In the debate over whether Scorched.TV really is social media, I was reminded of this line from one of my favourite movies, The Princess Bride.
Not content with taking Channel 9’s word for it, I decided to check out the Scorched.TV site and upload a video of my own. Unfortunately, even when I follow the directions provided by the "EP of CPN" (that is, the executive producer of a fictional news network), the best I could do was to send them an email with my story idea. This is hardly social media.
Social media is relatively simple … and it looks like the slide below. The way this plays out, however, is complicated — and is most articulately explained in Michael Wesch’s definition of "context collapse" which I talked about here. The defining feature, however, is participation of "users", or "consumers" or "people like me". And until you have those folks involved, creating, changing, mashing and even destroying, then in my book, you don’t have social media.
Thank you for the apt Princess Bride reference! You totally made my day.
Hi There
We have been getting lots of feedback about the social networking side of Scorched. We have had quite a lot of videos sent to us by users that are in-story.
It is really easy to upload a video. You simply load it up to blip.tv and send us the link. We’ll then upload it. We would have loved to have built an upload engine in to the site, but we just didn’t have the time or budget and we figured that it was more sensible to use existing video players.
In terms of the level of interaction, we are getting loads of e-mails which is great. And we expect over time (and once we have a little more time) that the level of interactivity with the audience will grow. Most importantly we are wanting people to contribute in-story. As in, in a drought ravages Australia in 2012. We were inspired by World Without Oil amongst other sites.
Look forward to seeing more dialogue about our site. All criticism and ideas welcome. We are at the beginning of a long journey that has already had a five year gestation.
Best
MG
Producer, Director
Scorched