The Next New Thing

One suggestion I have for a new type of “new media” is the virtual reality concept. The concept was introduced recently where people can put on a pair of Goggles and they are able to see things 3D based on prerecorded videos. Perhaps the next live news media can have drones go into dangerous locations and one can put on the goggle and see things live. Maybe news can now be covered using live camera and transmitted directly into these goggles so that the person viewing the content can also experience it live and 3D. What if I were to see a concert but its located half a map away, this 3D concepts allows me to experience the “live” concerts without physically being there.

P2P File Sharing

According to technopedia, file sharing is the practice of sharing or offering access to digital information or resources, including documents, multimedia (audio/video), graphics, computer programs, images and e-books. File sharing connects users to users on the computer from both online and offline. One can simply share online using upload sites or share offline using removable storage devices.

P2P file sharing according to Google dictionary, it allows users to access media files such as books, music, movies, and games using a P2P software program that searches for other connected computers on a P2P network to locate the desired content. What this mean is what I mentioned above, online file sharing through upload sites. It can be either from one to one which is when one user sends files to another user, or it can be one to many whereas the user upload files into a public site and many other users can feed off of it. With all this information being transfer from one person to another/others, are there any restrictions one might ask. According the NY Times “Should Online Scofflaws Be Denied Web Access” written by Eric Pfanner, ““If you put 200 VCRs in your garage and start making and selling copies of films, you will get a visit from the police,” he said. “If you do it from a Web site, everybody says, ‘Hey, freedom of information’ ”. There are many risks that come with file sharing, and one of the biggest is online piracy. Are things uploaded online consider free or is it properly copyrighted and anyone who uses without authorization is subject to criminal charges?

Some examples of P2P file sharing include downloading music or videos from ITunes or Apple music. These website acts as an online storage and when purchased, you can directly download the content off the website. Other’s includes applications like Google Doc or Dropbox, where as one can store information into their accounts and it can be shared through links or access to the drive.

Eric Pfanner. “Should Online Scofflaws Be Denied Web Access?" The New York Times, April 13, 2009. Web. June 22, 2016.

Privacy & Confidentiality

The issue of privacy and confidentiality that are related to new media is trending in the recent years. We are no longer keeping our identity on cards and on paper that’s stashed in our safe. With the explosion of new media and social networking websites surfacing, people are pouring in their personal information without regards of who might be on the receiving end. We must be careful on what we post on social media websites as well as how we allow our information to be transferred. We can’t simply enter our house address and name because we would like to sign up for a random poll that’s requesting these information. Social media is constantly talking about people’s identity being stolen and people having access to other people’s social Medias accounts. I believe everyone must find a way to secure their information one way or the other from getting into the hands of the wrongdoers.

Creativity and New Media

World of Warcraft was one of my all-time favorite MMORPG (massive multi-player online roles playing game) game that I spent a lot of time playing when I was younger. The game allows me to become someone that I will never be able to be in my or anyone’s life time. For example, if I want to go rogue and sneak around killing monsters, this game allows me to do that just be creating a character equipped with rogue-like features and skills. Perhaps one day I am feeling helpful and want to help out people, it allows me to become a healer or paladin which enables me to recover other players’ health bar as they go into battle.  The game not only allows me to become who I want to be based on my imagination, it also allows me to interact with people from around the world. I get to dress up my character in any ways I feel like as well as tell my avatar to do whatever I wish.

Here's a screenshot of the paladin I created in World of Warcraft. I equipped myself with the choice of armor along with the Hammer of Justice as a weapon.

CREATIVTY

Creativity is defined as the use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work according to Google dictionary. One is only as creative as their imagination can be. In order to be creative, the more someone is exposed to certain things, they better they think of ideas to incorporate into other things. People’s imagination is endless and with the right tools, their imagination only that far away from becoming reality. New media fosters creativity in many ways. One way new media encourages creativity was mentioned in The New York Times article called “Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. Buy Why?” by Brooks Barnes. “Anthony Falzone, a copyright expert at Stanford, said, “Media companies have been fairly tolerant of Internet mash-ups and parodies so far.” Part of the Disney contents were edited as a music video similar to the one call “Crank that”, yet Disney took no actions to take it down or press charges for copyright violations. This shows that there’s a fine line between encouraging creativity on the internet verse using someone’s original ideas for profit getting. New media is like an encyclopedia of resources for people to use, it allows people to search up anything they wish and turn ideas into different ideas in many ways. As long as you can imagine it, you can look it up on social media and use it to create something completely different based on your own imagination.

