Jon Hickman
I'm based in the Birmingham Centre for Media & Cultural Research.
I research and publish work on digital culture and creative industries, specifically exploring social media.
This work is applied to my role as the Degree Leader for Web & New Media within undergraduate programmes, and my teaching on the MA Social Media at Birmingham School of Media, Birmingham City University.
My industry experience in new media also make me a key member of our knowledge transfer team.
Phone: +44 (0) 121 331 5633
Address: My CV: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/jonhickman
I research and publish work on digital culture and creative industries, specifically exploring social media.
This work is applied to my role as the Degree Leader for Web & New Media within undergraduate programmes, and my teaching on the MA Social Media at Birmingham School of Media, Birmingham City University.
My industry experience in new media also make me a key member of our knowledge transfer team.
Phone: +44 (0) 121 331 5633
Address: My CV: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/jonhickman
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Journal Articles
This paper considers SxSWi as a mega-event, and as a technological imaginary (Flichy 1999). We consider how it is given meaning by its consumers, and how this validation allows it to confer meaning on technology. We look at the ways in which SxSWi attendees construct their attendance through their own (social) media accounts, and how they construct their own media and their social position as digital workers through their attendance.
The research project focussed on a pocket–sized camcorder which was issued to staff and students involved in the study. Lecturers were requested to experiment with the technology to supplement their existing practice while students were asked to use the technology during their teaching placements. Both lecturers and students were encouraged to share video clips of their work on a specially created secure repository.
We believe this investigation is important as it examines the introduction of new technology from both a student and a teacher position. It examines a number of current developments and concerns including adoption of technology into the learning and teaching process; incorporation of web technology and social networking sites into a teaching programme; the implications of such developments when external organisations are involved; and the willingness of both lecturing staff and students to experiment with new technologies.
Book Chapters
Students are assigned roles within teams as part of a class-wide project. As they pursue that project (‘stories’) they will encounter problems, and in attempting to solve those problems they will choose to sign up for one of 3-4 short teaching sessions (‘streams’) taught at the class’s halfway point. These ‘streams’ replace the traditional lecture-driven format, and can be delivered by students as well as tutors. In the final part of the class, students rejoin their teams and exchange learning.
This structure is being proposed as a way of addressing issues of student motivation and engagement with learning. By scheduling the project work at the start of the class and as the driver of the process, teaching is related to students’ own problem context. By requiring students to make an active choice in the learning that they experience, we push them to explicitly opt-in to their learning, and identify its relevance; by giving different students different skills – and the opportunity to host their own ‘streams’ – we are encouraging peer-to-peer teaching.
See also:
Bore, I., & Hickman, J. (2013). Studying fan activities on Twitter: Reflections on methodological issues emerging from a case study on The West Wing fandom. First Monday, 18(9).
Bore, I., & Hickman, J. (2013). Continuing The West Wing in 140 characters or less: Improvised simulation on Twitter. Journal of Fan Studies, 1(2).
Reports
Conference Presentations
Our response to this was to destroy the project and renew it: BiNS was closed through an elaborate online performance only to be reborn as Paradise Circus – an ‘ongoing love letter to a battered city’ which seeks to challenge both the official record of Birmingham and the diminished nature of the city’s alternative public sphere.
In this practice-based case study we will discuss how we maintain and renew a sense of critical distance from events within an urban sphere and their media coverage, while also existing personally within those events. We will discuss how we seek to use new technologies to constantly reframe our work as a space for critique, protest and subversion despite it being an attractive target for co-option because of the city’s practices and discussion of ‘the digital’.
The unconference format can be particularly linked to digital culture as it is often used by communities of practice whose principal links are rooted in social media. In some ways we could argue that the format remediates the online discussions of forums, blog comments and tweets in a physical space. As such, the unconference discourse has historically drawn on certain discursive repertoires from digital culture: hacker culture, openness (of source and of data), and collaboration. As unconferencing has become more popular the model has been appropriated more widely - it has become something of a buzzword in events - and this appropriation causes some tension if the unconferencing discourse is seen to be misunderstood.
In this paper we discuss the unconference discourse with reference to a series of ethnographic studies covering a range of unconference events. We explore the networks and communities that gather at these events, and the ways in which information is shared and knowledge is constructed through participants’ collaboration in the event. We consider the extent to which unconferencing is an activist discourse and examine, through a detailed case study of a disputed event, the struggle to retain its oppositional position against mainstream appropriation.
