 More fun. Okay, hi guys. Sorry, I'm from my Jack and I'm pretty cool. So my thesis is on civic production and live streaming mobile video. That is video streamed live to the internet from a mobile phone. And just to get to jump right into the video as sense of what I'm talking about, I just want to show you a really quick example from two different videos. The first was posted quite a while ago. Not long after the site launched. This is I did a case study on videos on the site, quick.com. Hi, this is Paul Murphy, peddling words. This is a poem, another poem by William Butler Yeats. It's called The Ballad of Wandering Angus. I went out to the hazel wood because the fire was in my head. I cut and peeled a hazel wand and hooked a berry to a thread. And when white moths were on the wing and moths like stars were flickering out, I cut my berry in a stream and caught a little bone first one. Okay, I get the idea. That's a completely different example. This is from Brazil from a producer who is, I think, part of the Brazilian police force. The translation of the title is Outlaws Exchange Shots with the Police and Die. It's a little graphic. We are here in the city of Bacique, where the police had an outlaw exchange. The originals fled, they could have missed an informatics store. They fled, they could have missed an informatics store. They entered this street here in Bacique, a street without exit. They were caught by the police and in reality it was an outlaw exchange. The police were shot, taken out of the car. Here we can see the tree. There was a bandit here in the place. These ones that are here are in the place. I'm going to show you the other one here. Here we are at the river. At the river here, directly to Bacique. Next to the JK. Here is the other body. The other body of the marginal. Here we can see the tree. Okay, so another completely different use of live streaming mobile video. So really my goal for this thesis is to explore how live streaming mobile video is developing as a practice in general. And then more specifically looking at what I'm calling civic producers and how and why they adopt to use and understand this particular technology, which I'm calling a new medium. As I mentioned in the case study of quick.com, it's one of the oldest sites, the few two and a half years old, for live streaming mobile video. It's a mobile application out of a website. So you can stream content from your phone as I was doing during Sheila's presentation and you can watch it live online. It's like it's around a thousand broadcasts a day, which are then archived on the site for later use. And in my study, I found 80 countries, the site supports over 20 languages and just tons of phones. So that's just a brief profile. I'll get more into that later. Just to sort of define the terms that I'm talking about here, I kind of morphed a few different definitions from different terms to characterize what I'm calling civic content. And so this is sort of a mash-up of a bunch of those definitions as they relate to my subject. So civic is being public-spirited an activity or an event that relates to community or public affairs. And public is, you know, people producing content are authorized by serving or representing the community and that all ties into civil society and being civic minded, which is inclined to concern oneself with civil affairs or public-spirited, which is different from private or household-based activities, which I term in my thesis personal or other content. So this all comes together to make up the criteria that I'm using to separate civic videos from personal or other videos. And I have further categories which I'll get into. Also, on every slide, you'll see little images in the phones. Those are actually still frames from videos live streamed by some of the producers, civic producers whom I interviewed. And I won't explain what they all are, even though I really want to. But I can do that later if you're interested, because they're fascinating. So just to quote Henry, since he's here, and he wrote extensively on sort of trying to figure out what civic media is. So on his blog he had used a quote referencing or he had talked about Lisa Gilliman's idea of, Lisa Gilliman suggested that media should be understood both as a technological platform, which is channel of communication, and the social and cultural protocols which grow up around it. As we think about future civic media, we are not simply designing tools or devices that might be deployed to support and sustain citizenship. We're also talking about the practices that grow up around those devices. The practices that shape how they get used and how they're understood by the people who use them. So that's, I'm using as a kind of framework for my analysis here. I'll get more into that approach. Just brief context, why is this important? It's a pretty new medium. Even from the time I started studying this, a lot more services have cropped up to support live streaming mobile video. A lot of money and industry being poured into this. It's an accessible technology in the sense that it's affordable marginally in terms of you just need a phone that has a camera. It's becoming increasingly more affordable as data plans are more affordable. It's an understudied area. A lot of the existing research really focuses on the use of still photos and sharing. There's been some good research on the potential for mobile technology to promote democracy and organize grassroots movement. Or to improve local economies and social services in developing countries, especially through SMS. But not as much about mobile video because it really is pretty new. So I'm really, I'm analyzing mobile video as a specific medium through which producers can