Coursera: How online education works today. A short description.

Long gone are the times when education was provided through school and universities, where physical attendance was necessarily needed. New Media devices and software carry knowledge and education into people’s homes and work places all over the world. 

Nowadays, educational systems and culture of learning are at a stage of development. The shape of education transforms beyond formal schooling, due to the effects of new media.  Knowledge can just be a click away. The internet offers a broad spectrum of non-commercial and commercial wikis, dictionaries, online-advice communities, forums, online archives (e.g. Ubu ), and  learning platforms, (e.g. Open Culture ). Among the colourful diversity of online educational resources, I will introduce shortly before its first anniversary a growing online learning environment: Coursera; a site that puts up open access to university classes to the World Wide Web.

Coursera was launched on April 18^th 2012 and currently embraces more than 370 courses offered by 62 widely acknowledged universities. Basically, it is a sample of lectures, divided into brief videos of 10-25 minutes with added questionnaires and quizzes. Similar to ordinary lectures the courses have a start date and a weekly proceeding by means of updated videos, integrated readings and regular requirements. For testing created an own account and experienced that the lectures of Coursera got a workshop and seminar character, where the user's active participation is necessarily needed.

The design of Coursera follows the MOOC's  principles of interactivity and connectivity between users. Hence, the ability to follow lessons and to carry out requirements is strongly linked to the necessity of consulting with other users also known on the web-environment as Courserians.

These principles bear rudimentary signs of participatory culture, a term coined by Henry Jenkins and collective intelligence, coined by Pierre Lévy. The emerging phenomenon of participatory culture is caused by new media that shifts the roles of passive consumers and spectators into active users and participants.  A performance of spectators arises and Coursera utilizes its dynamics and the play of its users to generate an in-class effect and collective learning process. 

Two noteworthy examples are documented on the platform's blog. Therefore, you can take a look here  and here. In the case of an Iranian students group and “The Learning Café” in Ohio, Coursera evokes a gathering of peers that undergo the learning experience collectively. Both are small networks of people, who are concerned with the same problems and contents during the course. The individuals of a peer encourage each other to stick to the courses and enable the individuals to fulfil the requirements and course homework by discussing the topics and sharing their knowledge, ideas and opinions. An individual possibly couldn't successfully end a course on his/her own.

But are the Courserians really participating in the learning environment? Nico Carpentier differentiates between audience participation and interactivity. Taking into account the conditions of Coursera, the use of the term of participation is questionable. On the surface, participation and interactivity seems to be the same thing, but in the end they differ in their impact on the development of the learning environment. Coursera provides space for interactivity within a limited framework, for instance in forums and online quizzes. In other words the Courserians have no chance to influence the online learning environment itself.  Their activity is just valuable for their own learning progress.

But it is needed to mention that the blog enables users to post suggestions that concern user friendly design and give the website providers feedback, the user is still taking a very limited part in conceptualizing and creating the Coursera environment.

Slow beginnings of participatory culture within online education are noticeable; however, they remain in limited fields. The significant improvement concerns the outreach of online learning environments like Coursera, which are globally open to educational advantaged and disadvantaged classes. Coursera has currently more than three million registered users and the number is still growing. It is worthwhile to observe the consequences of the growing mass and an emerging participatory culture on the future formation of education. 

Christina Leichtling

Khan Academy and the future of education

For many years futurists have predicted that education will be revolutionized by computers and the internet. According to some, that future is already here. For the uninitiated, let me introduce the Khan Academy, a non-profit organization with a mission to provide world-class education to everybody in the world – for free.

The Khan Academy was created in 2006 by Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. Khan started out helping his younger cousin when she was struggling with math by tutoring her first through Yahoo!'s Doodle notepad and then switched to posting videos on Youtube when other relatives and friends requested his help. When Khan later realized that his videos gained increasing interest the concept of the Khan Academy started forming. His initial educational videos on mathematics was only to be the beginning and there is now a wide range of subjects available with everything from physics to biology and art history. The videos are quite simple in format with Khan himself drawing and writing on different subjects while also doing a voice-over himself. The Khan Academy now has over 4000 educational videos, available both on Youtube and their own homepage, and is constantly growing in both content and reach.