Drawing on a focus group with independent (grassroots and community) hyperlocal practitioners, I show how our understanding of hyperlocal draws upon the repertoires of a number of media discourses and how those producers negotiate when, why and the extent to which they align themselves with the field.
By demonstrating the fractured nature of hyperlocal media in this way I hope to contribute to the ongoing policy debates related to this emerging field, as well as other policy concerns such as community media which has, to some extent, been subsumed by the attention given to hyperlocal.
The project brought two groups of students together to collaborate towards a common purpose whilst working towards different learning outcomes. Through an exploration of a shared problem space, we pushed students to explicitly opt-in to their learning, and identify its relevance to themselves.
Students were assigned roles within teams as part of a class-wide project. As they pursued that project (‘stories’) they encountered problems, and in attempting to solve those problems they chose to sign up for one of 3-4 short teaching sessions (‘streams’) taught at the class’s halfway point. These ‘streams’ replaced the traditional lecture-driven format, and were delivered by students as well as tutors. In the final part of the class, students rejoined their teams to exchange learning.
This paper builds upon previous work (Bradshaw, Hickman & Jones, 2012) which discussed the framing of the project and early findings from a student questionnaire. In this paper we build upon this work and provide further evaluation of the project through a discussion of students’ achievements at assessment and student focus groups.
Although there were some issues presented by this approach, our findings indicate that this approach was particularly useful for developing soft skills that relate to employability. The overall quality of student work was also enhanced through the process, which provided an indication that learning had become deeper.
Stories & Streams activity is already being planned at other media schools and a resource book will be made available to CEMP delegates who wish to adopt this approach.
Bibliography
Bradshaw, Hickman & Jones, 2012. Stories & Streams. Exploring Collaborative Learning In Media Studies Programmes, 3rd May 2012, Winchester, UK.
Students are assigned roles within teams as part of a class-wide project. As they pursue that project (‘stories’) they will encounter problems, and in attempting to solve those problems they will choose to sign up for one of 3-4 short teaching sessions (‘streams’) taught at the class’s halfway point. These ‘streams’ replace the traditional lecture-driven format, and can be delivered by students as well as tutors. In the final part of the class, students rejoin their teams and exchange learning.
This structure is being proposed as a way of addressing issues of student motivation and engagement with learning. By scheduling the project work at the start of the class and as the driver of the process, teaching is related to students’ own problem context. By requiring students to make an active choice in the learning that they experience, we push them to explicitly opt-in to their learning, and identify its relevance; by giving different students different skills – and the opportunity to host their own ‘streams’ – we are encouraging peer-to-peer teaching.
The central case study is a film making competition called Swede It! which ran in early 2011 to promote a leisure complex in Birmingham. Swede It! was designed firstly through understanding the social object that was relevant to the campaign, and secondly through an understanding of fan culture. The tendency of fans to want to make media products and demonstrate fandom was built into the Swede It! concept during design. The case study outlines how fan activity was engendered by Swede It!, how such activity was then situated within and used by the leisure complex's
own media products, and was therefore articulated towards the leisure complex's promotional goals.
The paper outline some of the background to the theory of social objects, and explains why it is a useful way to think through a social media marketing campaign using this idea. The paper also offers some new possibilities for developing the theory and the way in which we approach social media campaigns.
N.B. Please see Journal Articles for published outputs from this project.
The MA Social Media was launched by Birmingham School of Media in September 2009. As the first course of its type, the programme attracted a great deal of media attention. The small cohort of students in the first intake have also attracted the interest of employers. By March 2010 half of the cohort were living and working away from campus, and completing the taught elements of the course through informal distance learning. This created a number of issues around group work (coherence and completion), the development of lesson content, and the provision of useful support, feedback and tutorials for students. These problems occurred during the course and thus required an immediate response; Web 2.0 technologies and the institutional Virtual Learning Environment seemed to afford solutions. Students were allowed the opportunity to develop their own processes to manage the issues, leading to innovative uses of services such as Twitter, Google Wave, Skype and email.
Using a range of analytical tools we document and evaluate the processes employed by the students, including an investigation of technologies which were rejected by them. We conclude that online support for near-distance learning can
Hickman, J. & Kane, D.: Supporting students’ learning with web 2.0 Page 1 of 1
be problematic and what is needed is a consultative, or even student led approach to eLearning design. Furthermore, we suggest that eLearning is not an ICT product to be procured, but a set of processes which can be enabled through existing free, online, Web 2.0 services. While this is a general issue within education, we feel that it is particularly pertinent to media studies, which consistently finds itself at the forefront of technological advances in communication.