become specifically engaged. And I'm offering a textual analysis of content and interviews with people to explore how much does have civic value and what does that mean. And just to lean on a quote from ill-focused skin and who's one of the few scholars who's really been focusing on mobile video. He was talking about Flickr supporting mobile video and he was saying as far as I can say no studies of the content of pages like this have been conducted. Obviously a good deal of material is just entertainment consisting of funny or non-ordinary occasions in ordinary life. However, more serious content is also delivered through these services. And that serious content is really what I'm interested in and what I'm calling civic content. And my background is video production and activism so that all blends nicely. I've been using this site as well for a few years just to test it out. So I really wanted to write about it. Key questions. Just a few basic ones. What type of content is actually being produced? Is actually being broadcast online through mobile video. It's very general. Not just civic but in general what are people filming? How do we identify demographic trends in production? I'm talking about age, location, whatever that type of thing. How much of content in this new medium actually has civic value? And what factors encourage producers to capture and stream a type of footage? And also can we come up with a profile of the type of general civic producer? Is that even possible? And what are the contexts in which these people are producing media? So my interview is really focused on assessing the motivations behind production. And then research methods. I knew there was a few ways I could go at this. Every approach was a little bit limiting. So I wanted to merge both quantitative and qualitative. So I did a quantitative survey. I had a thousand videos over a period of five months. I measured a lot of general stats for the videos, whether they were shot in public or private. And came up with one of my civic value tags, ways to categorize whether something had civic value. Of course this is very subjective. I'm doing this myself. In terms of study, they might choose different categories. They might choose a different way of categorizing this. But I felt that this was appropriate. I chose journalistic, political, activist, educational and religious for my value tags, specific videos. And then also some additional tags for videos that were not necessarily civic, maybe personal videos, entertainment, professional, touristic, and promotional, just to get a larger sense of what was being produced. I also did qualitative interviews with... The context of a lot of people ended up speaking with seven people to borrow the ghost of Lana Schwartz's thesis presentation from last year using an ethnographic stance, more particularly as Ito and Akabe called it a techno-social approach, which really uses anthropological analysis to interpret the technologies that underlie social activity and grounded theory methods to interpret. It's deconstructed and analyzed my qualitative data, my interview content. And as I mentioned, I was really talking to people to assess what motivated them to use this, what characterized their practice of production and their adoption of it, or their issues and challenges, and if there are other trends that I can identify that are useful. So there's a number of things that I did not study. I did not look at viewer reception. It's a big area. I really wanted to concentrate on production as a practice. I did not... Unfortunately, I had no way to systematically matter age, race, ethnicity, or economic status of producers. I would have loved to do that. I think it would be really a right area for further research. I made some generalizations based on just physically what I saw when I was watching these. It seemed like a pretty diverse range of people producing this, where they were from, what their backgrounds were like in terms of the context in which they were filming their homes. I didn't look at interaction. The site supports if someone posts a comment in real time while someone is live streaming, it'll show up on the person's phone. We'll be able to see. I have two viewers and one of them just wrote a little comment. I can react while I'm filming to that. Really interesting features are emerging in this space with interaction. I didn't look at that because it's also its own thesis. And distribution of content in the sense of... All the people I spoke with cross-distributed their content, Quick has really good social integration, social media integration of just with one click. You can spread it to all your networks. But I didn't focus too much on what happened to that content once it's spread out in the space or if news agencies picked it up or anything. I really limited this to just people within the US and the EU who are English speakers for practical reasons and also because that's the cultural context that I best understand. Hopefully... Okay. Just to give you an overview, I want to get into the interesting stuff which is the results. The fourth chapter is structure of inquiry, introduction with key terms, and overview of an argument. I talked a little bit about the historical parallels between civic production in different forms of media across time and issues then and now, especially in public production. Then I look at my survey results and sort of break down those numbers and try to identify trends in production. The fourth chapter, motivating factors, is really based on my interview data with producers and what they were conceptualizing is things that really made them want to continue doing this type of production. And I boiled that down to the madness of media, the