Martin Douglas Hendry

What is it?

Tunepics is a new smartphone application that has been garnering a lot of attention from the press this week. It has been designed by the Innovate7 UK consultancy firm, lead by CEO Justin Cooke.

The premise of the app is that users are able to share images with each other in conjunction with 30 second clips of music. These previews are sourced from iTunes’ library of 35 million songs, allowing users to combine images with music for effect. As such – the application is only currently available on iOS devices at this time.

“MUSIC AND IMAGES BELONG TOGETHER

For the first time, share the true emotion of your moments by adding tunes to your pictures.
This is social media with a soundtrack.”

In addition to an image and a 30 second clip, the user is also able to use a colour/emotion wheel to categorize their own images; as well as respond to those posted by others with a predefined set of 16 sentiments. This allows users to respond with a number of affect categories to an image (e.g. “cool” “sad” “inspired”) in addition to a generic “like”.

This combination is the culmination of research undertaken by Innovate7 into the relationship between images, music and emotion – as well as a desire from the creators to expand upon the kinds of interaction that can take place between social sharers.

“When you get a notification saying that you made someone dance, or you made them happy, you get more feeling than when they just say they “liked” something of yours,”

– Nicola Peters, Director of Innovation and Experiences Innovate7

Aside from these core features, the app is appears largely similar to the popular application Instagram in its design and interactions – featuring square images, a number of post capture modifications that can be applied to the images (filters and some interesting weather effects) and analogous community features (hashtags, likes, comments, friends etc.) This allows for user familiarity. The aesthetic finish of the app however appears to be far more minimalistic – with thin icons, and an abundant use of white space.

Here Kate Bosworth has tagged a malancholic picture of the beach with an appropriate Bruce Springsteen song Image courtesy of The Guardian [http://tinyurl.com/nmd7uxj]

In an interview from Fast Company (from which the majority of this post is informed), Cooke stresses the importance of placing music alongside images:

“There’s so much that can’t be articulated in words that music captures so beautifully. This is a way of deepening the emotional context around a picture or experience.” 

Cooke also points out the fact that through posting music alongside images – Tunepics may also act as a music discovery tool – where a user is able to explore their friends images (or their own images) to identify music for specific moods. In addition to use of the iTunes API – each post on Tunepics includes a “buy on iTunes” link, allowing users to purchase music through the application. This is a pretty interesting USP – as if scaled, this could be a great way of differentiating the app from Instagram, as it would have a core music discovery function.

The upshot is the ability to communicate using Tunepics through the combination of an image, the music, the emotion “wheel” as well as image annotations.

Special thanks to FastCompany – the primary source for the material covered in this post. Please check out the original article here.

Why is it important?

If successful in practice Tunepics is a significant development in mobile photo-sharing for a number of critical reasons. Firstly, it expressly benefits from the effects of “media convergence” – an attribute intrinsic to digital new media. Secondly, it sets out to expand upon the kinds of gratification or reward which we are able to receive through photo sharing. In this way – it may be expanding upon the kinds of connection we can make through image-sharing Thirdly, it aims to allow users to share their experience with each other through a number of new dimensions – some of which are specifically for the purpose of tacit communication.

These are all pretty complicated ideas – so I will now break each of them down into more digestible chunks in turn!

Media convergence: a product of networked societies

Today we live in a world where the majority of the media we consume (Video, Images, Music etc.) is comprised of the same raw material – binary data. Digital media exists as a series of zeroes and ones at its most intrinsic level.

As a consequence of this – it has been proposed in theories covering new media (specifically Network Societies and the writing of Van Dijk and Castells) that as we progress with digital media it becomes increasingly entangled. This is in contrast to before where the progression of each form was on a distinct trajectory from each other.

We can understand this by comparing the development of chemical photography and vinyl records – progression in the first (i.e. colour processing) had no direct benefit to the fidelity or distribution of vinyl as these were entirely separate technologies. Whereas a comparable progression in new media has complimentary effects across other digital medias (e.g. increased ability to share digital images, directly increases the ability to send digital music).

As a consequence, theorists predicted that as new media progressed, we would be become increasingly comfortable with “multi-modal” media creation and consumption. In layman’s terms: we would be more familiar with using a range of different types of media in conjunction with each other. This is something we can observe freely in contemporary forms of social networking – where people connect with each other through a range of different media.

Tunepics takes advantage of this, by explicitly combining a range of different media types together as part of the user disclosures – and can be argued to be the technological validation of a predicted progression in digital media sharing.

Whether Tunepics successfully scales or not may determine the extent to which this continued “convergence” strikes a chord with users – or conversely, that they wish to keep these media expressions distinct from each other. Either way, it would be interesting to explore why this might be case.

