Creative Collaboration and Online Social Media: Can Facebook be Used as a Tool to Support the Process of Collaborative Creation?

Abstract

Web 2.0 online social media tools have made it increasingly easy to communicate, cooperate, and collaborate with others online, and as such offer new frameworks for making creative work. Facebook claims that it helps members connect and share, but what if the people you want to connect and share with are your artistic collaborators? Can Facebook be used creatively, as a collaborative artistic environment? This article draws on a practical research project ‘Feedback’, carried out by the author in early 2010, exploring new methodologies for collaborative creation supported by online social media. The project focused on the creative use of Facebook as a tool for creative collaboration, establishing a possible working model of artistic collaboration using Facebook.