immobility, the real imagined audience, and self-identification. I would like to be able to offer some suggestions for the design of future applications to support not just live streaming old video, but this particular type of producer, civic producer. So research findings. This is a provocative statement almost exclusively men. It was there were 9% identifiable women in my general survey of all videos. And the numbers, the percentages are pretty much the same for just civic videos of 7% women. So this is a pretty male thing right now. A good range of older people. I was surprised I expected a lot more younger people and that's really not what I found between 25 and over. And a lot of people in the 40 and over range and the 15 over range. Again, I don't have real stats for this because I did not matter for age, but I would say definitely more than half or over 40. And also a lot of this is just experimentation. It's a new medium, people are experimenting with it, they're showing their friends, they're doing little test videos and they're really excited about it. This is the general thing I found. Also an important insight from my interviews with people. You know, you hear a lot on the news about these random people who some accident or newsworthy event happens and they happen to pull out their phone and film it. And that's great. But that's really not the profile of the typical civic producer that I found. I found that these are people who are already engaged in some activities. Those are the ones who are appropriating this. They're seeing this as yet another tool for doing what they're already doing. And as John Gergen calls the magnetic clusters of interest. So these are videos that are going to have value within people's circles if they're an educator, if they're a journalist, if they're an activist. That's the people that are going to value the content that they're producing. And then one guy I talked to who made this, this is still from his video, the Christian rocker he's in a Christian rock band and he also films all of his church services. So this is what that is. He's originally from Sri Lanka, but he lives in Texas now. He and I were talking about why my data pointed to more civic videos coming out of places like Brazil and Mexico and maybe less developed countries. And he was saying, well in Sri Lanka when I found he knows about this, they liked it but they can't really pay for it because they don't have the data packages that are due in the US. It's really expensive. And he said, well maybe I'm seeing more serious footage in developing countries because people are paying for it and they don't want to just stream their cute dog or their baby, as you see a lot of them in states they want to film a politician or something that they consider really important. And then I would talk to them about desirable features that they would want to see in future applications. So quantitative data, I only picked two charts to show you which just overview my categories that I gave to these civic videos and there were overlaps in there. And then as you can see on that right most of the civic footage is being produced in public spaces versus the personal or other footage is kind of even split between public and private. The main thing to look at here is I found that 11%, based on my categories, 11% of the footage that I watched has a civic value and that was largely journalistic and educational. I already talked about the gender discrepancy but the average length was also interesting. There was a little over two minutes for personal videos and almost seven and a half minutes for civic which points to some interesting trends and people taking it more seriously they're really editorializing they're filming the whole whether it's a speech or a meeting or a protest or something they're really putting more time into it. This site that I looked at quick is based in the US. There are other sites that are more popular in Asia which is why maybe I saw more of a trend of US, Brazil and UK, Mexico and Europe as sort of the main countries out of the 80 that I found in my study. And then I investigated the hosting style which I won't go into but was which was interesting because it's just a style which people acknowledge or don't acknowledge the camera and how they sort of take the viewer through the video. Some qualitative insights, this is just a chart I know it's a lot of text it's a chart of the people I talk to and where they're from they all self-identify as activists or educators or journalists they all cross post their content in other places and half of them make personal footage as well as just civic footage and then just a few quotes from people that was interesting the real image of an audience is a big motivating factor for production. A lot of people have an idea through their audiences or real stats on their audiences or they know that they're going to share it within their network. Other people are really motivated, most of the people I spoke to are really motivated by the potential for anyone to just stumble upon their videos and become what I'm calling accidentally educated. So one man Alden had explained to me I don't have a specific audience in mind to reach out to as broad an audience as possible I write about anything I can think of, partly to bridge different communities to get people to think about one thing and try and think about something else. So this afternoon I did a little bit of live streaming at the snowstorm so people will come in and look at my videos because they're interested in looking at the snowstorm and hopefully then they'll look over at the board of education meeting or look at the speech that I candidate gave. And he wasn't the only one, almost the one I