Revolutionary aspirations

A stated object of the organization is to change the old paradigm of education and create something better and Khan himself says that it is theoretically possible to implement his model in every school in America tomorrow. The way we usually think of education is the top-down approach where a teacher holds a ”one size fits all lecture” and where students most of the time sit passively and listen. With Khan Academy in mind this model comes into question. Considering it is an online resource it is fully possible for students to utilize the learning material while at home or even while riding the bus using a smart phone, all for free. In this way, students can actually get a type of lecture wherever and whenever they have access to the internet. The student's can simply create their own login on the Khan Academy homepage and start making progress on their own.

In practice

When the Khan Academy platform was introduced at a school in Los Altos, California, it turned up-side-down the concept that lectures are given in school, and that some tasks are suitable to do at home. When the lecture material could be accessed through the platform at home the time in class could be spent on tasks that were usually set aside for homework. The model seemed to free up time for the teacher's to only adress students that got stuck on a specific task, or maybe even better, made it possible for the teacher to utilize students that have mastered a specific task so that they can help their peers. The teacher's have the possibility to monitor every student's progress individually through their own login and hence know where their help is most needed.

But what will motivate students to study on their own?

What Khan Academy has evolved into is an integrative framework where students can create their own profile and avatar, get points for completing tasks and earn merit-badges for skills that they have mastered. These simple measures, inspired by the world of gaming, can have great incentivizing effects on the students. It is this twist that seperates the Khan Acedemy from other types of educational material online – the merging between education and gaming in order to make learning more fun. In a test the organization made some slight changes in what types of merit-badges the student's received and how many points the student's got for completing certain tasks – something that seemed to have a real effect on what tasks the student's ended up doing. Teacher's can use similar measures to motivate student's in an incredibly easy way.

By using computers as a means of gathering information about the students progress it is also much easier to rearrange curriculums in order to enhance the learning process. For instance you could evaluate how quickly a student learns a set of skills while following one certain path in the system and compare that with other paths taken by other students. Which paths are the quickest and most effective? By constantly gathering information the system can be improved continually in order to enhance the students learning process. This type of information would take massive amounts of time to collect if done without computersystems. 

Coupled with the internet the platform also constitutes a virtual learning space where in theory, the entire globe can ultimately be connected. It could also mean that the distinction between teacher and student gets increasingly complicated where former students can become teacher's or mentor's to other students. The Khan Academy might be a frontrunner in the educational sphere in what many people like to call the ”sharing-economy” or ”gift-economy”, in the same way that information is being spread through peer-2-peer networks online. File-sharing is the obvious example of sharing for free but also homepages like taskrabbit.com, couchsurfing.com and zipcar.com could perhaps show us the paradigm of the future – a paradigm of collaboration and sharing. These new ways of doing things is of course challenging to many of the institutions we have in our present society. Will concepts like the Khan Academy make the teacher obsolete or will their role simply be different in the future? And how do you create a lasting business-model in an environment of collaboration and sharing? Time will have to tell.

Snapchat

 Snapchat is the new social media sensation that has allowed young adults to take a picture or a video with a "free" feeling. Snapchat is unique in a way because the picture or video you send can only be viewed for a certain amount of time. The sender chooses how long the receiver can look that the picture or video. The sender has between ten seconds and down to one second. After that time is up the picture or video disappears forever. It allows people to send funny things to their friends without having to get to technical about it. It is very easy to use and many find it fun to mess around with.
More than 20 million "snaps" are sent each day, primarily by teens, according to a report from investment firm Piper Jaffrey. Many use this more then Facebook and twitter now. Although the length of viewing might not be as long as Facebook or twitter, the amount of snapchats taken a day is on the rise and is moving fast. 






