Qualitative Assessment of Contemporary Media Sharing Practices and Their Relationship to the sMS Platform

Abstract

Being a social species, humans sometimes desire to share information and to consume content as part of a group. A myriad of practical issues might however prevent people from physically congregating. The synchronous MediaSharing (sMS) framework attempts to remedy this inconvenience by supporting the real-time synchronization of multimedia content across dispersed locations. As such, it can be regarded as a social media consumption platform for geographically dislocated users. This paper presents the outcome of a two-fold prefatory qualitative assessment of the sMS application. A literature study was first conducted to gain insight in the contemporary (non-professional) practices of end-users with respect to the authoring, sharing and consumption of multimedia, as well as concerning their usage of digital social services like social networking sites. On the basis of focus group interviews, the findings from the desk research were then representatively verified and their relationship to the sMS framework was studied. The results reveal that users do recognize the need for an sMS-like application, that they generally appreciate its functionality and present feature collection, that the sMS service is largely compatible with or supplementary to their current habits, and that they would consider utilizing it in certain use cases.