The symposium concerning modern socialmedia will be held Martch 13th, 2010. The symposium is organized by the project regarding communities and ICT of Tokyo City University as shown in the next section, collaborating with Yokohama Community Design Lab.
Symposium organizer
The project concerning social media and community building organizes the symposium. This project is titled ‘the design of communication platforms in Newtown utilizing ICT: Gathering local information, and promoting and supporting local activities via web2.0 technologies’. It is conducted by the Faculty of Environmental and Information Studies of Tokyo City University. The project is funded by Modern Good Practice (GP) Program of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT ).
The details of the project are shown in the following site.
http://gp-public.sv.yc.tcu.ac.jp/english-site
The background and the purpose of the symposium
Modern days can be regarded as the period when wildfire activities (Engestrom) are expanding more and more. The term wildfire activity refers to the phenomenon that distributed, local activities, communities are shaped everywhere simultaneously and intertwine each other in various ways.
In wildfire activities, on the contrary to the topdown bureaucratic organization, distributed activities and communities are locally shaped and mutually interconnected in complex ways such as rhizome. The activities of red cross, skate boarding, graffiti and community building by local people themselves are the prototypical examples of wildfire activities.
Socialmedia in web and mobile is accelerating expanding of wildfire activities and of complex interconnections among activities, communities and people. Socialmedia shapes hybrid social space combined with wildfire activities in various places such as streets, local areas, and individual rooms.
The examples of shaping hybrid social space can be shown in the activities of community building by local people, in the cultural consumption and production in communities of subculture such as Otaku and Geek. These are, rather, the limiting cases of shaping hybrid social space. However, it seems that we can see the futures of hybride social spaces and of wildfire activities.
Thus, the purposes of symposium are, first of all, to make visible hybrid social spaces in various modern wildfire activities. Second, it is to clarify how the future design of hybrid social spaces are, base on the field research on concrete hybrid social spaces and on the case analysis of practices of development of socialmedia.
The symposium are composed of five parts shown in the following.
Part 1
Socialmedia and wildfire activities in USA
Part 2
Socialmedia and wildfire activities in local communities
Part 3
Hybrid social space as the place of production and consumption in subcultural activities
Part 4
Hybrid social space and wildfire activities as a design of learning environment
Poster Session and lightning talk
In the poster session, the the result of the project concerning social media in local communities will be presented. The posters web and mobile systems developed by students of Tokyo City University and the students’ practices of community building that utilize the web and mobile systems. The lightning talk session will be held as well.
