Playfulness

by asi

While I don’t have a Flickr account myself (well, I do have but didn’t find the time to upload my pics yet…) I am a big fan of it because for me, everything that is beautiful in life and web 2.0 (literaly) can be found there – community, creativity, sharing etc. Its all there.

There’s a lot of research and conversation around UGC (user generated content) both from academic and marketing point of views. Why we create content is one of the most interesting questions around these days. Take tagging for example. We use it for future retrieval, contribution and sharing, attracting
attention, play and competition, self presentation and opinion
expression among other things. We build and exercise our identities through blogs and profiles etc. and we open ourselves to unknown audiences, unconsciously blurring the boundaries between the public and the private, between the personal and the social. [I wonder if anyone already explored the theme of immortality. While in the past only authors and artists had the opprtunity to immortalise through their art, today, every one has a voice and every one has the opportunity to live a residue of him/herself out there in the endless digital space whether through blogs, through YouTube or the Yahoo! Time Capsule].

Now where was I before I carried away with all these random musings?…yup, Flickr. What I really like about Flickr is all the little communal fun stuff thats happening there. It would be interesting to explore the idea of photos (not of self but extensions of self)  as identity markers and as conversational properties (I’m sure Danah has written something about that).

Now take this thing I found today – whats in your bag? To date, more than 4000 people took the effort to expose the contents of their bags to the public, and out of such a silly game, a fascinating personal-cultural image/mirror has emerged – Kind of ‘Tell me whats in your bag and I’ll tell you who you are’.

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Flick through the pages, read the conversations around it….ita all about playfulness with a touch of voyeurism (or ‘striptease’ on behalf of the bag’s owner….)