There is a lot of criticism going around about snap chat because some people use it for "sexting" or pictures that many people don't want an audience to see. The problem is because people can "screenshot" these snapchats people send. There is not much the snapchat company can do about screenshotting because you can turn that off via app. So what the snapchat team has done to the app is allow the sender to see if the receiver has done a "screenshot". Now there is not much the sender can do when it is taken but the responsibility is in the senders hands. You pick you send you pictures and videos to and all of them are through your contact list, so people should take responsibility if there is trouble involved with send pictures through snapchat.


It is great and easy way to keep in touch with your friends. You can draw on the pictures and you can also put a little caption in to make it more personal. The snapchat app is gaining more and
more popularity throughout the world and if you want a fun way to show off your life without having millions of people having access to it, download snapchat.

“The right to be forgotten”, a reasonable reality or a Web 2.0 myth?

“The right to be forgotten”, a reasonable reality or a Web 2.0 myth? by Jamie Taylor

The issue of an individual’s want, right or need to their online personal privacy has since its inception produced considerable contention and debate. Currently this alleged “right” is not protected by a host of the most prominent social media sites on the web, arguably the most publicised legal deficiency of this nature being found on facebook.com. Increasingly however this issue of an individual’s right to “freedom from the past” is, as social networking sites information spans longer and longer time periods, creating considerable issues both personal and more general. My blog will therefore focus upon where this issue lies with current governments, what the effects and risks are to individuals through their social networking profiles, and whether it is both reasonable and realistic for our private lives online to simply… disappear.

Due to growing pressure in regards to deletion of personal information the issue has risen to the top of the technological legislation agenda. This has come in the form of a European Union initiative to provide people with “the right to be forgotten” which would come in the form of a European Data Protection Regulation. However, at this present time a political clash between the European Union and the British ministry of Justice has erupted regarding this legal change. The British Ministry of Justice is alternatively requesting an adapted law that would apply to Britain, providing it with greater “flexibility”  in its enforcement of such a law. The main crux of the British governments’ argument is the possible difficulty in enforcing such a law, which due to the manner in which sites like twitter, MySpace and Facebook pass on personal information to third-party companies could lead to long-term, potentially costly and irrevocably unsuccessful recuperation.

In terms of opposition to the EU proposed legislation seems to be stuck more so upon the practical usage and implementation of such legislation.  Clearly this could prove time-consuming and costly in a period of budgetary governmental cuts and will, at least in the British example provide headaches in regards to how this right is protected and how social networking sites are punished for contravening this proposed legal change.  This argument does become particularly more compelling when the manner in which data is passed on between various internet organisations is taken into account and how exactly this is to be traced if it has been replicated as has been argued by Edward Vaizey the current Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries.

It would appear that despite this rebuke from the British government in very recent years the consequences of embarrassing or equally false data remaining on the internet has all ready fuelled scandals and legal battles regarding grey areas in data protection. Notable examples have been Max Schem who had a high profile battle spanning a number of months with Facebook in order to obtain the subsequently discovered 1,222 pages of material the site possessed on him.  A case currently running in the British press pertains precisely to the now ever-emerging risks attached with possessing a social networking profile from an early age, where the newly appointed first  youth police and crime commissioner Paris Brown (17) is under investigation from both the national media and police force alike for posting homophobic, racist and violent language on her twitter account dating back to when she was 14 years old, including a reference to “hash brownies” in which she denies all allegations.  

 The most prominent argument being given in her defence is the fact she was 14 at the time of publishing these comments and despite her now still relatively young age, it is unfair for her to be judged on comments made whilst in her early adolescence. Primarily it is the right to delete potentially damaging or embarrassing posts from individuals past, most likely those in their youth that this proposed European legislation would be pursuing. It can be assumed without a doubt that these kind of instances will become more common in the near future and reach a point where all individuals are indicted for past posts in regards to; university applications; job interviews and at the top end of the scale political appointments. This feeling is equally reflected by the British public with the privacy pressure group Big Brother Watch recording 68% of British people stating ‘concerns’ regarding their personal privacy online. 

