways of relating to consumers.
For example, niche content can survive using the Web to appeal to a market which actively seeks out content of interest, and recommend them to their friends. They can even cut the middle man – such as studios and networks – by selling directly to the consumers via the Internet.
And don’t necessarily assume that people would be selfish and not moral in their media choices. Wikipedia lets people govern the content on its site, and more people take the responsibility of participants seriously, making sure the correct info is written.
It’s a moral economy of information, a sense of mutual obligation and shared expectation. Sharing (or shareware) as opposed to legal copyright.
The role of broadcast media is important to. Grassroots media diversifies while broadcast media amplifies. Without either, there’s no chance of gaining larger group in terms of participatory culture.
The usual distinctions remain. Race, class, language. Makes some grps more confidence in engaging with new tech, and be more comfortable expressing their views in public about culture.
maybe Pool's for blokes in dark sun glasses, with shady paranoia and fascinatingly funny wit like this guy, who gives quite a succinct intro into the ABC's world of Pool, or naked cyclists musing about the joys of - you guessed it - cycling.
all jokes aside, i was seriously skeptical. in my experiences, most of the best kinds of sites online are started by guys in the basement or art majors with too much idealism, not big corporations and professionals in suits (no offense intended).
but i gave it a go, probably course it's part of my project and joined Pool.
and, without sounding like i drank their kool-aid, i found myself enjoying purely exploring the material that people put up onto Pool. there were pictures, text, audio, some of them just vaguely related to the "official" projects up on the site. and some of these folks on display seemed like just the sort of people you need to have a vibrant community of media producers, full of stick-it-to-man attitudes and open debates about offensive material (without degenerating into haters espousing 'your mother is fatter than mine' troll stuff)
but unfortunately, the site's a little messy to navigate. i felt lost at first, trying to figure out where to click, or even how this particular work fits into the larger picture of one set of projects.
and i think the forum doesn't reflect the amount of eyeballs and users on the website, with just a handful of regulars (not few, but i think there are more) commenting and providing feedback to the Pool team on functionality or debating on the topics on the forum. read here, i really think veronique said it better than i can.
in short, the sense of a Pool community hasn't yet been cemented.
but the frequency and timely fashion that the Pool team replies to queries and try to soothe over some issues are astonishing frankly, considering how other forums mod take months to even get to replying - at least when i was looking through this forum thread.
so as social media producer for mytribe on Pool, it's got to be one of the major task to do, building a more vibrant collaborative eco-system, so it's not just a whole bunch of isolated pro-consumers but a real interchange of ideas and projects.
in trying to answer the question "What is a SMP?"...
...i found myself confronted with how little anyone really knows.
most of my friends had little clue what it means.
the internet didn't really help, giving me more questions than actual answers.
some companies use SMPs as glorified copywriters, merely trying to have a presence on the internet without a clear reason why. like this and that. i mean, why would a company want to use twitter? does a company wake up in the morning and say, i should twit about my messed up third quarter?
sometimes, i get the feeling that companies are just doing it course it's there, and people are using it.i reached for my trusty wikipedia and typed in social media, getting a list of different kinds of social media.
they included "traditional" social media like facebook, twitter, blogs. and web-animals like Twine, meetup.com, deviantart and skype; all very different from each other. with such a huge range of social media, is it any wonder that SMP is not a clearly defined job?
"the past five years, an entire industry of consultants has arisen to help companies navigate the world of social networks, blogs, and wikis. The self-proclaimed experts range from legions of wannabes, many of them refugees from the real estate bust, to industry superstars such as Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk. They produce best-selling books and dole out advice or lead workshops at companies for thousands of dollars a day. The consultants evangelize the transformative power of social media and often cast themselves as triumphant case studies of successful networking and self-branding.
The problem, according to a growing chorus of critics, is that many would-be guides are leading clients astray. Consultants often use buzz as their dominant currency, and success is defined more often by numbers of Twitter followers, blog mentions, or YouTube hits than by traditional measures, such as return on investment. This approach could sour companies on social media and the rich opportunities it represents. "It's a bit of a Wild West scenario," blogs David Armano, a consultant with the Dachis Group of Austin, Tex. Without naming names, he compares some consultants to 'snake oil salesmen.'"
I don't necessarily agree with this but i get the sense that not many people (even the experts) really do know how to fully utilize social media in a professional manner. that's because most of the progress is inspired by ground-up movements, too unpredictable to forecast and shape, since it depends wholly upon plain joe and jane feeling inspired and motivated enough to contribute to the social media and form a community around the project itself.
and in case the hype of a social media revolution gets to you, the rise of the proteriat against big business, think again. As illustrated from the picture below, 5 people in a sample of 100 make 75% of the content on twitter.
so like any kind of media, whether it be televisionland or internet-heaven, the SMP would still have to work hard to get people interested enough to make it matter, and want to contribute to the social aspect of new media.
