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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