TL;DR – Tunepics takes another step forward on a critically predicted path of sharing using combinations of different media.

Expanded gratifications: new ways to receive value from image sharing

Tunepics has been explicitly designed to increase the kinds of feedback we can receive from our images. In this case – alongside the traditional “like” button, which we may propose is used to simply reinforce the image; there is a colour wheel which allows users to respond to images (as well as categorize them) with a set of 16 emotional categories.

Above is an illustration of the Tunepics colour/emotion wheel, which allows users to categorise and respond to posts with emotions.

As such, there is a wider scope of possible non-verbal responses to posts – and more individualization of this kind of feedback. For example, consider a picture of two image-subjects celebrating a graduation – this could be responded with a range of responses – “Sad” “Inspired” “Hot” etc, without having to leave a comment to this effect. It is notable that perhaps this kind of interaction is something that would be more acceptable for a stranger to do non-verbally.

According to Innovate7 – this decision was made in order to increase the kinds of possible interactions that can happen through non-verbal responses. This allows people to react to images in a less constricted way (they use the example of responding to an image of someone who has passed away – where a “like” would be a problematic response).

Despite this, the Fast Company article points toward the notion that this information (which is largely possible to convey through verbal responses), could be of great use to marketers – especially in conjunction with the use of music.

Linking mood to music, with a visual cue is of course the holy grail for advertisers looking to leverage upon a certain emotion! (Imagine having the majority of a demographic commonly attach a popular song a distinct emotion – and think of the value to marketers.) It does of course harbour additional value to users as well, who might both share and react to images in a different way as a consequence of the new typology of responses they are able to receive from images. This is something that may be interesting to explore in additional detail.

TL;DR – Tunepics is designed in such a way to increase the kinds of interactions users can have with images through non-verbal inputs (namely the colour wheel). Whilst these kinds of interactions would be able to be completed through comments – the ability to complete them non-verbally may have additional value for marketers and users.

Tacit communication and image-sharing

One of the old adages commonly used when discussing photography is that “a picture says a thousand words“. However, what a picture says to one person – may be completely different to what it “says” to another, as the instance that it refers to may only be known to a select group of individuals.

This image taken from my Facebook to a stranger might propose that I am an experienced wood-worker. Those who know me would understand that the image is deeply ironic, as this is not the case at all.

For example, consider an image of a music festival containing the image-creator, a stranger and a group of friends (paired with a popular song). To the public viewing the image – who are not close friends with those depicted – the image may clearly “mean” that those involved had a good time at the festival. To those who know the people in the image, the meaning may be something else entirely – where the song being played refers to an in-joke only shared amongst intimate friends.

This dimension of communication is intrinsic to image sharing – as the “reading” of an image is largely subjective understanding. Thus, a large proportion of the way that we express ourselves with images is through “tacit” communication. That is implicit information that we have inferred from the image (whether from a position of knowing those involved or not).

Critically, in the Fast Company interview – tacit communication is referred to explicitly:

“… people are going to post something about the way that they feel that maybe only one other person will understand but hundreds of people might see.”

– Justin Cooke, CEO Innovate7

Thus, by providing users with more tools (image + sound + emotion tag) to do so, Innovate7 are explicitly attempting to negotiate an interesting space between public and private sharing – by proposing that this increases the ability for users to express private meanings through tacit sharing. Of particular note are friends knowledge of a users’ emotional response to certain things, or musical preferences (here of course they may be sharing ironically to friends – unbeknownst to public audiences).

Again, the extent to which users are willing and aware that they are able to do so remains to be seen – but regardless, this is a notable direction for the progression of social sharing around images to be taking.

TL;DR: The application gives users an increased number of tools to share their experiences with. The CEO of Innovate7 notes in the interview with Fast Company that this could foster “secret interactions”, which are in essence a way to share privately in public (where a post means something different to certain, privileged audiences).

How might it affect the social camera?

To recap – Tunepics may influence how we share images social in three principle ways.

1/ It represents a continued move towards “multi-modal” media sharing, something that users are increasingly becoming more comfortable as new media continues to converge.

2/ It has made significant effort to create new ways in which we can interact with each other surrounding images non-verbally. Whilst these interactions (i.e. responding to an image as “sad” / “inspiring” rather than “like”) could be completed verbally – there is value for both the user and marketers in enacting in this way.

3/ Through providing users with the ability to post images alongside music and an emotion tag – the application greatly increases the users’ ability to communicate tacitly to selected audiences whilst still sharing in public spaces (as privileged audiences such as friends are better able to infer from the additional information provided.)

In conclusion, Tunepics proposes some interesting progressions upon contemporary image-sharing which touch upon a range of areas identified currently through my research. If adopted as a new paradigm of image sharing, there are a number of critical implications which will be covered in more detail within my thesis. More soon!