Brooks Barnes. “Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But Why?” The New York Times. September 24, 2009. Web. June 22, 2016

Modeling Reality With Virtual Worlds

What's a better way to escape the reality world than to dive into the virtual world which allow us to be someone we can't in the reality world? A virtual world can fill in gaps that we cannot fill in real life. Since it's based on computer simulated technologies, we can create who we want to be and do what we want to do in a virtual world. This all can be done through the use of avatars. Games like MMORPG and Grand Theft Auto allow the users to do things that is almost impossible to do in real life. It allow us to express ourselves in ways that only our imagination can imagine. If you can think of it, the virtual world can do it. Similar to what it's mentioned by Diane Mehta on "After Second Life, Can virtual Worlds Get a Reboot?” But Minecraft is a virtual world. It's digital LEGOs if you will, but it's a space for kids to exercise their imagination and to connect with others to also want to build and create things. This agrees to what I mentioned earlier, if you can think of it, the virtual world can do it. Another example written by Stephanie Simon "Avatar II: The Hospital", which allows nurses to act as if they are on duty and performing emergency decisions to better prepare them for the real situation.

There are pros and cons to everything, and this includes the virtual reality world. Pros to this is that it allows one to tackle real life situation before it happens which gives the user an insight of how to react and the decision it makes to complete a mission successful. Another pro is that it allows the user to express their feelings and actions that they held inside in which is not allowed to be performed in the real world. The cons to the virtual reality world is that it can lead to addiction. Someone can become so addicted to the virtual world that they lose a sense of the real world along with the necessity needed to interact with humans normally. This can be seen with kids who are playing games constantly and never go outside, it tends to lead to isolation, trouble finding friends, and may even lead to having hard time communicating through human interactions.

Virtual worlds foster creativity in a way that it allows the users to create anything they wish that is on their mind. As I’ve mentioned many times previously, it allows the user to do things that they simply cannot do in real life. One can show off their personalities in terms of avatar in the virtual world, they can be as creative as they want in terms of decorating their avatar. They can also speak in ways that they want, or test certain personalities and see how others reacts in a virtual world. They can talk in a way they never thought they would do when face to face with someone else. One can simply do something and just disconnect from the virtual world as if nothing has happen. To many users, virtual worlds allows second chances where the real world does not.

Diane Mehta. “After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get a Reboot?” Forbes. April 30, 2013. Web. June 20, 2016

Stephanie Simon. "Avatar II: The Hospital". The Wall Street Journal. April 13, 2010. Web. June 20, 2016.

Social Networking Sites

Facebook is one of the social networking site that I am very familiar with. This platform is one of the most successful social networking site that's still popular. It allows users to share anything they wish and connect with friends and families. I found that website along with its phone application to be very organized and easy to navigate. Everything can be reached within a touch of a button; without any major redirection. I love the news feed function as it updates instantaneous which allows you to keep in touch with the current news of your friends. One of the major advantage to Facebook is that it does not allow you to edit its page like Xanga or Myspace, which keeps the page very clean and it’s not messy. Facebook is one of my favorite social media to use and I'm not surprise that it last longer than most social media websites ever created.

Second to Facebook is Instagram. Instagram allows the user to upload and view photos and videos at a touch of a button. The design of Instagram is simplistic and it’s very pleasing to the eye. One simply choose a picture and uploads it and people around the world can see it when you use hashtags (#). Instagram definitely a great entertainment if you are looking to scroll through pictures of different people and it sparks a lot of DIY ideas and it also allows the users to see what other are capturing with their camera. One major plus of Instagram is that the filter features, it allows the uploader to edit photos with the lighting of their choice which enhances their photo.

The third is LinkedIn, similar to Facebook, LinkedIn allows the user to connect with people in a more professional setting. Although it can be sociable, people in LinkedIn are more sophisticated and the overall setting of the page is towards professionalism. LinkedIn is great if you are looking to know someone professionally, it allows you to see their work ethics, current employments, career goals and the type of technical skills that they have if you are looking to employ someone. LinkedIn is definitely a great tool for me to look for someone if I need to connect with someone professionally and looking for someone with the right skills to help me do the job. 

Last, I was reintroduced to Twitter in this class. I tried using Twitter a year or two ago and I didn't really like the feel of the site and found it hard to use. At first view of the platform, it seems like a news site where people upload their message quickly and short as its limited based on 140 characters. Later looking deeper into this social media website, it allows people to talk to each other public and allows other to see as well, to me it feels like this is a baby version of Facebook since Facebook also allow people to update status and have people comment on it, whereas this is allows people to update news and people retweet it.

