Burst: Collaborative Curation in Connected Social Media Communities

TL;DR

Burst is a social media design enabling content sharing and curation across varied group sizes, fostering participatory culture through a mobile app demonstrated in a ten-day field study.

Contribution

Introduces Burst, a novel social media approach allowing content to be shared and curated across multiple group sizes, enhancing participatory engagement.

Findings

Burst enabled a participatory curation culture.

The mobile app facilitated content sharing across diverse groups.

Field study showed positive user engagement over ten days.

Abstract

Positive social interactions can occur in groups of many shapes and sizes, spanning from small and private to large and open. However, social media tends to binarize our experiences into either isolated small groups or into large public squares. In this paper, we introduce Burst, a social media design that allows users to share and curate content between many spaces of varied size and composition. Users initially post content to small trusted groups, who can then burst that content, routing it to the groups that would be the best audience. We instantiate this approach into a mobile phone application, and demonstrate through a ten-day field study (N=36) that Burst enabled a participatory curation culture. With this work, we aim to articulate potential new design directions for social media sharing.