Has Social Media Changed YOU?

Terry in his writing “A Citizen Journalism Primer” suggested that in countries that are not democratic, or recently become democratic and where there is a history of indirect or direct state control over official media sources, there is an indication that the Internet has a great significance as an alternative source of news and information.

After the period of New Order (1998), there has been a significant rise of Internet use in Indonesia. On the top of that, there has been an explosion of independent journalism. McNair in his book “Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News and Power in a Globalised World” pointed out that Indonesia is moving from the age of information scarcity to the age of information abundance.

Blog has become a tool for instantly publishing thoughts and opinions, sharing information, and conducting Internet businesses. Blog has also become an important source of news along side traditional mainstream media.

Besides blog, there has also been a remarkable expansion on the use of online social networking websites, Friendster was the first social networking website that has gained popularity among Indonesians. According to Hit Search on 10th April 2008, 20% of 20 million Internet Users in Indonesia visited Friendster and 40% of them had Friendster accounts.

After Friendster, the Indonesians are moving swiftly to Facebook. Facebook considers Indonesia as the fastest growing country in Southeast Asia with 645% growth rate in 2008, outpacing the growths in China, India, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore.

The question here is whether Indonesia is ready and steady with fast pacing of the new media development.

Learning from the recent shocking news, I learn that social media has grown into a powerful and serious tool with a tremendous potential to influence and change one’s destiny – both in positive and negative ways - in a modest country like Indonesia.

MoDe Workshop

I participated in the MoDe (Mobiling and Designing) workshop, which was conducted by the team from Initiative Information Studies, University of Tokyo lead by Professor Shin Mizukoshi at Media Lab on the 20th March 2006.

MoDe project is an experimental project to investigate a new type of media research linking analytical humanities and social scientific research to creative experimental research in fields such as media literacy, information design and media art. This project includes efforts to nurture public media literacy on mobile media, as well as the development and implementation of practical programs (educational materials, curricula, workshop) in order to reinvigorate public communication.

This research group has been developing their own framework of methodology that is called “media probe”, which combines activities, such as information design, workshop program, media literacy program and ethnographic research. Starting from designing media, they have been experimenting new ways of media communication based on critical views to the current mode of media. They design a new media and gave it to the users to be tested. The new media aims to provoke user reaction so that they may express themselves through that media. After a period of time, they gather the traces of the users' activities left in these medias. Redesign media based on the information from the probes and iterate the next cycle are the next steps of the design process.

In this workshop, they particularly introduce the Cambrian game. Cambrian was a combination of old and new methods. Renga, which is considered as an old method, is an old Japanese series of poetries, which link as inspiration of emergence and whose space focused in sessions. The new method that they use is blogging.

In Cambrian game, renga was used as inspiration to share interesting digital images to the the community. The game allows players to submit their own "leaf" in form of pictures, images, music/sounds, movies, commentaries to a virtual tree using their mobile devices or PC. The players can link a new leaf to any inspiring leaf. A leaf can trigger some leaves which will grow the tree explosively.

Playing Cambrian game has a lot of similarities with blogging. The game encourages individual to share their personal thoughts, memories and favorites in public spaces, in particular using their mobile devices.

From learning point of view, I think the game has a lot of potentials in supporting the process of idea generation, mind mapping, data gathering, etc.

Moreover, the game can be used as means to start communication in the community. People start to get to know each other by playing the Cambrian game. In one of their workshop, the research groups extended the format of file sharing from digital pictures to movies and music. Combined with other technology, such as QR-code and RFID, further interaction and sharing information techniques can be developed further.

From game to learning

I recently attended an interesting workshop on Cambrian Game. The game allows players to submit their own leaf in form of pictures, images, music/sounds, movies, commentaries to a virtual tree using their mobile devices or PC. The players can link a new leaf to any inspiring leaf. A leaf can trigger some leaves which will grow the tree explosively.

Playing Cambrian game has a lot of similarities with blogging. The game encourages individual to share their personal thoughts, memories and favorites in public spaces, in particular using their mobile devices.

The game has a lot of potentials in supporting educational process. Some learning activities that can potentially be developed further using this game include “mind mapping”, “idea generation” and “data gathering/collection” activities.