WORKSHOP 3: Social Media and Technology I
Thursday 7 June at
14.30-16.30
Chair:
Sirkka Heinonen
Co-configuration with the
Media Audience
Tiina Rautkorpi (Research and Development/Media, Helsinki Polytechnic, Finland)
Social media is an important keyword in future. There has been a lot of talk about user-centered programme making and community media, e.g. public access television and radio, which is told automatically promoting democracy in civic society.
I think the real change in cultural meaning making process is a much more complicated challenge and it is more a question of continuous interaction. How to use the means of social media for emancipation, for getting rid of the pre-existing power-relations and separated working cultures between journalism and the civic society.
The creative economy requires diversity and plurality of society and culture. We have to build new arenas for co-configuration between so-called producers and customers. Established communication companies often say that they use public opinion and public feedback to make better programmes. The public access channels and the blogs can be seen as a profitable way to collect material for journalistic purposes. Even today many commercial production companies say that they get so much ideas from the audience, that the role of journalistic gatekeepers is becoming more important than ever. There is still a locked gate between the professionals and the amateurs when planning the final programme content even in so-called interactive programme productions.
The audience needs better access straight into the journalistic production process. This means we have to organize the whole professional process in a more interactive way. In my presentation I suggest this is an essential place for intervention in participatory action research.
Social Media – How to Broker Innovative
Combinations?
Mikko Ahonen & Katri Lietsala (Hypermedia
Laboratory, University of Tampere, Finland)
Social media is a combination of online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other (Wikipedia, 2007). In this article, we investigate how the current social media core services utilize tools to enable brokering, by compounding several resources from different sources into innovative end results.
Brokers translate, coordinate and align perspectives from multiple communities. When a person or an organization belongs to different communities and transfers different practices from one to another, they act as brokers (Wenger, 1998). Some brokers rely on a strategy for exploiting the networked nature of the innovation process and building new communities around innovative re-combinations (Hargadon & Sutton, 1997). The recent Open Innovation paradigm (Chesbrough 2003, 2006) emphasizes brokers working as intermediators and their role in the innovation process.
The collective creativity of web communities are changing business models of companies and service providers. In the social media, this development is driven by special brokering platforms and tools that need a closer look. The peer-to-peer distribution and community-based media production have already challenged traditional ways of operating. For example, weblogs are used for “klogging”, as a tool for personal and corporate knowledge management (Bowman & Willis 2003).
This research inspects different brokering models (Hargadon & Sutton 1997, Wenger 1998, Bowman & Willis 2003) and tries to explain how brokering takes place in the organizational and individual level in social media services. As a research method, we use case-based reasoning; interview data is available from the Tekes Parteco project, where authors work as researchers. Case examples cover several social media, community-enabling Web 2.0 services (del.icio.us, InnoCentive, EInnews).
Social Media Applications for Innovative
Working Environments
Toni Ahlqvist, Minna Halonen & Sirkka
Heinonen (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Finland)
A new digital culture is emerging in Knowledge Society - a culture of user driven social media. The concept of “social media” refers to applications where user actions and user generated content play a central role. Such applications of social media may be based entirely on user driven content (UDC). The most familiar examples of these applications are probably blogs and wikis. Flickr and YouTube are further apt showcases of social media applications. Social media may be one of the leading sources of creative business opportunities and new business models in the future. One needs to take just a few current examples to highlight this point. Amazon processes book purchases into recommendations and lets the readers write the reviews. Another example, web based search service Cha-Cha, utilizes crowd sourcing as a business model to produce flexible knowledge services. Also, more familiar services may be carried out in new ways, e.g. “grounded trading” in eBay. We claim that social media processes and applications can be used to support open innovation and knowledge sharing in companies and institutional networks. Social media thickens and “re-wires” the relationships between the user and service. This re-wiring can be a source of personalized and flexible products.
Alongside with the new products, social media applications can also be used to promote creativity and innovativeness among the knowledge workers by transforming work environments. Social media may be utilized to steer company’s or organization’s course toward a new interactive digital learning and innovation culture. Future-oriented companies are transforming workspaces to integrate people, digital spaces and physical working spaces to create better collaboration, to stimulate innovation and to increase staff empowerment and wellbeing. The origins of work modes, “office mentalities”, and even the definition of the concept of “work” may be reconstructed, since the common industrial age meanings of the work have little to do with work in the web-based Knowledge Society. New work environments in the emerging digital world – WiFi connected world – are designed for mobile nomad workers who are not dependent on certain office space or on established routines for their work. These environments offer a menu of choices of different activity spaces to empower people to accomplish their tasks in settings designed to best accommodate their actions. In brief, the search for collaborative creativity is increasingly done by combining digital and physical spaces. This paper discusses the varieties of roles that social media applications can have in the new working milieus of future oriented companies and organizations.
The conference organisers reserve all rights to
any programme or schedule
changes.