Next New thing

If I had the next new media idea, I would possibly be rich. But off the top of my head, I think that virtual reality will be the next new thing. By virtual reality I mean devices you put over your head that allow you to experience the world differently. Imagine playing a video game in any given environment. Imagine feeling like you in a forest and you are trying to find your way out or driving a race car racing other people. That would be really fun and I believe with the advances of technology this will all soon be possible and hopefully affordable to the average person. To add on to this, virtual reality can incorporate your friends or anyone within the world into it. So you can be racing your friends in the car next to you.

Wiki So Far

I am planning to contribute an investing section to the wiki. This is because I have noticed that there isn't anything about stocks, mutual funds, and other investing tools on the wiki. An investing section I think would be helpful because it will help people learn more about the stock market, and potentially help people learn how to save their money for the future.

P2P

File sharing can be defined as the transmission of a file via a network from computers. P2P is a type of file sharing that allows these files to be transmitted through various programs like Bittorrent that allows users to connect directly to each other to download and upload a file. If these programs are used legally than they are offer a great deal of advantages. One advantage is being able share any type of file you want to the world. The more peers the file gets, the more accessible it becomes to the person downloading. However if no one "seeds" the file than it wont be available for download. In one of the articles posted on "Wired", it says that Bittorrent lets users quickly upload and download large amounts of data quickly. A lot of this data is movies, music, books, and games that are copyrighted. Normally what would cost you money to buy movies and music is now free thanks to Bitorrent.  It basically encourages piracy and as a result music artist and movie companies loose out on lost revenue. To try to combat some of this piracy companies like Spotify, Pandora, and Netflix allow users to stream content instead of downloading it for a small monthly fee legally. I think offering these types of services at a reasonable price point is very effective instead of music companies suing individual downloaders who download copyrighted files as it waste time and money.

 

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/bittorrent.html 

 

 

Privacy

Privacy and new media is a hot topic today. One thing off the top of my head was how ethical the app Snapchat. Snap Chat allows you to send photos and videos to your friends that display for up to 10 seconds. Than after 10 seconds they are not viewable and deleted from your phones. However they are not deleted from Snapchat servers. Now this was seen as a problem because the average user thinks their photos are deleted once it disappears. Now I'm sure this was in the privacy statement they issued but the average person does not go through pages upon pages of legal text that's hard to decipher. This is why I feel like company's that use or keep your data should alert you directly. Privacy is a very sensitive issue and many people would like to remain private online. Facebook is starting to step up its privacy procedures at it is making it easier for people to set up and be AWARE of their privacy settings. Sometimes on my news feed Facebook shares videos that show allowed me to be aware of who can see my post and so on and how to change certain settings so they can only be viewable to friends. At the end of the day if us users of new media want to remain private we should partake in apps and websites that can invade our privacy. It is up to us to have trust in the company.


Cited:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/deleted-snapchat-photos/story?id=23657797

Advice

Since I will be graduating soon, what I am about to suggest would of helped me throughout my 4 years of Baruch. I feel like we could use new media to start a forum or discussion board that would be part of Baruch Library. In this discussion board or forum, you can have students and faculty helping each other out. Whether it be students inquiring about a class that they are interesting in, they can get feedback from other students as well as teachers. Even if the person is unsure about what degree they should get or what minor to take, they can just ask in the forum and hopefully someone else whose been through the same experience can offer some insight. Another thing that I have noticed is that many classes do not utilize the discussion board in blackboard. Many of my lecture classes at Baruch the teacher barely used blackboard. If we can get teachers to encourage students to use the discussion board within blackboard so they can discuss about what they have learned in the class so far and if they have any other questions with the class that would be great.

Creativity and New Media

For this assignment I wanted to see how well I can create an avatar of myself. So I Googled a couple of sites and found a website called "MyBlueRobot". Within your web browser you can create a splitting image of yourself with all the different customizeable features. However, as you can see I wasn't too good at creating a replica of myself even after several tries. But on the bright side, these "avatars" can be used in many online communities. You can even create avatars in Xbox and PlayStation consoles. This allows you to be creative and also hide your identity instead of putting your real picture in these communities.

Creativity

New media fosters an environment for creativity. Each and everyone of us can create something unique and share it with the world. We can do this by making YouTube videos about a certain hobby we enjoy or to instruct others on how to complete a task. Another example of creativity is creating a mashup of an existing song. In the New York Times article by Sasha Frere Jones, she talks about how mashups tells us how digital technology allows almost anyone to create mashups of existing songs. These mashup even got as far as Billboard top 10. That is certainly impressive. There are certainly a lot more ways new media influences our creativity but I think YouTube is a prime example because we can create anything we want and show it to the world in a video.


Works Cited

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/01/10/1-1-1-1