Social Networking

It seems like everyone now a days is trying to networking one way or the other. Social networking is relatively new in today’s society, and it allows people to communicate one way or the other with each other. The idea of social networking allows people interact and share ideas in ways that was never done before. Social networking does in fact help boost businesses in various ways. One way it certainly has helped business is finding the right candidates for the job. Mentioned on “Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting”, "I ended up looking for consumer product marketing," Crawford-Hentz says. "And I hit upon his profile, and I sent him this e-mail saying: 'Hi, Alfred, I found your profile on line. And we have a position that I think may be of interest to you.'". Recruiters are finding people with the right skills and qualifications for business that requests it. Back in the days, whenever someone need a person for the a job, they would post on newspaper or public forums and people who are interested would come to the employer, now it’s the other way around thanks to social media and social networking. Social media has definitely benefited society in many ways, finding job is now easier, communicating with people of similar interest are also brought closer.

Social networking is equipped with many benefits, however there’s a dark side to all these benefactors. For example, privacy issues. The hot topic that’s trending around social media is the how can we better protect ourselves from identity thefts and better protect our personal information. Once someone upload something or post something on the internet, it’s there forever whether you delete it or not. People should be careful of what they post online or their status. Now a day’s people are craving for attention for those links on Facebook, for the approval of their pictures on Instagram. Mentioned by Virginia Heffernan on The New York Times, people likes to post status about their well beings at any given moments. The fact that they are doing this can easily put themselves in danger letting the public know what they are doing at a given time of the day. 

These technologies will definitely evolve in the future as time passes. As we have seen with Xanga and Myspace, as new technologies and platform surfaces, the older one fades. I wouldn’t be surprise to see Facebook or LinkedIn gets replaced in the next couple years or so. Perhaps we no longer need to type to tweet what we are doing and selfies are no longer a thing.

Frank Langfitt. “Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting” NPR.org. November 22, 2006. Web. June 21, 2016

Virginia Heffernan. “Being There” The New York Times. Feburary 10, 2009. Web. June 21, 2016

BLOG: Blog v Wiki

Blogs and wikis are becoming increasingly popular throughout the years there are major increase of users on the internet. Users are searching for information more than ever as internet became an everyday tool people use to conduct work. Both blogs and wikis exists on the internet, both are very similar to each other, and it’s a way for internet users to gain information they search for, however they both have their very own distinct differences. Some of the differences between the two is that wiki information can be directed towards a more general an unbiased way as many users accumulate facts and real information to create a one-stream of information relating that the topic of interest. Whereas blogs tends to be more of an opinion sided story where the author can set the direction of the information in ways that they proposed. Ultimately we can look at wiki as being a collaborative piece of work from users all over the internet and blog as being a one person or a team of writers creating articles of their choice to voice their opinions.

The sense of convergence is very important in today’s networked world. With the vase information across the internet platform, research applications, blogs, wikis and social media from all over the world, it allows people to come together and contribute on a single topic that sparks their interest. According to Kathy E. Gill’s “How can we measure the influence of blogosphere?” on blogging as journalism; “Participatory journalism is a concept that embraces an expanded two-way communication between established media and readers, allowing readers to interact with journalists and news organizations. Today’s practice of blogging embodies these concepts of journalism. Not only does it provide many viewpoints on shared experiences, but it often also serves as a collective databank used to jog the faulty memories of those who write or report for major media”. Blogs and wikis allows for collaboration of information, as multiple users can voice their opinions or inputs on information which allows other users to receive a more vivid picture of the information they are searching for.

One of my hobbies is going out on a boat or onshore at various areas of Long Island to go fishing, and blog has definitely help in a way for fishermen to provide daily fishing reports. With the help of fishermen around the island, it allows other viewers to see rather or not fish are migrating to an area or if the day’s catch are good. Similar to fishing, according the Michael Wilson’s article “Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid”, a community was united by a blog to help fight criminals and illegal activities in their neighborhood, all of the information which later alerted and used by the police which led to a drug-raid.

Looking at wiki and blog at the same time, one of the functions I personally think wiki should add is a comment function. This allows those who do not wish to alter the information that is on the page to voice their opinion or concerns. Another way for wiki is to add the approval or disapprove function, I believe this provides a better way for people searching for information to look for more validated information as other’s approves the writing that’s written on the wiki page.

Kathy E. Gill “How Can We Measure the Influence of the Blogosphere?” May 2004. Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem. June 20, 2016.

http://faculty.washington.edu/kegill/pub/www2004_blogosphere_gill.pdf www2004_blogosphere_gill.pdf

Michael Wilson “Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid” June 26, 2008. The New York Times. Web. June 20, 2016.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/nyregion/26bayridge.html?_r=0

Positive and Negative Effects of Social Media

Social media can have both positive and negative on the everyday lives of people. It can be seen as a way to enhance relationship with friends and families, as well as reduce communication barrier, create more opportunities for business to conduct as well as increasing efficiency in communications. It can also place a negative effect in terms of being physical isolation towards the non-virtual world, it can leads to online addictions and it also have a huge impact on productivity of work. Some effects are greater than others in a both positive and negative away.