The next new thing

The new type of media that I imagine is people could have real live experience in the virtual world. It is a new way of human interaction. I can imagine when people sleep on a super bed then they are in the virtual world interacting with others. It could make people confuse about the real and virtual world, but they could experience something that they wouldn't experience in real live. For example, people could live in the ocean for a day. It must be a great experience that they could never experience in real live.

Wiki So Far

I have not yet contributed to our class's wiki. I have been doing research on the technology category and I am planning to add a sub-content called "OnePlusOne". It is a new android cellphone that only sell to customers with invitations. I will continue to do research on two other categories, photography and advertising. I would focus on how photography has been become an important factor for social networking applications. People used to share moments with text only, now a lot of people just upload a picture with a line to express themselves. For advertising, I will research more on the benefits of advertising by using social media.

P2P File Sharing

File sharing is the transmission of of various types of files such as audio, pictures, video between two computers through network. P2P, Peer-to-Peer file sharing is one the of the most popular method of file sharing. P2P file sharing allows one person to offer their file to another person and they could download it as many times as they want. An example for P2P file sharing would be copyrighted music share between people. One person upload a song on the internet and give everyone access to download it. This is the most common thing now, whenever we want to download a song we could just google it. There must be a free copy there for you to download. According to Wendy Kaufman's article, "Peers Find Less Pressure Borrowing From Each Other," technology provides a great sharing platform between peers because the cost is very low or free. Torrento is a great example for P2P file sharing. People can easily access, share, download, upload and search for files. However, the convenience of P2P file sharing might cause people in trouble because it is illegal.

Work cited:

Peers Find Less Pressure Borrowing From Each Other http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/05/10/182651552/peers-find-less-pressure-borrowing-from-each-other

Privacy

As social media has taken a huge part in people daily live, the issue of privacy has become more serious. Even though social networking sites like Facebook allows users to change their privacy setting on their own desire, but their information is still searchable in public. Nowadays privacy is too hard to be protected because personal information is too easy to be searched in public. Some states started to talk about that we might need regulations to protect privacy. I hope they will come out with some rules that could really protect privacy, otherwise it would be more serious in the future.

Advice

New media has been used broadly for educational purposes. Baruch College should also take the advantage of it. One of my suggestion would be if a class has been scheduled cancel, the professor could record a video for the lecture and send it to the class. So that the class could follow the regular syllabus and the professor doesn't need to worry about delaying the class schedule. Another suggestion is I encourage every major could create an official Facebook page. It is not necessary have to be run by the department, it could be run by a professor who's very passionate about it or a formal student organization. For example, There is an official Facebook page for CIS majors, students exchange course experience and sometimes professors would leave comments below the post. This could help students to get information more easily and faster.

Creativity

New media has created a whole new platform to foster creativity. Youtube has made an ordinary person famous faster than wild fire. People like Justin Beiber owe all his success to youtube because that’s where he was discovered. It is a great place for people to express their creativity and talent through videos. A lot of people made mash-ups of their favorite song like “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” with Disney cartoon characters or Spongebob. Like a Nickelodeon spokesman said “Our audiences can creatively mash video from our content as much and as often as they like.” 

Work Cited

Barnes, Brooks. "Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But Why?"The New York Times. The New York Times, 23 Sept. 2007. Web. 31 Mar. 2015.

Creativity and New Media

Many say the internet now consumes the majority of our lives. When we wake up the first thing most people look at is our phone, whether it’s for social media or the news. Even though people are spending a lot of time on new media, it also expanded our creativity. Like in my video I managed to create this video using Biteable.com. 

Virtual World

A virtual world is a computer-based online environment that allows users to interact with each other. According to "After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get a Reboot" by Diane Mehta, virtual worlds can be used in so many different way. For example, some of them are created for education purposes, kids can do some learnings in virtual worlds. The benefits of it would be users can easily interact with each other so they could have their social lives in front of the screens. Also, some of them are created for military trainings. Some of the cons would be people are too addicted to the virtual world so they escape from the real world. Another con would be it is not accessible on web yet. According to No Budget, No Boundaries: It's the Real You by Ruth La Ferla, even this tiny virtual world can make a big difference for peoples' daily lives. It is not only fulfilled their desires but also involve with real money. Virtual worlds foster creativities by encouraging people to think outside of the box. I think virtual world would be commonly use by individuals and companies for any purposes.

