The Next New Thing

     It is hard to predict what will be the next new thing in the world of the new media but I think it will definitely have to do with getting out world even more connected, collaborative and faster paced. As a simple example, maybe the next thing will be a some sort of combination of facebook and P2P file sharing. The idea that people not only will be able to instantly connect to each other, review profiles and post pictures or videos but also share various types of files and documents, which will significantly speed up information exchange.

Our Class- Wiki So Far

   My topics for Wiki are the following: How Business is using Social Networks and Marketing and Advertising using new Media. Both topics go hand-in-hand because new media became indispensable part of most businesses and completely changed how they do marketing and advertising, which basically drives the revenue. My research consists of periodicals and business articles.

P2P File Sharing

       File sharing is basically sharing of digital files stored on one computer with another computer. P2P File Sharing stands for "peer-to-peer" file sharing that allows "peers", which are computers on the joint network, to transfer digital files using P2P software. It simply links people who need files with people who have them. Due to the nature of the software, P2P file sharing has been surrounded by controversy since its beginning in 1999 according to Wikipedia. The main concern is copyright issues and piracy. It is claimed that filed sharing significantly impacts entertainment industry. According to The New York Times article "Should Online Scofflaws Be Denied Web Access?", "the growing problem of piracy.... accounts for the loss of $20 billion a year in sales". Also there is risk of leaking personal information on-line that is associated with file sharing.  Nevertheless, I believe the P2P file sharing will continue to grow because it allows for fast and cheap way of transferring information which is the key in our  dynamic society. 

Privacy and Confidentiality

The issues of privacy and confidentiality have definitely escalated with the development and growth of new media. I have addressed that issue regarding Twitter in my term paper, but it concerns not only Twitter but any other social media tool. Social Networks allow our society to be more dynamic, linked and collaborative. As the result some people have hard time separating between personal and professional lives and therefore lots of private information becomes available to everyone. We have heard plenty of examples when lots of private information accidentally ended up on utube or Facebook which can potentially lead to loosing a job, relationship or dignity. Another issue that comes with new media tools is higher chances of security breach or identity theft, which arises from reliance on technology.

New Media to improve college..

I truly believe that new media should be heavily used by educational facilities. First of all, it can be a great tool to advertise and recruit student to college/university. Also, old media is slower, less compelling and more expensive than many emerging new media tools, therefore utilizing on-line books and on-line lectures (like we have in the class) can significantly cut down on costs. Additionally, I highly suggest using wikis to share information and improve the efficiency of the group projects. Finally, tools like Twitter can be utilized to post important announcements and students will be able to see them immediately on any electronic device.

About My Term Research Paper

My topic was the analysis of Twitter. I was looking at the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our society. I used databases from the Newman Library as well as google articles. I have learned that Twitter is more than simply a web 2.0 application- it is the micro blog, social messaging system, marketing source and the news update and these are just to name a few. I was surprised how deeply Twitter penetrated our lives and how widely it is used by different businesses and sources.

Creativity

I think the two words “New Media” and “creativity” should go together.  I believe various sources of new media stimulate creative expressions among individuals and businesses. New Media sources largely appeal to consumers and allow for fast information transfer and sharing which in turn boost innovations. Therefore, we see a growth of utilizing new media tools in advertizing and new product development.  For example, Twitter itself, uses comments and ideas from its users as a way to design and come up with new products:

“Twitter’s smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, ‘Gee, let’s not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let’s outsource design to them,’ ” said Eric von Hippel.  Technology companies for example, have also recognized new media sources as a pool of creativity and “have been the most active in relying on others to innovate for them. This is in large part because the Internet lets people exchange ideas easily and rapidly with large groups, and computing tools let people design new products cheaply”

I believe that New Media sources spark innovation and learning, and trigger out-of-the-box thinking, and these tools should be heavily incorporated in work and school activities.