talked to was really, even if only two viewers from the random internet stumbled upon his video that was enough for him to say, okay cool maybe two people learn something and that was enough for him to want to produce more. So finally just areas of future research I really already went over this but the things that I didn't really look at, the viewer reception I'm interested in also the actual impact of videos in terms of what happens once they're out there being used as legal evidence one of my producers had their footage used in a legal case in Thailand whether major media picked up again, demographics, where are the women what about this trend of older users using this, this is something that should be more studied and then the nightmare of archiving, once a thousand videos of stream per day to just this one site and there's a lot more sites and it's growing every day what does this mean not just YouTube's problem of archiving everything but also for civic content what happens when this valuable footage goes unorganized. So those are all my issues and that's my presentation I have a question about the word civic I know you were talking about, you were dealing with this earlier and I was curious about whether you would come to any sort of conclusions about it and I talked a little bit but it seems like there might be the possibility for the idea of what counts as civic production to be shaped by the kinds of products the kinds of things that you're looking at so when you go and you want to categorize things as civic in various ways do you think that it's possible that say these people who are putting up videos for various reasons are while doing that redefining what counts as civic which might make a problem for your category it's interesting you bring it up because I think I missed a very important point when I was rushing through my presentation which is that the way that I describe value to these finger analysis is in my interpretive textual analysis so I evaluated each video based on my reading of the inherent worth of the text itself obviously someone else might read it differently but that's how I placed it within these categories and because I couldn't really know what the producer's intent was or what something that I thought was just a stupid silly video maybe they really thought oh no I'm doing this, I just keep people you know, the heads of the value and that's another reason why I wanted to couple this with interviews with people because I really wanted to have conversations with people because maybe there's things that I missed so it's problematic because I couldn't, I mean there's no way I could not be so that I could be objective unless I had a team of people that helped with reliability but no, it's a good point Nothing off that it sounds like you interviewed producers who you thought were doing civic stuff rather than reviewing a mix of people some of them were doing civic stuff some of them weren't so would you have found something different if you talked to people it's interesting because I when I first started this I had kind of gone into a thinking that I would do what you described is interviewing both your average viewer who just films a dog or whatever and I found, let me tell you really wonderful interesting videos that I was dying to talk to producers about it really came down to feasibility and time the interviews that I did do even though it was only seven but it took a lot of time and I realized I wasn't going to be able to invest that level and I really, because I wanted to focus on the ones that were obviously civic and that they would describe it the same way I had to make that call if I had more time this was a PhD dissertation poorly and I think that would be really interesting Do you have any thoughts on where this whole medium is moving Funny you should ask I do I think it's very timely I think it's sort of heartening and it's interesting that in the six, seven months I've been looking at this issue all of the sites are cropped up just this week Bambooser which is like the quick of Sweden has launched a partnership with emergency services company like EMT and they're allowing the emergency workers and journalists to use this on the scene as a way to get there first and say here's the conditions and then emergency personnel will come and it's their private videos but that's one of the first things I've seen recently that really speaks to commercial partnerships or public-private partnerships in this realm and I think that could have really great potential and of course things where you know national news outlets are soliciting contact from producers that's sort of the existing model but I think maybe we're beginning to see a lot more a bigger ship Is there any evidence of collaborative networks of people No but my producers that I spoke with one in particular we were talking about the snowstorm thing in the court of education meetings who ironically was on a panel with Henry like in the dean campaign in 2004 just randomly I found him on the internet he was like oh compare them to these studies he was saying that I told people about what they want in the future what futures they want and he was saying something that could support that that could be a way for people maybe people who covered the same event but don't know each other but then are live streaming it to be able to find that content online and maybe pull it down edit it into a larger thing so that is a picture that people want push production a little bit of editing features after it's streamed once it's archived and that doesn't exist right now I mean the question of what civic I think is interesting and I think it's fine to use the term but it is one of those terms that has the danger