Our examination is informed by previous research at Birmingham City University into the uses of web 2.0 technologies within teaching and learning, based on a concern that new technologies are often adopted because of their 'newness' rather than their contribution to the learning and teaching process. This work highlighted the importance of the student voice in determining the best use of technological innovation, and the problems of imposing normative uses of technology within teaching and learning.
The use of hash tags is widespread throughout the Twitter network, and the concept now finds a place in wider media discourses, for example news media often report on coalitions and campaigns which have formed online around certain hash tags (e.g. Sweney & Busfield 2010). As hash tagging becomes a common activity, the process becomes changed and is acted out in a variety of forms. Parallel networks, speaking through disparate discourses employ hash tagging to different ends, and may come into conflict when the resources (in this case a combination of letters after the # symbol) become scarce.
This paper considers social practices and discourses of hash tag- ging. Drawing on recent studies into twitter activity (Boyd et al 2010; Anstead & O’Loughlin 2010) I map out the various uses to which the hash tag is employed, analysing relevant case studies. Modes of hash tagging include: humour (memes, pastiche), events, campaigns & awareness, curation & archive, and branding & corpo- ratisation. Humour and events tags are shown to be instrumental in generating and maintaining social capital (Bourdieu 1986); cam- paign & awareness tags are seen as a way of realising social capital for a social benefit, while participation in tagged conversation is suggested as a means to access the shared capital; curation & ar- chive tags are seen as being pragmatic in their outcomes; branding & corporatisation tags are similarly pragmatic but with an implied function of being exploited for commercial ends.
In particular I shall draw on an analysis of activity around the hash tag #esm in January 2010. The hash tag was subject to a dispute between two rival groups, with branding & corporatisation at the heart of their dispute. The confusion was seized upon by Twitter members outside of these groups as a subject of humour, with the hash tag employed in a memetic mode.
I conclude that this categorisation of hash tags may prove useful in analysing twitter activity as it will provide a basis for understanding the underlying intention behind the uses of hash tags. I also suggest that, as corporate culture and promotional discourses embrace social media activity more readily, disputes and issues of ownership are likely to occur.
Anstead, N. & O’Loughlin, B. (2010) The Emerging Viewertariat: Explaining Twitter Responses to Nick Griffin’s Appearance on BBC Question Time
UEA School of Political, Social and International Studies Working Paper Series Number 1: February, 2010
Bourdieu, Pierre (1986) The Forms of Capital in Richardson, J (ed) (1986) Hand- book of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education Connecticut, Green- wood Press.
Boyd, D. Golder,S. & Lotan, G. (2010) “Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter.” HICSS-43. IEEE: Kauai, HI, January 6. Sweney, M & Busfield, S. (2010) BBC to close two radio stations and halve web output after Tory pressure, The Guardian. 26th February 2010. Accessed at
http://bit.ly/9UST3R on 27/02/10
'Help Me Investigate' is an online tool which aims to help individuals "organise and pursue questions of public interest you think should be investigated" (Help Me Investigate, 2010). It provides tools and seeks to build a user base to effect the process of "crowdsourcing" (Brogan & Smith, 2009) of investigations which might normally be within the realm of investigative journalists.
The cost of "quality" journalism has recently been cited by Rupert Murdoch as part of his defence of paywall technology (Bunz, 2009). The crowdsourcing of investigations, which ostensibly offers free labour, challenges the orthodox view that news investigations are expensive. It also challenges the traditional notion of the "professional" investigative journalist, suggesting that we can all aspire to be in the elite cadre of newsmakers: we can be citizen investigative journalists.
Textually, Help Me Investigate presents itself using the genre codes and conventions of social networking.
Through a virtual ethnography I describe the process of an online investigation as it operates both within Help me Investigate, and within a wider ecology of social media (blogs, twitter and physical meet ups). I demonstrate the value of a distributed and layered network in leveraging social capital (Bourdieu, 1986) towards an investigative goal, and posit that distributed investigation, using free labour, can be both informed and valuable. While it is relatively easy for news media companies to profit from this crowdsourced activity, participants in the investigation do not go unrewarded; the social act of investigation enhances the aggregate social capital available within a network, but also confers individual benefits on those who take part."
Other Publications
This structure was proposed as a way of addressing issues of motivation and engagement with learning and as a response to the instrumental consumption of media education framed by the employability agenda; in action the structure actually enabled deeper learning of soft skills which are known to contribute to employability of graduates.
Articles
Through case studies of alternate reality games, filesharing networks, Twitter hashtags, and football (soccer) fandom, this forum article brings together four scholars to discuss the inherent tension between brands and fannish consumer practices. In particular, the authors focus on the interplay of power and control between the two parties, debating the extent to which fandom might be considered a negotiated form of brand ownership."
Papers
This paper considers SxSWi as a mega-event, and as a technological imaginary (Flichy 1999). We consider how it is given meaning by its consumers, and how this validation allows it to confer meaning on technology. We look at the ways in which SxSWi attendees construct their attendance through their own (social) media accounts, and how they construct their own media and their social position as digital workers through their attendance.
The research project focussed on a pocket–sized camcorder which was issued to staff and students involved in the study. Lecturers were requested to experiment with the technology to supplement their existing practice while students were asked to use the technology during their teaching placements. Both lecturers and students were encouraged to share video clips of their work on a specially created secure repository.
We believe this investigation is important as it examines the introduction of new technology from both a student and a teacher position. It examines a number of current developments and concerns including adoption of technology into the learning and teaching process; incorporation of web technology and social networking sites into a teaching programme; the implications of such developments when external organisations are involved; and the willingness of both lecturing staff and students to experiment with new technologies.
Students are assigned roles within teams as part of a class-wide project. As they pursue that project (‘stories’) they will encounter problems, and in attempting to solve those problems they will choose to sign up for one of 3-4 short teaching sessions (‘streams’) taught at the class’s halfway point. These ‘streams’ replace the traditional lecture-driven format, and can be delivered by students as well as tutors. In the final part of the class, students rejoin their teams and exchange learning.
This structure is being proposed as a way of addressing issues of student motivation and engagement with learning. By scheduling the project work at the start of the class and as the driver of the process, teaching is related to students’ own problem context. By requiring students to make an active choice in the learning that they experience, we push them to explicitly opt-in to their learning, and identify its relevance; by giving different students different skills – and the opportunity to host their own ‘streams’ – we are encouraging peer-to-peer teaching.
See also:
Bore, I., & Hickman, J. (2013). Studying fan activities on Twitter: Reflections on methodological issues emerging from a case study on The West Wing fandom. First Monday, 18(9).
Bore, I., & Hickman, J. (2013). Continuing The West Wing in 140 characters or less: Improvised simulation on Twitter. Journal of Fan Studies, 1(2).
Our response to this was to destroy the project and renew it: BiNS was closed through an elaborate online performance only to be reborn as Paradise Circus – an ‘ongoing love letter to a battered city’ which seeks to challenge both the official record of Birmingham and the diminished nature of the city’s alternative public sphere.
In this practice-based case study we will discuss how we maintain and renew a sense of critical distance from events within an urban sphere and their media coverage, while also existing personally within those events. We will discuss how we seek to use new technologies to constantly reframe our work as a space for critique, protest and subversion despite it being an attractive target for co-option because of the city’s practices and discussion of ‘the digital’.
The unconference format can be particularly linked to digital culture as it is often used by communities of practice whose principal links are rooted in social media. In some ways we could argue that the format remediates the online discussions of forums, blog comments and tweets in a physical space. As such, the unconference discourse has historically drawn on certain discursive repertoires from digital culture: hacker culture, openness (of source and of data), and collaboration. As unconferencing has become more popular the model has been appropriated more widely - it has become something of a buzzword in events - and this appropriation causes some tension if the unconferencing discourse is seen to be misunderstood.
In this paper we discuss the unconference discourse with reference to a series of ethnographic studies covering a range of unconference events. We explore the networks and communities that gather at these events, and the ways in which information is shared and knowledge is constructed through participants’ collaboration in the event. We consider the extent to which unconferencing is an activist discourse and examine, through a detailed case study of a disputed event, the struggle to retain its oppositional position against mainstream appropriation.
Drawing on a focus group with independent (grassroots and community) hyperlocal practitioners, I show how our understanding of hyperlocal draws upon the repertoires of a number of media discourses and how those producers negotiate when, why and the extent to which they align themselves with the field.
By demonstrating the fractured nature of hyperlocal media in this way I hope to contribute to the ongoing policy debates related to this emerging field, as well as other policy concerns such as community media which has, to some extent, been subsumed by the attention given to hyperlocal.
