Media Lifecycle and Content Analysis in Social Media Communities

This paper examines the role of content analysis in media-rich online communities. We highlight changes in the multimedia generation and consumption process that has occurred the past decade, and discuss several new angles this has brought to multimedia analysis research. We first examine the content production, dissemination and consumption patterns in the recent social media studies literature. We then propose an updated conceptual summary of media lifecycle from a previous research column by Chang. We present an update list of impact criteria and challenge areas for multimedia content analysis. Among the three criteria, two are existing but with new problems and solutions, one is new as a results of the community-driven content lifecycle. We present three case studies that addresses the impact criteria, and conclude with an outlook for emerging problems.