Creativity and New Media

For the cretaivity assignment I decided to explore the "Virtual Worlds". I have never used any of the virtual world applications and I thought it would be interesting to play around with them. I have created an avatar in the "Second life". I have created someone that totally doesn't look like me- I wanted to be someone different in the virtual life.  Unfortunately, the application didn't live up to my expectations: my experience wasn't really user-friendly and I found the program to be less intuitive than I expected. First you have to install a program on you computer, which means that you can only operate your avatar from one computer and can't just simply log-in anywhere. Second- there are so many buttons and options, that I got lost! It took me about 10-15 min to figure out how to change my outfit. Therefore, it turned out to be very-time consuming and no longer enjoyable. In the long run, I am not sure if I continue using "Second Life", but i found it to be a great opportunity to use my imagination and create someone that I am not, be able to attend places as a "new" person and have a real-time conversations with other "people".

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual world or “digital world” is an “avatar-driven social networking site” (“No Budget, No Boundaries: It’s the Real You”) that simulates real life. The virtual worlds can be used for many different purposes. One of them and most obvious is for gaming. 3-D avatar games like   “World of Warcraft” substantially increase experience of the game.

Socializing is another reason for using virtual worlds. Users recreate their world, decorate their places, visit bars and other public spaces, meet like-minded people and even create their own language. Virtual worlds can also be very useful in any kind of professional training. Military training simulation can serve as an example. The use of virtual worlds has substantially grown within education as well. That does not only include university courses or language classes but many world-known museums and libraries, that have adopted virtual tours. In medicine virtual worlds help disabled people do things that they can’t do in the real life.  According to Dave Sparrow, the “Naughty Auties” visitors can practice social interaction and find information about the condition. The graphical representations of real people create a "comfort zone" that can coax users out of their shells and get them communicating with others”. In Commerce, virtual worlds are used for advertising the places and getting feedback from customers.  

Virtual worlds are also tapping into the work space. “Virtual community Second Life is seeking to tap into that market by creating a new tool that allows businesses to have virtual meetings on their own computer networks” (“Going to the virtual office in Second Life”).

Obviously virtual worlds can be used for various purposes and have a lot to offer. To summarize all of the above, they offer major opportunities for enriching learning in the vocational training and educational purposes and allow interaction in a realistic way.

On the other hand, there are of course some disadvantages. Virtual worlds are known to attract a higher numbers of predators: as an avatar you can do whatever you want since no one knows you, therefore you can be obscene and rude. In education, it’s hard to determine if students are taking their work seriously and hard to manage students behavior. Also for some unhappy and unsuccessful people a virtual world can replace a real world and they can lose a touch with reality.

On a good side, I think virtual worlds also foster creativity. You can create who you want to be, what you want to do and where you want to live. It forces you to brainstorm and visualize what you want to create. When used for education, students not only extract the information from the book and answer questions, they are forced to react in a particular scenario and create something new and original. The use of strong imagery, visuals and audio in a virtual world stimulate curiosity and promote new thinking.

So there is definitely a future for virtual worlds. I believe more and more companies and educational facilities will use it for meetings and interactions to cut cost. Some websites (http://www.thenanoage.com/virtual-reality.htm) claim that “Everything we experience in life can be reduced to electrical activity stimulating our brains as our sensory organs deliver information about the external world”. Therefore “Everything you see, hear, feel, taste and smell is an interpretation of what's outside, and” will be eventually “created entirely inside your head” using virtual worlds. We shall see…

Social Networking Sites

The two mostly used social networking sites today in my opinion are Facebook and Twitter. Both are different and serve different purposes. Facebook, as we all know, is the most popular site for sharing information with your friends, post pictures and videos. It basically allows you to keep your circle of friends in the loop about what you are up to, which events you are attending and invite your friends to come along. Additionally, you can review individual profiles and get to know or be introduced to people.

Twitter is more of a status update site. Tweet is a short real time commentary on the person, product, event or a feeling to keep the updates quick and easy. That’s why most of the people have both Twitter and Facebook accounts, since they complement each other. Another social networking site that I like a lot is LinkedIn. It has some similar features as Facebook but serves different purpose- it’s a networking site for professionals. It allows you to expand your professional network, increase chances of getting a job, and exchange professional presentations and marketing papers. You can’t (and it’s not necessary) exchange pictures or videos and you need to be careful what you post on LinkedIn since HR divisions of many companies use it as one of the main recruiting tools. I personally use LinkedIn a lot to keep in touch with updates on the industry and to follow the companies.

