Prosumers of the Y generation are becoming more and more critical about top-down media and are willing to become an active part of content creation in the world around them, Peter Langmar tells us in this interview. With his new startup Brickflow, he wants to help this new generation taking online collaboration to the next level.As part of the Start-up Chile incubation program Brickflow is partnering with OuiShare to organize the first ever OuiShare Latin American Tour happening in August 2013. #OSLatamTour
When talking about collaborative consumption and production we tend to restrict our imagination to physical world actions like exchanging objects and sharing products and services. I suggest getting back to from where the open source movements come from and focus on collaborative creativity in an online context. Peter Langmar, expert in open and remix culture and CEO of Brickflow, a startup that just went live, describes the development of tools that make the remix culture flourish and make an attempt to imagine the next step of collaborative creativity. Sharing online content is one of the early bird areas of the collaborative economy. Can you explain briefly the main steps of its development? [caption id="attachment_9110" align="alignright" width="200"]
CC we are social / stefano maggi[/caption] The shift from broadcasting to participatory media and culture is a clearly noticeable trend of the last few decades. There used to be a top-down content industry: some key players pushing their own content to a larger public. But thanks to the web, participation and creation started to become democratized. It was revolutionized by Napster-like services at the end of the 90’s permitting rapid online file sharing between peers, later on followed by Kazaa and torrent. The web 2.0 revolution broadened the possibilities of peer-to-peer file sharing enabling easy content sharing for masses (blog engines, YouTube and Flickr). In the next step of its evolution, platforms like Facebook and Tumblr made it easy to share this content within your network. This is an ever-evolving and extremely rapidly developing segment of collaborative economy, functioning as a driver for the whole segment. How about the users? Are they the same as in the golden ages? Is this a real consumer trend? They are definitely not the same as in the very beginning. User-friendly technologies and the growing accessibility to smart devices enable more and more users to become active members of this participatory media culture. They are the so-called prosumers, people who do not only consume but also produce content online in a respective manner. A proactive and critical attitude against top-down content creation is the main characteristic of this segment. They share, reuse and remix online content in the frame of existing online solutions. The younger generation is clearly the most active in this sense as you can see on this graph. All together we count 150 million prosumers in the world and it is growing exponentially.
Do you think that today’s social media toolkit is collaborative and open enough? People have several tools that enable sharing, re-sharing and consuming content online. This is a good thing but it’s only the top of the iceberg. It is still very hard to find the personally relevant content, build on it and reuse it in an appropriate context. The reusability of content is a key element of the flourishing participatory and remix culture and there is still space for developing tools to encourage co-creation. Content gets stuck in different online feeds and it is hard to bring it together and build something upon it with peers.
The reusability of content is a key element of the flourishing participatory and remix culture...
How did you come up with this vision? I have a background in photography and media design and started researching the impacts of Flickr and Youtube-like services on media and visual culture. I was truly amazed by the ever-growing amount of high-quality social media content. For example, we saw the importance of citizen journalism after the Iranian elections in 2009. These experiences motivated me to get involved in several research projects related to cultural democracy and online participatory culture. Working in this field brought me closer to the free culture movement and I turned out to be a Creative Commons advocate. Among other activities, I have co-organized a CC festival, presented at the Free Culture Research Conference in 2010 and encouraged media professionals to use the CC licences. While I started to get a better understanding of this phenomena, I recognized the need for a more open and collaborative online environment and wanted to become actively involved by creating an appropriate tool. Hence you decided to turn your purely academic approach into a startup project. What happened? I was working at an idea incubator founded by a professor of Harvard in Paris when I was introduced to Mihaly Borbely. At the time he was working on an online content curation tool. It was an early stage idea but I really liked his idea. A couple of beers later it turned out that we shared the same vision about free and participatory culture. We therefore started working together on Brickflow. How Brickflow can bring forward collaborative creativity? Do you consider Brickflow as an online collaborative economy tool? Collaborative economy has to be considered in the broadest sense possible. I agree with the categories defined by OuiShare and I believe Brickflow is a tool on the crossroad of Collaborative Consumption (for online and social media content) and Collaborative Production built on remix culture between peers, while keeping in mind the importance of Open Knowledge. We create bridges between all social media platforms enabling users to reuse and build on any online content in a very simple and playful way. Brickflow goes beyond a simple ‘Like button’ and a ‘Share it! link’ and puts a focus on actively remixing user generated content. For us, this was the missing link from the social media segment of the collaborative economy. Let me explain: a few weeks ago pretty serious protests were going on in Turkey. National media neglected the events and no official media coverage was accessible about the riots. But no one took away people’s smartphones so the whole world was getting the latest information thanks to citizen journalism. Brickflow was able to aggregate content live from all major social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter based on a single hashtag or keyword, and show the world the protests in Turkey. Is Brickflow capable of changing how people co-create and remix online content? What impact are you expecting in online collaborative creativity? We encourage people to become more creative, while being critical about mainstream media and relying more on personal experiences. We want Brickflow to become an empowering tool for the Y generation and to enable them to become more active participants of their society working towards open democracy. Credit Picture: