By: erhardt

erhardt — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:19:29 +0000

This is a rich topic with a nice, systematic research plan. I think you want to assess the features of the esports tools like Twitch where they are building a business on engagement with live streaming content. There has been some predecessors at the lab like Drew Harry’s ROAR (http://web.media.mit.edu/~dharry/) that might be worth investigating. As for the question of curators, I think you need to wonder what you could give to an algorithm (like ROAR) and what you might want a direct community manager’s thoughtfulness to be in charge of. Where does that person derive their authority and what happens if the community feels they aren’t serving the community’s interest? You could think of examples like Wikipedia’s hierarchy to understand what the rules and norms are for that work in a networked public sphere. Lastly, I think the crisis response space is the place where this is most interesting right now. Reddit Live was created following the findbostonbomber subreddit’s problematic online vigilantism. But you should spend some time, perhaps talking to Willow, on the core idea that crisis focused attention can be used whether its from a livestream and participants tweet out information (like I did the night Occupy Boston was raided) or a police scanner and participants log things in GoogleDocs (as I did the day of the Boston Bombing). How does that sustain outside of crisis moments? Does livestreaming really only work well when its a crisis, when we are focusing on the event? Grisha Asmolov has them thoughts on this with regard to the Virtual Rynda system he created following the successful of the Russian Fires Map system: http://book.globaldigitalactivism.org/chapter/virtual-rynda-the-atlas-of-help-mutual-aid-as-a-form-of-social-activism/

Comments on: Re-imagining Civic Livestreaming

By: erhardt