Inspiration, Socialization, and Skill Acquisition in an Amateur Multimedia Community

Online amateur multimedia communities are one of many places where informal, interest-driven learning is taking place. Therein, multimedia content creators can learn from one another and produce artifacts to share with fellow creators and others. This content analysis of forum postings in the Cold Hotdog community indicates that several factors serve as inspiration including cartoons, movies, and the encouragement of others, that self-deprecation, sarcasm, and humor are common, and that knowledge demonstrations, name-dropping, participation in the forums, and claims to methods of skill acquisition serve as status markers within the community. This analysis helps better understand the participants and one type of environment that one may encounter when trying to acquire and/or refine technical skills in a more informal, less-structured online environment. It is clear that community participants are responsible for not only learning and demonstrating technical skills but that they have to learn and demonstrate different social skills as well.