Special Lecture

Context, Content, and Community: Mobile Social Media and the Future of the Internet

Thursday, April 26, 2007
3:30 pm to 5:00 pm
Marc Davis, Yahoo! Inc

With the advent of the cameraphone as a ubiquitous platform for media production, sharing, and reuse, we are transforming media participation on the personal, social, and global levels. We can now gather and correlate media metadata about the spatiotemporal context and social community of media capture and use it to enable people around the world to create, describe, find, share, and remix media content. To do so, we are engaged in the iterative design, development, and analysis of large scale 'sociotechnical' systems that will ultimately connect billions of humans, computational devices, and media assets into a global processing network. What the internet is and what it will become will be transformed by the creation of large scale mobile social media systems, in which we move from a web of stored documents to a live network connecting billions of people together across space and time. The design of these sociotechnical systems for mobile media participation requires us to rethink the core assumptions and boundaries of computer science, information science, social science, media studies, and design. The key intellectual shift reframes technological challenges for mobile media within social and humanistic understandings of information, communication, context, memory, and identity. As a result, by understanding mobile media technologies as sociotechnical systems that connect people to the spatiotemporal contexts of their activity and to each other, we also enable new technological innovations.

This talk will describe the concepts and methods we have developed to create interdisciplinary innovation in mobile media and social media research and design at: Garage Cinema Research in the UC Berkeley School of Information, the UC Berkeley Center for New Media, Yahoo! Research Berkeley, and Yahoo! Inc. We will also show mobile social media systems that leverage context, content, and community: the Mobile Media Metadata projects which pioneered context-aware mobile media tagging, sharing, content recognition, and data visualization; ZoneTag, a Web 2.0 version of context-aware mobile media tagging and sharing integrated into Flickr; and TagMaps, which enables the visualization and exploration of geocoded tags and photos on Flickr maps. We will also describe key challenges and opportunities for mobile social media in the coming years.

Marc Davis is Social Media Guru at Yahoo! Inc. His work focuses on creating the technology and applications that will enable daily media consumers to become daily media producers. His research encompasses the theory, design, and development of digital media systems that leverage contextual metadata and the power of community to enable people to produce, describe, share, and remix media. From 2002 to 2006, Marc Davis served as Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information where he directed Garage Cinema Research and co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for New Media. At Garage Cinema Research, Marc Davis and his students developed and deployed Mobile Media Metadata (MMM) prototypes for context-aware mobile media tagging and sharing, and technologies for video capture, tagging, and remixing. In 2005, Marc Davis worked with Yahoo! Inc. and UC Berkeley to create Yahoo! Research Berkeley where he served as Founding Director. In 2006, Marc Davis joined Yahoo! as Social Media Guru to formulate strategy and take action to invent and realize the future of social media and mobile media. Marc Davis earned his B.A. in the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, his M.A. in Literary Theory and Philosophy at the University of Konstanz in Germany, and his Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory.

Last updated:

March 26, 2015