African Americans and mobile video: exploring Black cultural practice on Vine

This study explores Black cultural practice on the mobile video platform Vine, a six-second micro-video editing mobile application. The purpose of this research is to critically examine how African Americans embraced social video through Vine and how Black cultural practice is enacted within the political economy of the mobile video landscape. This dissertation employs the use of Qualitative Content Analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) as a means of systematic yet adaptive exploration of the cultural phenomena transpiring in Vine videos, and Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (Brock, 2018) to establish context and meanings of the descriptions that emerge through the content analysis. The analysis demonstrates Vine videos produced by Black users were important to Vine’s success. Videos fall into the following categories: everyday life, celebrity cameo, content remix, Black boy joy, comedy & jokes “the dozens”, music & dance, tech-speak, and socio-cultural commentary. Black content creators leveraged punchy storytelling to compel the world’s internet users to watch and adopt Vine. This practice is defined as Black digital efficacy in the study, the process by which technology is given direction, labor, and Black aesthetics to propel it forward

Local Vocal: Where Design Thinking Meets Social Media and Creates Civic Engagement and Social Entrepreneurship

Local Vocal is a web application that uses design thinking and social media to foster collaborative civic engagement and social entrepreneurship to build stronger local communities. Local Vocal provides a platform for community members to create civic projects, share ideas, receive feedback and contribute to local projects through funding or time contribution. By using the five (5) modes of design thinking (empathy, define, ideate, prototype, test) created by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, Local Vocal propels each project through a similar five-stage development process to mature the plan for funding. Local Vocal connects the community through commenting and rating mechanisms common in social media; with the help of Local Vocal, projects become more than ideas. The web application aims to support community engagement in the online space, encouraging citizens to take their opinions and views from ideation to creation with the goals of improving the communities in which they reside or operate. The purpose of this paper is to present a design exploration of Local Vocal which includes the five modes of design thinking and how they have been incorporated into the web application, the paper will also discuss related work from projects already being implemented in the area of civic engagement and crowdfunding, and will conclude with considerations for future work.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe