The Next New Thing

As people begin to depend on platforms such as Facebook Message and text messaging to communicate, I find it difficult to convey emotions through solely words. When speaking to someone in person, the receiver is often listening to the words and interpreting body language and emotions. However, virtual communication through messaging doesn't have the capabilities to include such nonverbal language. Many times, I would depend on emoticons to express different emotions. Yet, these emotions would depend on the receiver to convey. Also, it is often inappropriate to incorporate such symbols in a professional email. Therefore, the next new media could be a platform that would permit people to convey emotions without the use of emoticons. It would have a sensor for senders to express emotions, and a sensor for receiver to accurately interpret these emotions.

Our Class Wiki - So Far

While I have not contributed to the wiki page yet, I plan to update the Privacy page by including current events that affect Facebook users' privacy. I will be placing more emphasis on how Europeans are handling the invasion of user privacy and lawsuits that are currently in motion. My term paper was based on the invasion of privacy through Facebook. I believe research conducted for my paper will help me improve the content on the Wiki page. Next, I plan on expanding the Social Networking page. Recently, Instagram has considered updating their platform to personalize each users' homepage. This could have a drastic impact on advertisers who depend on users inability to control the content they see. I plan on doing more research regarding these two updates to social networking sites and privacy before I update the wikipage.

P2P File Sharing

File sharing is when individuals distribute media content through the Internet. Some things that people share are pictures, videos, documents, E-books. P2P file sharing is the use of peer-to-peer platforms to distribute this content. Users are able to search the platform, where media is centralized, for content they want. P2P allows owners to upload content but save on bandwidth costs and introduce content to a large audience. In the article, "Content producers should take advantage of P2P, not fear it," P2P exposes content to millions of users on a daily basis for free. Examples of P2P platforms are BitTorrent, Napster and the Pirate Bay.

Privacy & Confidentiality

Privacy and confidentiality have become increasingly problematic when related to new media. New media platforms such as Facebook, virtual video games, blogs, etc all request for personal information about the user. As more people use these platforms, more people reveal personal information about themselves. Users are no longer as wary of their privacy or confidentiality issues. Over time, people may believe that it is common for these new media platforms to obtain personal information from the users. However, users don't realize that their information is being sold to advertising agencies and used for data mining. As a result, personal information may be easily searched by anyone on the Internet. Perhaps we are too accustomed to sharing our personal information on new media sites.

Advice to Baruch College

Baruch College is a commuter school that is very different from the typical "college experience" and "campus life." Because of this, many students may not have school pride. Our campus is very different from other schools in that students are not actively promoting their school sports teams or wearing clothing with their universities' names. New media would be a way to remedy that. Nowadays, many college students are constantly on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Vine, etc. In order to promote school pride, one could create engaging events on the various social media platforms. Because college students are already on these platforms, it would not be difficult to convince them to view the content about Baruch and share it. Sharing of information through new media is also a very effective method to spread an idea, or in this case, school pride.

Creativity and New Media

For this assignment, I chose to create an avatar via SecondLife. To begin, I created an an avatar from pre-selected styles. From there, I edited each feature of the avatar to portray the clothing I would wear in real life. This new media platform allows me to personalize an avatar that represents my style. From the screenshots below, one is able to add to the avatar by visiting the online shop. Through this platform, one is able to create a portrayal of oneself, or perhaps create an avatar that one would wish to become. The highly personalization feature allows users to explore their creative minds. 

Creativity

New media develop as platforms that help people express themselves. Oftentimes, they also spark the user's sense of creativity. For example, when Twitter was introduced to the public, it served as a communication tool that limits users to 140 characters. However, as the article, "Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers" depicts the new media scene, users are creating new ways to communicate beyond the original intent of the founders. Because of how unconventional new media is, users are given the opportunity and space to explore each platform's options. Creators are then able to curate these ideas and incorporate popular ones into their platform design. This strategy also helps Twitter set itself aside from its competitors, like Facebook. However, because people will naturally use Twitter in a way that is not supported by Facebook, it will be able to tailor its outline to accomodate the requests that its competitors can't answer. Many forms of new media are based off of the creativity and willingness of users to expand its potential beyond creators' plans.

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds are a platform for people to connect with others while being in the comfort of their own homes. As mentioned in "After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get a Reboot," virtual worlds help children engage with others under the supervision of their parents. These worlds are beneficial because they teach children how to interact with others. However, virtual worlds can also bring negative effects to one's social abilities. While it's often easy to socialize in a virtual world through words, this takes away from the experience of human interaction in real life. This may inhibit one's abilities to develop social skills. Virtual worlds can also be hazardous when the player fails to step away from the game, but rather carries that behavior into reality. As illustrated in "Virtual World may Impact Real-World Behavior," players who play the role of Superman tend to be the nice person or hero in real life. Whereas players who played the role of Voldemort in video games became the villain in the social experiment. This infers that the roles one plays online leaves an impact on his/her behavior and influences judgment. 

Virtual worlds such as Minecraft also foster one's creativity. Specifically, Minecraft allows players to create and build their world by exploring the platform for raw materials. In the future, I believe virtual worlds will be a platform where people from third-world countries will also be able to connect with people around the world. It'll allow for more social interactions where meeting in person would not be feasible. It'll also be a platform for children to learn to interact with others at a young age, and it may also assist in child development.

Social Networking Sites

Impression of Facebook:

This is a site where I can be up-to-date with current events and friends through statuses and pictures. There's not a lot of extraneous details that I would not want to see since Facebook filters out friends that I don't wish to follow. The live feed on the right column gives me a quick update of friends who are currently active and the news. This is convenient because I can easily private message friends. The news feed follows a timeline so that only my top stories are shown.

Impression of Twitter:
Twitter can be overwhelming for me because tweets by people I follow constantly update. It becomes difficult for someone like me, who tries to read everything, to keep up with Twitter. It also bothers me that tweets are limited to 140 characters. This can be challenging since it may be difficult to include a well-developed thought with 140 characters. But yet again, Twitter was structured to be like Facebook statuses without Facebook platform.

Impression of Instagram:
I really like the layout of Instagram. Photos follow a chronological order. There is also no limit to the number of characters with each post. The filters available for each photo and video are well designed. Hashtags are also handy in organizing photos. The "Explore" function allows me to view pictures posted by people I'm not following. I like how people can be creative with Instagram. For example, there are bloggers who have a "white theme" for their Instagram photos. I think Instagram is a great social networking sites that allows users to personalize their page and be creative.

Impression of Pinterest:
Pinterest is an amazing platform for people to keep track of certain articles or photos that interests them. My bulletin boards help me organize my thoughts. This site almost acts as my virtual scrapbook of ideas. I like how I can view posts by other people and clip it to my board. This becomes handy because I can simply search keywords and save pictures that are relevant.

Blog about Twitter

Twitter, compared to BlackBoard discussions and classroom discussions, limits communication. Because only 140 characters are permitted per tweet, discussions are brief and succinct. Yet, this also limits the opportunities for well-developed discussions and arguments. With Twitter, people are able to reply directly to certain comments, just like the capabilities of Blackboard and Classrooms. With Twitter, hashtags (#) can be used to track a conversation and related comments. However, in-class discussions may be more difficult to track if one doesn't take adequate notes. Blackboard discussions can be tracked through separate threads.

Social Networking

Social networking such as Facebook and LinkedIn are platforms that serve to connect people. They can be used to help people find jobs, connect with business leaders, and share ideas. As the article, "Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting" describes the job-hunt scene, they illustrate how convenient it is for head hunters to search for talent through professional social networking sites such as LinkedIn. Facebook's news feature also helps people stay up-to-date with current events.

On the other hand, there are also drawbacks to these social networking sites. One major issue is privacy. In the article "Who Cares About Facebook Privacy? Students Do," it describes how young adults are concerned with privacy settings and tend to update them from time to time. As Facebook grows, the scope of information they collect from users also expands. While it is convenient for users to share through Facebook, sharing information such as location can jeopardize one's safety.

As these two social networking platforms grow, I believe they are creating communities never done before. Because both sites are user-friendly, and have a small learning curve, I believe their user counts will continue to grow. As Facebook develops, I believe one day, people will be able to rely on Facebook completely for different functions. 

Blogs vs Wikis

Blogs and Wikis are both platforms where people can freely express and spread their ideas. Because both platforms have limited learning curves, they are both simple to use. Their platforms are also great ways for people to collaborate in updating readers on the latest news.

However, they are both different in nature. Blogs are platforms where only the owner will be able to update posts. However, wikis are pages that allow multiple users to update. Blogsposts are also tagged with dates whereas wiki updates are not tagged with dates. Bloggers are able to tailor their page to include the content that they want and how this content is portrayed. On the other hand, wiki pages are simple in formatting, and is difficult for one single user to format because anyone can change its display and content. Finally, blogs are different from wikis because blogs usually include a signature indicating the owner of the post, whereas wiki users are normally anonymous. Wiki pages are more useful in collaborative efforts because they provide a platform that permits many-to-many communication.

Unfortunately, there are also downsides to the nature of wiki pages. Because of users' ability to posts anonymously, some users may be able to post sensitive information at no cost. According to Noam Cohen, who wrote A Rorschach Cheat Sheet on Wikipedia?, psychologists were enraged with the idea of having ink blots posted on the platform to review. Many people say that this compromises the effective of the Rorschach Test and limits psychologists to other diagnostic tests that are not as well-established.

Another downside of Wikipedia is its lack of reliability. The artical Wikipedia Looks Hard at Its Culture suggests that errors in wiki pages resonates around the world. Because many people rely on Wikipedia for information about certain topics, few people choose to fact check what's written. This causes an issue because ideas are spread instantaneously. Many people would be misled if erroneous ideas are spread.

Convergence is important in today's world because of tie vast amount of information that is available to us. While it is advantageous to have so much informations available, it may also be burdensome to extract information that we want from this database. Therefore, collaboration and convergence of knowledge will allow us to better tailor the information that we need. By working together, we are able to combine ideas from people of different backgrounds and expertise. We are able to collaborate on blogs by establishing a blog list that includes posts that are relevant to our topics of choice. Finally, a new use for wiki pages would be for students in a class to collaborate on one research topic. Research may be added to the wiki page along the course of the class. Ultimately, the wiki page would have detailed analysis of the topic at the end of the course.

Project Proposal: Facebook's Invasion of Privacy

Facebook is a platform that allows people to share different aspects of their lives with others around the world. However, over the years, it has gained access to more personal information such as location, phone numbers, and addresses. Some people may consider these details confidential. The purpose of this project is to research the amount of information Facebook has of each person's Facebook account, and analyze the features that may invade a user's privacy.