Mobile media sharing in large-scale events

Abstract

ity of mobile phones equipped with digital cameras calls for investigating mobile media applications beyond current approaches as MMS (multimedia messaging service), mobile instant messaging, and blogging. In particular we maintain that accurate studies of specific settings can help the emergence of novel approaches that better support people in producing and sharing mobile media. Nowadays large-scale events are prime social, economical, medial phenomena ranging from sport events (e.g., the Olympics), festivals (rock, cultural, folklore), to celebrations and carnivals. Interesting characteristics are the spatial distribution, the duration that extends over days, and the fact that such events are set apart from daily life. Spectators and visitors gather in groups investing resources (time, energy, money) to co-experience something “extra ordinary.” From our fieldwork in ongoing projects, we have an initial understanding of the spectator’s experience in distributed sport events [2]. Spectators are actively engaged in staging their experiences: navigating and selecting places, settling, creating multimedia records, expressing group image (some wear “uniforms”), and interacting within their groups and with strangers. In this context mobile devices can be considered beyond person-to-person messaging and beyond passive consumption of multimedia content. Our field studies with mobile camera phones showed how spectators co-experience events in groups, how mobile imaging can be a participative practice that is enhancing the event’s experience on-site, rather than merely documenting it or communicating it to others. Novel applications can be specifically used to support different aspects of the experience of the spectatorship, such as maintaining relations to a social network (group’s co-experiencing of the event), or maintaining awareness and engagement to the event (enhancing event presence). These findings indicated the need for alternative approaches and informed the development of mGroup, a client-server application for groups of spectators to combine co-production and sharing of mobile media on site with real-time media from event organisers.