Periscope

 I clicked on a link from one of my RSS feeds that was discussing the challenges that teenage girls go through not only in the U.S. but all over the world, especially when it comes to equality in education.  This article was really an announcement for a series that the public radio was doing on a perspective through a teenage eyes using periscope.  This was the first time that I had heard of Periscope so I figure I would check it out.  The idea of Periscope is that its an application to allow you to see things through the eyes of someone else.  It can be from what a teenage girl faced daily as mentioned in the article or through the eyes of a protester in Ukraine.  The idea about it is that you are able to experience things from a different perspective. When you go on the application you can chose a scope (what they call a look through video) by going to a list or by map.  On the list version it gives you the top scopes by watchers.  As I was exploring there was a real large mixture of scopes, from a mid-afternoon bible study, to a girl discussing the unfair dress codes in school for girls versus boys, to stars on the movie sets and just people doing normal things like eating or putting on make up while scoping.  

So here is the question, is this a community.  They claim that it is a community application and in the idea of it I can see how it could create something like an idea of a community.  There is no way to create a ongoing dialogue that stays on the board unless you subscribe to the person and then you are notified anytime they come on the application. When the person is scoping, people are able to ask questions or make comments.  There is not a restriction for people to watch or discuss things with you unless you block them.  So there is not many restrictions, as there was young kids scoping to people just talking while they sit there naked.  I was surprised by this and wondered how dangerous this application could be.  Many of the serious scopers have an ongoing dialogue, one lady does it every lunch break based on a theme to discuss, they can be connected through many other social and community tools to include blogs.  I can see how this could be one aspect of a PLN and also a way to promote your blogs and other connections to get other people to join your network.  I think that one day I will sit here and do my school work while scoping to see what happens.  Stay tuned and I will let you all know when I scope.