I guess of civic being the politics that I like you know and this has been a complaint of a lot of civil society research or soft powers another one of these that I think has the same kind of problem I don't think you should throw it out because of that but it raises the question how to contextualize it and that's sort of I guess back to Henry and some of the other questions as well so what's the relationship between the entertainment and the civic and I think you're right that it has something to do with a self identification it's politics outside the political system I think that's what makes it civic I think of that as sort of civil society versus government then there are ways in which entertainment is very much a part of this world too you know I always wonder why parents are so terrified of having their children walk around outside it was a big thing 20 years ago I'm not sure it's that much more dangerous now but I know we have a lot more entertainment now that has children being abused by random people out there and I always feel like all this NCI CSI sort of public sphere creates its entertainment but it has this political this sort of sense of danger the need for police the role of police why forensics is the be all end all and so you know it would be interesting then to think about that relationship you know because I also imagine that the people filming their cat or their dog if you said you know do you think this has some civic meaning they would say yes you know I think people don't recognize the importance of cats and dogs and I think this will help humans be better people and solve problems in the world and so I think it would just be interesting you know it's something related to that one of the people who is a Sikh he runs a website promoting a Sikh religion and culture he's the guy and he filmed this which is an interesting session and he just got here but he had a different perspective similar to what you're talking about where he had said he's using my own life and community as a way of being very real when you have very formal journalistic type content it's very different it's a very different field than when you see real people in informal type settings part of having things this way for me is so that people can see we were all on the same level and not better or different whatever I do I try to break down the virus misunderstanding prejudice judgment hate in the hope that people will see each other as part of the same so his whole thing was it wasn't just the religious ceremonies he was filming but like the every day here's my son in his traditional way of pressing and here's our daily life because he wanted it to be humanized he wanted people to see to break down on his misunderstandings and I think that was a really interesting example and I'm sure that a lot of other people would say that participant observations a nice term too I mean anthropologists use that term but often it's in the service of a relativistic culture whereas the activist says it's participant observation where it depends on participant and do something and I think that's also part of the civic world it's very powerful it's journalist too step back I think usually I'm trying to change I'm saying I'm reporting on the world so that's where it's this interesting space that drawing out some of the nuances of it to really help us see the limitations of what else is out there and also like what's the difference between how they're conceptualizing who's watching this and who's actually watching it which right now on this site this is mostly a community of people producing not people sitting there watching to use stream which is a similar service because a lot of people ready to watch content or as quick as not and so there's a disconnect there in terms of impact question in my head but I'm interested in debate and discussion which sounds like we're doing an interesting job of like presenting more platforms for people and more voices which is great we're hearing from people but do you see any back and forth between videos of like people maybe you can't do it simultaneously but people addressing each other or right now I'm not in the platform doesn't support that in the way that YouTube will say responses to this and people can do video responses but I did ask everyone about what do you got into feedback and how's that been important to you and every single person and I don't even know if this is true I kind of don't think that it's I don't know if it's completely true but like everyone said yeah I get feedback whether it's an email or a comment whether it's just from one random person or someone who saw it on my Facebook page it's not even part of my network and that really meant a lot to me and that keeps me doing this really this off I just got a question that I think does I saw one of your charts send it all of the community interviews posted to other close communities and I was wondering how the whole ecosystem works and like how where they put the stuff how does it work in other spaces and how does it all work together yeah the integration that's built into quick is the typical stuff so twitter Facebook it actually integrates with other sites to like justin tv other video sharing sites so you know you can sort of with one click spread it but then also you can anyone can go and share it to blogs embedding within their own site and everyone that I talked to seemed to do that actively because they knew that that's really the only way to expand your show there wasn't a lot of people randomly watching this so I think they all know that's important I just think that the platforms could build up more of that integration whether that's through commercial partnerships to other sites or thank you