danah boyd (2011) and Mizuko Ito (2008) outline a
framework for thinking about social media apps as ‘networked publics’ which are
structured by technologies. A networked public can be seen as a simultaneously
constructed ‘space’ as well as an imagined collective that emerges as a result
of the intersection of people, technology and practice (boyd, 2011). Networked publics have many functions,
allowing people to gather for social, cultural and civic purposes and highlight
the growing element of engagement, indeed a sense of activism, with digitally
networked media (Ito, 2008). boyd observes four key features that play a salient role in the curating of
art on social media: the creation of profiles, the ability to make friend
lists, and tools for public communications such as commenting boxes. In addition
content on networked publics is made out of ‘bits’. These bits [1] demonstrate
a persistence, replicability, scalability and searchability which boyd labels as
‘affordances’. These affordances give networked publics a sense of dynamics
that affect their audiences, the boundaries in which the networked publics
operate and the blurring of the private and the public (boyd 2011, Ito 2008). Aggregation
of content, as well as ‘value at the edges’- a term referring to innovation - are
additional key trends (Ito, 2011) representing the commercial and innovative
drive of social media apps. These ‘niche’ apps, aimed at special
interest-groups support a popular shift in art curating, away from the traditional
museum walls.
Molz (2011), informed by behaviours displayed by tourists, suggests that travellers increasingly rely on online sources to develop an understanding of their destinations but also to keep better informed of how to get there, implying that the ‘moving, knowing, networking and interacting coalesce in interactive travel around three important modes of knowledge production: connectivity, collaboration and search’ (Molz 2011, p 89). Using their online skills to complement their physical mobility, the author observes that travellers are ‘constantly moving among overlapping virtual, imaginative, communicative and corporeal spaces of social interaction’ (Molz 2011, p 89). Travellers now comprehensively describe the world through social collaboration and by means of powerful search engines, huge amounts of data can be accessed, with powerful algorithms that can sort, correlate, categorise and rank, so therefore virtual worlds are shaping and accessing real worlds (Molz, 2011).
The participatory role can be
considered in the context of the mobility/mooring dialectic, whereby the input,
strategies and behaviour of the community could be regarded as a determinant
for mobility. The intimate (or distant) interaction of the social media curator
with the online galleries will direct further searches and uploads. The
rhizomatic appearances of the artworks give rise to further participation and networking,
with the artworks set loose.
[1] boyd's observations can be seen as complementary to Kallinikos et al, 2012, who identified pliable, interactive, programmable and distributed as the main functional profiles.