 

                                                                                                      The debate can continue in regards to whether these methods of vetting are valid or in fact accurate but a more critical issue is still that of whether an individual, after consenting to the terms and conditions of an individual social network and voluntarily publishing statements/information/posts online should have the right to erase these once they become outdated, inaccurate or potentially damaging to the individuals personal interests.  It is an interesting conflict point that has emerged from the basic principles and basis of Web 2.0, which inherently relies upon exchange of information and date between individuals and where the possession of such information lies post-publishing. Nonetheless it appears fairly unanimous that the vast majority are in favour of this right in principle, even in just a hypothetical sense, with nay-sayers to similar or the same legislation arguing along lines of feasibily of implementation rather than the now somewhat outdate ‘if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to lose’ argument.  Viktor Mayer-Schönberger the self-professed “midwife” of the right to be erased and the current professor of internet governance at the Oxford Internet Institute has stated, "The more I've worked on data protection over the past 20 years, the more I've realised that at the heart of this, what matters as much as the privacy aspect is the issue of human decision-making”.  Essentially Mayer-Schonberger is hitting at the primary argument for the right to be erased, that it is fundamentally an exercise of an individual’s right to decide their past and present and not that of a potentially unscrupulous social network provider.

Even with this morally derived argument opposition to such internet privacy laws has been upheld, with claims that this measure could damage the growth of the internet industry in the European Union by U.S. Critics of the legislation. Thomas Lenard, president of the Technology Policy Institute (a free-market think-tank) claimed, “If adopted, it will stifle the development of the Internet, which depends critically on the use of individual data to develop, improve, and fund services and content." Equally the costs this would bear upon large corporations has been raised as a supporting argument for how this may stifle the industries growth where, under the legislation “The proposal would require companies with more than 250 employees to appoint data protection officers, and it would require companies to report data breaches within 24 hours.” However for the obvious reasons it seems unreasonable to suggest the costs for such processes would significantly damage a company’s economic prospects.

Nonetheless it would seem the general consensus upon an individual’s right to erase has been decided amongst the general population and politicians alike and would appear to be in many regards a matter of moral conviction if not one of governmental practicality. However in the exceptional case of Britain it would seem the enforcement of such a deemed essential right may in fact be considerably more difficult than one would initially assume, especially in an industry where social networking sites have enjoyed a near 20 year head start in shaping their own internet privacy policies to ensure and protect their business interests for the foreseeable future. Even with this legislation in place the innumerable replications, spread of data and information sharing presents the question as to whether one could ever truly be ‘erased’, current internet data practices and trends would suggest, in spite of the perceived entitlement many of us feel we have to this liberty, regrettably no.

Which is the path of the citizen participation?

What is participation? What is participatory media? With the birth of the Internet and then with the developments of the web itself as a web characterized by being more open to the participation of the users, what was called web 2.0; we can say that the participation of the population in the reality, the development of the ideas, and the creation of the new ones, can be more easy. Here you have a video that summarize the idea of “where good ideas come from” by Steven Johnson that will make you think about what participation is.

After seeing this video, you can think that the participation online is great. That the way the ideas are being created nowadays is done by the population and for the population, but although I don’t want you to be upset I think that the phenomenon is well thought in the theory but I don’t see, at least in my environment, that thinks behave like this.

I will start to talk about McLuhan. He saw that the medium was the message, what means the content, he states that the technology was like part of our limbs and in fact I think this is like that, I mean, nowadays almost everybody use technology as it were part of their bodies or at least people use technology in order to get the reality and life the current times. The technology is like a tool with which we must live. But what is the problem here? What is the link of all this and the participation?

