Web-Mediated Communication: in Search of Togetherness

This paper introduces a community-based video sharing environment to support asynchronous communication among heterogeneous participants within a restricted social community. Unlike other community sharing efforts, our work is predicated on the desire to strengthen existing strong ties among group members, in which existing relationships can be nurtured. Using the example of a high school concert as a starting point, this paper discusses a sharing framework in which highly personalized music videos are constructed from a collection of independent parent-made recordings. The environment addresses a series of parent needs for producing tailored presentations with custom features, based on ‘safe sharing’ of common assets. We report on the user needs determined by a number of focus groups and on a web-based environment that can be used to manage the complex inter-personal relationships and time-variant social contexts with a community of diverse (but related) users.