Work cited:
Mehta, Diane. "After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get a Reboot?" Forbes. N.p., 30 Apr. 2013. Web. 20 Mar. 2015.

Ferla, Ruth L. "No Budget, No Boundaries: It’s the Real You." The New York Times. N.p., 21 Oct. 2009. Web. 20 Mar. 2015.

Social Networking Sites

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Wechat are platforms that allow users to share ideas, pictures and videos. Facebook is one of the most popular social networking platforms in the U.S., but there are users all around the world. It is easy to stay in touch with local or long distance friends. Due to the popularity of facebook, many companies advertise on facebook which you usually see it on the right hand side of the page. MySpace is a little bit outdated compare to facebook. It is also a place to share interests. Twitter allows users to post words up to 140 characters by using hashtag(#) to form a topic discussion, at(@) to notify users that someone mention them in a post. There is another function is called re-tweet. This function is very strong when a super star post a tweet and all his/her fans would re-tweet it. Lastly, wechat is the one I like the most. I can share moments, send pictures, send or post videos or even voice/video chat with my friends locally or internationally. I never text message even since I started using wechat.

Blog about Twitter

Twitter is totally different with blackboard discussion and in-person discussion. Twitter is usually used for making new friends, following stars or post a short sentence which is up 140 characters to express yourself. Twitter started the trend of using hashtag(#) to make users search for hot topics easier and at(@) to sent notification to users. However, blackboard discussion is more serious. It is mainly used for academic purposes. Users don't have to option to @ other users. They can either reply one by one to the individuals or reply to all by hit the reply button. In person discussion is also different than blackboard discussion, you can see each others facial expression.

SOCIAL NETWORKING

Social networking is the most common thing nowadays. It becomes more and more important when more people involve. The benefits of social networking service makes people more connected and developed a very important role for social networking. Corporations focus on advertising in the social networking world because it makes spreading their new products or services very fast and broad with reasonable budgets. Also the using of politicians has been dramatically increased since 2008 presidential campaign because Barack Obama took a great advantage of social networking. According to “How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power” by David Carr, he mentioned that “by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans.” Social networking not only help individuals, they also provide opportunities to professional online networking, such as LinkedIn. There is always concerns come with it. In the articles “Facebook Privacy Is So Confusing Even the Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn't Private” by Rebecca Greenfield, even photos of a family member of Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg are not protected by the privacy setting on Facebook. This would make people feel insecure about their privacy.

How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power 

 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html?_r=0

Facebook Privacy Is So Confusing Even the Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn't Private http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/12/facebook-privacy-so-confusing-even-zuckerberg-family-photo-isnt-private/60313/

Blogs vs Wikis

Blogs and wikis are two of the most popular online platforms that allows people to share their ideas and thoughts. These two platforms provide very similar functionalists to users, such as post ideas, debate, review and collaborate. Of course, there would be some difference between them. Blogs are own by individuals which mean it only allow blog owner to edit it while others can only view and comment. Unlike blogs, wikis is a great platform to share opinions and collaborate projects. Wiki users could easily access to wikis, they could edit it anytime without permission.  According to Wikipedia on Wikis, " Wikis can serve many different purposes both public and private, including knowledge management, note-taking, community websites and intranets." Basically wikis provides a very broad platform for users. Whenever you type something on the search engine, Wikipedia always pops up on the first ten results. If people need to collaborate in blog, I would say they could either share one log in information or one user post a blog and others leave comments below, then that user can edit the original blog base on the comments. According to article, "More on How to Build Your Own Wikipedia" by Margaret Locher, wikis allow users to make better solutions and complete the project in a more efficient way.

Work cited:
Wikipedia on Wikis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki   
Locher, Margaret. "More on How to Build Your Own Wikipedia." CIO.com. N.p., 17 Apr. 2008. Web. 03 Mar. 2015.

Social Networking: Better or worse than the real thing?

In today's society, social networking affects people's lives in various ways. Social networking provides a place for people to share their thoughts, stories and many other stuffs. People enjoy the benefits from it because it is very easy to access and it saves people a lot of time. The more people involve in the technology dominated world, the more people rely on it. Is it better to "meet up" online or in real person? There is no exact answer to this question. I will find out the pros and cons of each side on my research.