I see in “the medium is the message” a problem nowadays. The people, at least the youth generation, are blinded by the new technology. The participatory media supposed to be a way in which the population can be part of the system, can be part of the democracy in order to create a participatory democracy in which all of us we have the right to speak and create ideas. But.. at what is reduced the participation? To the social media, chats and games online. The majority of young people spend lots of hours online but in entertainment issues, what means that the participation is being reduced to this, the participation is reduced to create a virtual reality and live in it more that in the real reality. The medium is all and the content has lost importance. This is a riskiness because I think that because of this the new generation has lost the capacity of astonishment when are talking about the reality.

What I mean with all this is that the consumer is not as prosumer, as creative, as involved with the media as It seems. When nowadays we are watching the news and see what is happening in our countries, not just the wars –that has completely lost our capacity of astonishment- but also but is happening with the politics. For example in Spain, the government is damaging the country. The government is cutting the public services, is sacking a lot of people from the enterprises and is doing measures completely antisocial; and moreover it is been published that the corruption in the party is huge. What is all this? This is completely surrealistic and unfair, and what is amazing is that people has lost completely the capacity of astonishment and don’t participate in the public system in order to develop it. There are some people that, of course, do demonstration but this is not according with the current times. This way of participate is old and young people should utilize technology and social media for this, people should use it as a social tool in order to participate in the public problems of the society.  

What has been said in the past paragraph should us make think:

 Is the society really active? Is the society making things change? Or is the technology what is making people being evade of this reality? What would be the future? Would be people be in a virtual reality in which all the feelings as the indignation, would be lost? Which is the path of the participatory media?

  

Why own it? Share it!

The so called sharing economy is said to be one of the 10 Ideas that will change the world according to Time Magazine. Rachel Botsman, one of the thought leaders of this concept, expects that collective consumption transforms the way we live, work and consume. Besides that the world’s largest computer expo ‘CeBIT’ in March 2013 has selected ‘Shareconomy’ as keynote theme.

But what is really innovative or even revolutionary about this upcoming trend?

First it should be mentioned that the idea of sharing itself is not new at all. Probably it exists as long as human beings have social interactions with each other. So before the Internet got invented there were already neighbors sharing their lawn mowers, travelers sharing a car and students sharing a flat. What distinguishes these older forms of collective consumption from the new-emerged culture of sharing is that it is online-based. The Internet functions as a platform that enables people to organize their deals easier and cheaper than ever before. It brings together owners and borrowers even if they never met before and puts the relationship between demand and supply on a new groundwork. The emergence of social networks (especially facebook) and the mobile Internet promoted the development of the sharing economy. The rise of social media got people used to share experiences, thoughts, pictures or videos online with friends, followers or even strangers. By this people became more comfortable with the concept of meeting new people and sharing content with them using technology. Smartphones on the other hand flexibilize and mobilize the act of sharing. To illustrate how the ‘shareconomy’ works, there should be given some examples:

One of the most prominent sharing services is Airbnb. It is a marketplace, where people can rent their accommodation to travelers – from a spare bed to an entire mansion. Anyone looking for a place to stay can enter their dates and destination and browse matching offers. The advantages for the owner are quite obvious: He receives a rental fee. So he can make money with his accommodation even when he is not using it himself, for example when he is out of town. The motivations of the renters are more diverse: On the one hand they can save money, because in most cases a stay in a private offered place might be cheaper than one night in a hotel. On the other hand it may also be part of the lifestyle of young, urban hipsters who prefer paying money to online-peers rather than to a big hotel company.