The project brought two groups of students together to collaborate towards a common purpose whilst working towards different learning outcomes. Through an exploration of a shared problem space, we pushed students to explicitly opt-in to their learning, and identify its relevance to themselves.
Students were assigned roles within teams as part of a class-wide project. As they pursued that project (‘stories’) they encountered problems, and in attempting to solve those problems they chose to sign up for one of 3-4 short teaching sessions (‘streams’) taught at the class’s halfway point. These ‘streams’ replaced the traditional lecture-driven format, and were delivered by students as well as tutors. In the final part of the class, students rejoined their teams to exchange learning.
This paper builds upon previous work (Bradshaw, Hickman & Jones, 2012) which discussed the framing of the project and early findings from a student questionnaire. In this paper we build upon this work and provide further evaluation of the project through a discussion of students’ achievements at assessment and student focus groups.
Although there were some issues presented by this approach, our findings indicate that this approach was particularly useful for developing soft skills that relate to employability. The overall quality of student work was also enhanced through the process, which provided an indication that learning had become deeper.
Stories & Streams activity is already being planned at other media schools and a resource book will be made available to CEMP delegates who wish to adopt this approach.
Bibliography
Bradshaw, Hickman & Jones, 2012. Stories & Streams. Exploring Collaborative Learning In Media Studies Programmes, 3rd May 2012, Winchester, UK.
Students are assigned roles within teams as part of a class-wide project. As they pursue that project (‘stories’) they will encounter problems, and in attempting to solve those problems they will choose to sign up for one of 3-4 short teaching sessions (‘streams’) taught at the class’s halfway point. These ‘streams’ replace the traditional lecture-driven format, and can be delivered by students as well as tutors. In the final part of the class, students rejoin their teams and exchange learning.
This structure is being proposed as a way of addressing issues of student motivation and engagement with learning. By scheduling the project work at the start of the class and as the driver of the process, teaching is related to students’ own problem context. By requiring students to make an active choice in the learning that they experience, we push them to explicitly opt-in to their learning, and identify its relevance; by giving different students different skills – and the opportunity to host their own ‘streams’ – we are encouraging peer-to-peer teaching.
The central case study is a film making competition called Swede It! which ran in early 2011 to promote a leisure complex in Birmingham. Swede It! was designed firstly through understanding the social object that was relevant to the campaign, and secondly through an understanding of fan culture. The tendency of fans to want to make media products and demonstrate fandom was built into the Swede It! concept during design. The case study outlines how fan activity was engendered by Swede It!, how such activity was then situated within and used by the leisure complex's
own media products, and was therefore articulated towards the leisure complex's promotional goals.
The paper outline some of the background to the theory of social objects, and explains why it is a useful way to think through a social media marketing campaign using this idea. The paper also offers some new possibilities for developing the theory and the way in which we approach social media campaigns.
N.B. Please see Journal Articles for published outputs from this project.
The MA Social Media was launched by Birmingham School of Media in September 2009. As the first course of its type, the programme attracted a great deal of media attention. The small cohort of students in the first intake have also attracted the interest of employers. By March 2010 half of the cohort were living and working away from campus, and completing the taught elements of the course through informal distance learning. This created a number of issues around group work (coherence and completion), the development of lesson content, and the provision of useful support, feedback and tutorials for students. These problems occurred during the course and thus required an immediate response; Web 2.0 technologies and the institutional Virtual Learning Environment seemed to afford solutions. Students were allowed the opportunity to develop their own processes to manage the issues, leading to innovative uses of services such as Twitter, Google Wave, Skype and email.
Using a range of analytical tools we document and evaluate the processes employed by the students, including an investigation of technologies which were rejected by them. We conclude that online support for near-distance learning can
Hickman, J. & Kane, D.: Supporting students’ learning with web 2.0 Page 1 of 1
be problematic and what is needed is a consultative, or even student led approach to eLearning design. Furthermore, we suggest that eLearning is not an ICT product to be procured, but a set of processes which can be enabled through existing free, online, Web 2.0 services. While this is a general issue within education, we feel that it is particularly pertinent to media studies, which consistently finds itself at the forefront of technological advances in communication.
Our examination is informed by previous research at Birmingham City University into the uses of web 2.0 technologies within teaching and learning, based on a concern that new technologies are often adopted because of their 'newness' rather than their contribution to the learning and teaching process. This work highlighted the importance of the student voice in determining the best use of technological innovation, and the problems of imposing normative uses of technology within teaching and learning.
