Second Screen User Profiling and Multi-level Smart Recommendations in the context of Social TVs

In the context of Social TV, the increasing popularity of first and second screen users, interacting and posting content online, illustrates new business opportunities and related technical challenges, in order to enrich user experience on such environments. SAM (Socializing Around Media) project uses Social Media-connected infrastructure to deal with the aforementioned challenges, providing intelligent user context management models and mechanisms capturing social patterns, to apply collaborative filtering techniques and personalized recommendations towards this direction. This paper presents the Context Management mechanism of SAM, running in a Social TV environment to provide smart recommendations for first and second screen content. Work presented is evaluated using real movie rating dataset found online, to validate the SAM's approach in terms of effectiveness as well as efficiency.Comment: In: Wu TT., Gennari R., Huang YM., Xie H., Cao Y. (eds) Emerging Technologies for Education. SETE 201

Impact of Social Media on TV Content Consumption: New Market Strategies, Scenarios and Trends

The mass adoption of Social Media together with the proliferation and widely usage of multi-connected companion devices have tremendously transformed the TV/video consumption paradigm, opening the door to a new range of possibilities. This Special Issue has aimed at analyzing, from different point of views, the impact of Social Media and social interaction tools on the TV/video consumption area. The targeted topics of this Special Issue and a general overview of the accepted articles are provided in this Guest Editorial

Socialising around media. Improving the second screen experience through semantic analysis, context awareness and dynamic communities

SAM is a social media platform that enhances the experience of watching video content in a conventional living room setting, with a service that lets the viewer use a second screen (such as a smart phone) to interact with content, context and communities related to the main video content. This article describes three key functionalities used in the SAM platform in order to create an advanced interactive and social second screen experience for users: semantic analysis, context awareness and dynamic communities. Both dataset-based and end user evaluations of system functionalities are reported in order to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of the components directly involved and the platform as a whole

Online and offline rock music networks: a case study on Liverpool, 2007-2009

This thesis explores the relationship between the online and offline presence and activity of contemporary indie rock bands in Liverpool. It addresses two main questions: firstly, how should the relationship of music, place, and social groups be described and understood in the age of the Internet; and secondly, what can research on local music making suggest about the relationship between online and offline worlds. These questions are addressed through ethnographic research conducted between 2007-2009. The research involved qualitative analysis of online content, discourse, and connections related to Liverpool indie bands and music events, as well as first-hand observation of offline events and interviews with musicians. On the basis of this, the thesis proposes two main arguments: Firstly, online presentation and interaction surrounding bands and events are closely connected to offline events, places, and personal relationships. Local music ‘scenes’ must therefore be understood as both online and offline, and their temporal and spatial (self-)positioning in online space can only be understood with reference to offline places and temporal dynamics. Secondly, the ‘network’ is a useful concept for describing and analysing the relationship of online and offline worlds. It is conceptualised in the thesis as the dynamic set of active, enacted, and negotiated connections among those participating in music making. This conceptualisation enables the description of the social world of participants in music making within a particular local environment, which at the same time branches out globally through the active collective online presence of these participants. The analysis of a band’s network structures enables the identification of both its individual characteristics and collective-oriented ties along such lines as genre and style, career stage and success, and aims and strategies. The network complements the notion of the ‘scene,’ which is defined by an expressed and represented coherence with regard to the aspects of genre aesthetics and ethics; locality; discursive participation and identification; and personal relationships. Moreover, the analysis shows that online technology has provided new means for music networks to function as cultural resource and form part of identities related to music making and place

Social Capital Online

"What is ‘social capital’? The enormous positivity surrounding it conceals the instrumental economic rationality underpinning the notion as corporations silently sell consumer data for profit. Status chasing is just one aspect of a process of transforming qualitative aspects of social interactions into quantifiable metrics for easier processing, prediction, and behavioural shaping. A work of critical media studies, Social Capital Online examines the idea within the new ‘network spectacle’ of digital capitalism via the ideas of Marx, Veblen, Debord, Baudrillard and Deleuze. Explaining how such phenomena as online narcissism and aggression arise, Faucher offers a new theoretical understanding of how the spectacularisation of online activity perfectly aligns with the value system of neoliberalism and its data worship. Even so, at the centre of all, lie familiar ideas – alienation and accumulation – new conceptions of which he argues are vital for understanding today’s digital society.

The Newspaper Comic Strip in the Making of American Mass Culture, 1900-1935

In the first third of the twentieth century, the newspaper comic strip took America by storm. Within a decade of the first single panel ‘funny’ appearing in 1896, comics had become a firm feature in American newspapers. Comics quickly spread across the United States, meaning Americans from vastly different walks of life could consume the same narratives simultaneously. This rapid spread was aided by the explosion of syndication in the 1910s, and the comics acquired enormous cultural salience. Comic artists –whose portrayal of mainstream life was driven in part by the demands of the syndicates to maximise their market –increasingly aimed to appeal to Americans from a wide range of social backgrounds and wished to avoid alienating readers by covering any topics that could be deemed offensive. As a result, they inadvertently created a normative depiction of American society centred around extremely narrow cultural conceptions of a white middle class, which excluded Black Americans and shored up a racialized hierarchy. Instead of engaging with Progressive political discourse the comics sought to smooth over difficult racial issues by ignoring and excluding them. This thesis explores the evolution and impact of newspaper comic strips on American popular culture, arguing that they played a critical role in the wider consolidation of American mass culture in this period, despite being largely overlooked by historians. It uses extensive archival resources to detail the early development of the comics industry, and the dynamics of the syndicates. It then goes on to analyse the narratives of a dozen comics over a 35-year period (over 26,000 individual strips) in order to uncover the complicated and often profoundly satirical way that the comics dealt with issues around race, gender and particularly class and social status. Lastly, it explores the impact of the comics on American culture, including other forms of popular culture, advertising and consumer goods and language and dialect

Video Vortex reader : responses to Youtube

The Video Vortex Reader is the first collection of critical texts to deal with the rapidly emerging world of online video – from its explosive rise in 2005 with YouTube, to its future as a significant form of personal media. After years of talk about digital convergence and crossmedia platforms we now witness the merger of the Internet and television at a pace no-one predicted. These contributions from scholars, artists and curators evolved from the first two Video Vortex conferences in Brussels and Amsterdam in 2007 which focused on responses to YouTube, and address key issues around independent production and distribution of online video content. What does this new distribution platform mean for artists and activists? What are the alternatives