The case of Airbnb not only shows, how the concept of sharing on the Internet works, but also that companies can make a lot of money by applying it as a business idea. Since the establishment of Airbnb in 2008 about 4 Million People found places to stay – 2.5 Million alone in 2012. With every rent the company receives 9-15% of the rental fee. Forbes Magazine calculates that this produced revenue of estimated 150 Million US Dollar in the last year. Besides that other big business players discovered the economic potential of ‘shareconomy’ and try to participate. For instance Daimler offers Smarts in big cities in Germany and North America for sharing. The conventional car-rental firm Avis recently acquired the American carsharing-company ZipCar for more than 500 Million US Dollar. Forbes Magazine estimates 3.5 Billion US Dollar will flow through the sharing economy this year. All this illustrates that ‘shareconomy’ already has become and will increasingly be a relevant economic factor.

The sharing economy is not only restricted on the share of material objects. The Internet also provides a marketplace for people to offer their manpower to anybody who needs it. This is what the online platform TaskRabbit is dealing with. Busy people that are short on time or just not talented enough can post their tasks that need to be done. Others can offer their special abilities and take care for these jobs by earning some money the same time. The tasks can vary from pet sitting or house cleaning to the assembly of IKEA furniture. 

Airbnb, Carsharing and TasRabbit are only three examples for a bigger development in general. Especially after the start of the global financial crisis in 2008 there seems to be a new Zeitgeist evolving that promotes the business model of the sharing economy. Consumers no longer want to stay in their passive role and get exploited by the big players in global economy. This development gave rise to a big number of start-ups in the last few years. Nowadays it seems like there is a platform on the Internet for simply all kind of things that can be shared, swapped or lend:

“We are sharing our cars on WhipCar, our bikes on Spinlister, our offices on Loosecubes, our gardens on Landshare. We are lending and borrowing money from strangers on Zopa and Lending Club. We are trading lessons on everything, from sushi-making to coding on Skillshare, and we are even sharing our pets on DogVacay” (Rachel Botsman)

However Rachel Botsman, co-author of the book “What'sMine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption”, claims that the biggest impact of ‘shareconomy’ on society is a social one. By sharing things people get in contact and build up trust in each other. According to this Botsman prognosticates that reputation will be a more powerful currency than our credit history in the 21^st century. This is the case because all sharing platforms are based on the idea that their participants trust each other. If you want to share your flat on Airbnb for instance, you want to make sure that it does not look like a Rock ’n’ Roll-band was partying in there. And your IKEA-shelf should not break down after it got assembled by a TaskRabbit. So reviews made by other users are important and reflect the trustworthiness of owners or borrowers.

 Conclusion 

Sharing assets seems to be one of the biggest recent trends on the Internet. Especially in the United States it already has become a big deal and the sharing economy is a profitable business for many innovative start-ups. Still the question remains, if ‘shareconomy’ leads to a higher degree of sustainability. This is empirically not validated and maybe the rise of the sharing economy also motivates people to consume even more. This can be the case if people invest money in things which they expect to be highly valuable on the sharing market. Platforms like RabbitTask carry the risk that people in need for the money undercut themselves and so a modern form of slavery emerges. To avoid this there needs to be some regulation by the platform or even the state to protect the "rabbits" from getting exploited.

In general I presume the positive aspects of collective consumption outweigh the potential disadvantages. So start becoming a part of the online sharing society: "Stop owning, start sharing!"

Is Vine becoming invincible?

 

  

Never heard about Vine? That is just about to change. Vine has in fact just topped the US App Store's list of free iPhone apps. This new mobile service acquired by Twitter lets users create and share short videos (from three to six seconds long), like a GIF or a looping video. The videos, which can be directly integrated into the tweets, automatically start playing and are muted by default.

The particularity of Vine is its recording technique: the app asks you to touch the screen to record, in order to make a kind of stop-motion video. Instead of a continuous six-second video, you can put several short shots together. But there are also limitations, you can't edit the video after you have recorded it and Twitter doesn't let users import videos taken or downloaded elsewhere. The most important restriction is that Vine is only available in the App Store for now, the Android version will come later.