The use of hash tags is widespread throughout the Twitter network, and the concept now finds a place in wider media discourses, for example news media often report on coalitions and campaigns which have formed online around certain hash tags (e.g. Sweney & Busfield 2010). As hash tagging becomes a common activity, the process becomes changed and is acted out in a variety of forms. Parallel networks, speaking through disparate discourses employ hash tagging to different ends, and may come into conflict when the resources (in this case a combination of letters after the # symbol) become scarce.
This paper considers social practices and discourses of hash tag- ging. Drawing on recent studies into twitter activity (Boyd et al 2010; Anstead & O’Loughlin 2010) I map out the various uses to which the hash tag is employed, analysing relevant case studies. Modes of hash tagging include: humour (memes, pastiche), events, campaigns & awareness, curation & archive, and branding & corpo- ratisation. Humour and events tags are shown to be instrumental in generating and maintaining social capital (Bourdieu 1986); cam- paign & awareness tags are seen as a way of realising social capital for a social benefit, while participation in tagged conversation is suggested as a means to access the shared capital; curation & ar- chive tags are seen as being pragmatic in their outcomes; branding & corporatisation tags are similarly pragmatic but with an implied function of being exploited for commercial ends.
In particular I shall draw on an analysis of activity around the hash tag #esm in January 2010. The hash tag was subject to a dispute between two rival groups, with branding & corporatisation at the heart of their dispute. The confusion was seized upon by Twitter members outside of these groups as a subject of humour, with the hash tag employed in a memetic mode.
I conclude that this categorisation of hash tags may prove useful in analysing twitter activity as it will provide a basis for understanding the underlying intention behind the uses of hash tags. I also suggest that, as corporate culture and promotional discourses embrace social media activity more readily, disputes and issues of ownership are likely to occur.
Anstead, N. & O’Loughlin, B. (2010) The Emerging Viewertariat: Explaining Twitter Responses to Nick Griffin’s Appearance on BBC Question Time
UEA School of Political, Social and International Studies Working Paper Series Number 1: February, 2010
Bourdieu, Pierre (1986) The Forms of Capital in Richardson, J (ed) (1986) Hand- book of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education Connecticut, Green- wood Press.
Boyd, D. Golder,S. & Lotan, G. (2010) “Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter.” HICSS-43. IEEE: Kauai, HI, January 6. Sweney, M & Busfield, S. (2010) BBC to close two radio stations and halve web output after Tory pressure, The Guardian. 26th February 2010. Accessed at
http://bit.ly/9UST3R on 27/02/10
'Help Me Investigate' is an online tool which aims to help individuals "organise and pursue questions of public interest you think should be investigated" (Help Me Investigate, 2010). It provides tools and seeks to build a user base to effect the process of "crowdsourcing" (Brogan & Smith, 2009) of investigations which might normally be within the realm of investigative journalists.
The cost of "quality" journalism has recently been cited by Rupert Murdoch as part of his defence of paywall technology (Bunz, 2009). The crowdsourcing of investigations, which ostensibly offers free labour, challenges the orthodox view that news investigations are expensive. It also challenges the traditional notion of the "professional" investigative journalist, suggesting that we can all aspire to be in the elite cadre of newsmakers: we can be citizen investigative journalists.
Textually, Help Me Investigate presents itself using the genre codes and conventions of social networking.
Through a virtual ethnography I describe the process of an online investigation as it operates both within Help me Investigate, and within a wider ecology of social media (blogs, twitter and physical meet ups). I demonstrate the value of a distributed and layered network in leveraging social capital (Bourdieu, 1986) towards an investigative goal, and posit that distributed investigation, using free labour, can be both informed and valuable. While it is relatively easy for news media companies to profit from this crowdsourced activity, participants in the investigation do not go unrewarded; the social act of investigation enhances the aggregate social capital available within a network, but also confers individual benefits on those who take part."
This structure was proposed as a way of addressing issues of motivation and engagement with learning and as a response to the instrumental consumption of media education framed by the employability agenda; in action the structure actually enabled deeper learning of soft skills which are known to contribute to employability of graduates.
Through case studies of alternate reality games, filesharing networks, Twitter hashtags, and football (soccer) fandom, this forum article brings together four scholars to discuss the inherent tension between brands and fannish consumer practices. In particular, the authors focus on the interplay of power and control between the two parties, debating the extent to which fandom might be considered a negotiated form of brand ownership."