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

Virtual Worlds

Upon watching the videos assigned, I instantly remembered when I used to play the Sims in the early 2000's. You were able to build your own character and basically live real life in a virtual environment. Second life is more in depth though as it has a lot more options than The Sims. A virtual world mixes reality into a simulated environment. In the Washington post article, "At hearing real and virtual worlds collide" shows how a hearing was broadcast in second life. I found this pretty amazing because they were able to watch in "second life" what was going on in real life conference meeting. Another article that intrigued me was published in the NY Times," I been in that club, but not in real life" these people were actually going to clubs in the virtual world. This virtual world was made by MTV and it basically replicated the lower east side of Manhattan. Virtual worlds can also be used for training pilots. They can fly a plane in a virtual world that is almost identical to flying a real plane. Even people at home can load up flight simulator on their computer and learn how to fly a plane.  This shows how technology can assist us with learning new things and is a major advantage of virtual worlds. It can also foster creativity and a major example of this is with the popular game Minecraft. You can create basically anything you want in blocks. In the future I think virtual worlds will allow us to feel like we are more in the virtual world. I can envision us all wearing virtual headsets and actually being able to interact with real life environment virtually. The only con I can see is that virtual worlds will make it harder for people to interact with real life people. It might make people more socially awkward.




Works Cited


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/04/01/ST2008040103032.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/arts/television/06itzk.html

Social Networking Sites

Some of the most popular social networking sites are Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Linked-in. One can even argue that Snapchat is a social networking site because you can share your "snaps" to all of your friends. Lets start with Facebook. Out of all the listed, I think Facebook is more of the formal one because this is where you post pictures of your friends and family. You can update your statuses and even talk to your friends with the built in chat features. Now lets look at Twitter. The primary purpose of twitter is to "tweet" your followers about anything you want like your mood and what you think about something. Its more to get your message out quickly. Next is Instagram. This is where you share your photos you take to the world or your followers. People can like and comment on them. I would say this is less formal than Facebook as you would post pictures of anything you think is cool. Lastly, is Linked-in. This is where you market yourself for the professional world. It allows others to view your professional profile that can you help land jobs. At the end of the day, these social networking sites are similar at the core as they allow you to communicate with others over the internet.

Blog About Twitter

Twitter and BlackBoard have one sole purpose and that is to communicate to each other on any particular subject. However there are a few differences. I think twitter is more for "quickly" replying to a subject. That is evident because there is a limit to how much you can type on twitter. BlackBoard is for a more in depth discussion and its simply not meant to be quick like twitter. The best however is an in class discussion because you can pick up on the emotions of other people which is very hard to do on-line. The last thing I should mention is that twitter is a lot more mobile friendly than BlackBoard. BlackBoard should definitely work to improve their app. 

Social Networking

Social Networking can be used in a variety of ways. It can be used for consumers to review and talk about products or to express our thoughts, emotions, and opinions (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc). Privacy is one of the main issues of social media. In the case of Randi Zuckerberg posting a photo that was meant to be viewed by friends, but was viewed by millions of people. She was upset on how she thought her photos remained private to her friends, but little did she know other people had access. Another main issue of social media is cyber-bullying. Traditional bullying usually only happens in school, but now people can bully each other via the internet which is a lot worse because it can happen 24/7 and the whole world can see it. In the article "Antisocial Networking?" found in the New York Times, Mrs, Stout conveys to us that psychologist are not only looking how social networking leads to cyber-bullying, but how it makes us more anti-social. Its kind of an oxymoron, something that is suppose to make us more social is doing the opposite. It is also diminishing our emotions which makes sense because it is hard to show emotions via texting as opposed to talking to the person directly.

In a broad sense, these technologies have became an integral part in our society. Each one of us is guilty of posting content to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. They can benefit society because through these platforms we are able to get messages out instantaneously whether it be news or our opinions. It is ambiguous how these technologies are going to evolve in the future since technology is quickly growing, but I think they will become more connecting with our lives. 

Works Cited

Antisocial Networking? by Hilary Stout, New York Times, May 2, 2010, p. ST1. Available at
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/fashion/02BEST.html

Facebook Privacy Is So Confusing Even the Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn't Private,” The Atlantic Wire, Greenfield, R. December 26, 2012
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/12/facebook-privacy-so-confusing-even-zuckerberg-family-photo-isnt-private/60313/

Blogs vs. Wikis

Blogs and Wikis share many similarities and differences. The main difference between a Wiki and a Blog is that a wiki can be edited by virtually anyone. Think about it, Wikipedia, one of the largest wiki's in the world gets its knowledge from its users. In other words, many people all over the world contribute to the information that is on Wikipedia's website. On the other hand, a blog is a website that allows the publishers to post about any topic they want. The publishers can get feedback and comments from anyone who visits his/her page. These tools of the internet are important in our lives. Through wiki's and blogs we are able to obtain information about a topic relatively fast. Wikipedia has evolved into basically an online encyclopedia. Wiki's can also help companies gather and manage their own collective knowledge. This statement was found an article posted on CIO.com"More on How to Build Your Own Wikipedia." The main point in the article was that companies who used Wiki's allow their employees to remain more current on a project. This is something I never knew companies where doing. Blogs can allow us to get the latest news on a particular topic. For example, there can be a blog dedicated to new products that Microsoft launches. Or in the case in the New York Times article, "Walmart Tastemakers write unfiltered blog", consumers were able to give feedback about a particular product sold at Walmart. This feedback can help consumers decide on whether they should by the product or not. 

Another area Wiki's might be useful is within the classroom like we are doing this semester. We all can work and learn together from each other.  

"More on How to Build Your Own Wikipedia." CIO. Web. 3 Mar. 2015. http://www.cio.com/article/2436789/time-management-productivity/more-on-how-to-build-your-own-wikipedia.html

"Wal-Mart Tastemakers Write Unfiltered Blog," by Michael Barbaro, The New York Times, March 3, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/business/03walmart.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0

The Digital Divide

            

           I found the "digital divide" to be an interesting topic because I wanted to see if the so called "gap" is being closed as technology is getting cheaper and more people are easily being able to access information. What is the digital divide? Simply put, according to technopedia.com, the digital divide refers to the difference between people who have easy access to the internet and those who do not. But I think there are different factors to consider. Mainly the differences between developed, developing, and emerging nations within regards to the internet. In fact, I remember back in the early 2000's when dial up internet was a big thing in regards to the average American family being able to access the internet. Looking back onto that, dialup internet was painfully slow compared to the needs of us Americans today. Now in third world countries, dialup internet might be the only affordable way the average family can access the internet and we can clearly see the gap.

http://www.techopedia.com/definition/605/digital-divide