 

Vine, which is originally a NYC startup, is not the pioneer of the short videos concept. Michael Downing has indeed launched a similar app, Tout, in April 2012, saying that some moments in life can't be explained by text. The Wall Street Journal has quickly understood the potential of shorts videos and is working with Tout to create a kind of blog. It's in fact a stream of reporter-generated videos called WorldStream.

Google is of course not missing out on short videos and has developed its own free app: Capture, which is only available for the iPhone. But what really makes Vine different is two major innovations : the possibility of stop-motion videos and the square format that seems perfectly suited to watch a video on a Smartphone.

Cats, porn and job opportunities

Vine, which could be described as the Instagram of video, has quickly become attractive for social networks' lovers. Only three weeks after the launch of the app in January, 100 000 videos were posting by users. It's a new means for people to share their lives and as usual, there are a lot of videos about food, funny cats or cute babies.

But Vine is also well-known for porn uploads and the blunder made by the staff in January : highlight porn in the "Editor's Picks" category. The most creative or interesting videos posted to Vine are usually selected by staff in this section. Twitter quickly removed the video and apologized saying it was a human error.  

 

But Vine can also be used for another kind of purpose: the research of job (yes, it's not all about food and porn). Dawn Siff, a former political director for Fox News Radio made what seems to be the first Vine resume: a six-second video where she describes some of her skills. The journalist quickly found a job at The Economist as project manager but she wrote on her Tumblr: "I actually got this job through old fashioned networking, a referral by a friend. But I would say that the Vine Resume did impress them once I was in the door."

 

Dream for marketing

Vine is definitely an opportunity for brands which can create shorts advertisements for free and share them with their social media fans. Like Todd Wasserman writes: "It's easy to see how the 6-second format could become a new standard for video ads, the way the 30-second ad has for TV." There are many possibilities but brands can use Vine to:

- Promote their products. For example, Malibu has made a short video to promote its drink during the period of the SuperBowl. It's obviously much cheaper than an ad on a TV channel which broadcasts the game. Trident has taken advantages of the looping video, showing a gum pack and writing "The never-ending pack!".
 

 

- Interact with the followers and potentially consumers. This the case of the Rolling Stones Magazine for example which masks its cover with post-it and asks "Guess who is on the cover". It gives the feeling of a close relationship between the brand and the consumer and it's a way to get users' feedback easily.

 

- Encourage followers to produce content. And consequently advertisement for the brand for free. For example Martini asks users to share the "Martini moments" on Vine. Contests are also organized: the Cavendish London hotel offered an overnight stay at the hotel for the most romantic Vine video with the hashtag #ValentineVine to @Cavenish_Hotel. 

 

 

 

"I miss my pre-internet brain"

According to Henry Jenkins, "Convergence Culture maps a new territory: where old and new media intersect, where grassroots and corporate media collide, where the power of the media producer and the power of the consumer interact in unpredictable ways." Vine and other short videos apps are, as we have seen with Tout and The Wall Street Journal for instance, examples of interaction between old and new media. The film maker James Mangold has even used Vine to make a teaser of "The Wolverine", the last X-men film. Of course Vine could not be successful without massive participation of the users. The simplicity of Vine makes video crowdsourcing a real viability for brands and companies are wised to co-construct the story they want to tell with consumers.

 

Dom Hofmann, the general manager of Vine, said: "Posts on Vine are about abbreviation – the shortened form of something larger. They’re little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life." But we have to think about this word, abbreviation. With Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and now with Vine, are we moving to a "fast-food culture"? A culture where the information is fast-produced, fast-assimilated and badly digested?

With short formats like 140 characters or 6 seconds you don't have time for developments, explications or contextualization. The message is brief and to the point. Some of us don't read newspapers articles anymore but tweets or don't write full sentences but hashtags. Obviously we have to put things into perspectives, some tweets include a link to direct the reader to leading articles for example. And it reminds us the potential and the richness of media collaboration.


Laurence Donis