As far as MySpace- it’s outdated and was replaced by Facebook. Creators had a good idea to allow for personalization but it went too far and it became difficult to follow your friends’ profiles since all of them had different layouts. So Facebook in my opinion wins by creating a standard profile and allowing for simpler communication and information sharing.

Blog about Twitter

Twitter is a social networking site that is open for everyone to exchange and post short comments or status updates. It only allows for 140 characters and if you are going to use it for class discussions, you need to make sure you mark who you are responding to and use a special set of rules if you don’t reply right away, which limits the size of the actual response. Blackboard discussion on the other side is limited only to student enrolled in a particular class but it allows posting much longer responses and having an actual elaborated debate on the topic. Additionally, it is easier to follow the discussion and see which posts drive most of the commentary. I definitely think Blackboard is more appropriate and user friendly for educational purposes, but nothing compares to the in-class discussion with on the spot responses, emotions and gestures, where the whole class can participate at once and hear every voice.

Social Networking

The main reason many companies use social networking is for marketing purposes and image building since social networking provides the largest focus groups. For example a lot of companies are using Twitter to provide customer service and take responsibility for bad service publicly. For instance many hotels apologize publicly to their guests for bad service, Hollywood stars apologize publicly for any misconduct and these are just to name a few. Another tool that is commonly used in the corporate world is LinkedIn. It is mostly utilized for business marketing as well as for hiring personnel.  As Frank Langfitt mentions in his article “Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting”- “Using Linkedin ...can scout a group of job candidates in just half an hour”.

You tube is used to share videos with customers as well as demonstrating and promoting new products.  Companies like IBM also use Social Networking tools for business innovation. According to Chuck Hamilton “IBM explores the new frontier of virtual networking and is helping companies attract and screen potential new employees through virtual world interactions”. So clearly there are lots of benefits associated with these new technologies: they unite the world, make news and products easily acceptable, increase the possibility of meeting new people, express opinions and share experiences.

On the dark side will be privacy issues and legal issues that arise due to social networks. For example students are turned down by employers for jobs because of the information that is exposed on the networking sites.

So the next astep in the technolgy evolution will be enhanced security controls to prevent existing flaws and the websites will probably become more intuitive and would allow to link all the enformatioon from different networking sites.

Blogs vs. Wikis

Bogs and Wikis are both sources of new media that let users collaborate, exchange information and express their opinions, but when is one better than the other?

A blog usually has one author and lets the followers leave their feedback, on the other side Wiki is a more collaborative tool and lets all participants contribute information and be a part of creation process . Wiki knowledge comes from many sources, therefore a wiki page is constantly updated as opposed to a blog, where one post becomes stale overtime. A blogger shares his opinion and wants to get feedback from the followers, on the other side wiki participants share knowledge to reach final solution or result for a project or initiative. So not only wiki is the place for collaboration but it's is also a knowledge database which manages and updates itself. Wikipedia is the greatest example of all. The biggest disadvantage of wiki is that noone has the full control over the content which can be a critical downfall for many organizations. Therefore you need to properly pick between the two mediums based on your personal goals or the goals of the organization.

Ezra Goodnoe in her article "How To Use Wikis for Business" discusses cases when you should consider using wikis for your organizartion and when wikis will be a bad fit. For instance, if the project requires lots of shared documents and reviews of multiple people, then wikis can be really helpful, and if you want to exchange opinions and preserve them then wikis might not be an appropriate tool.

I believe that wikis should be utilized in school group projects. It will make "easier to gather and share information as well as record discussions about a subject" (Margaret Locher) as opposed to using email trail among a number of people.

Convergence is very important in our changing fast-paced networked society. Intersection of old and new media shift social patterns and makes people create new experiences and seek new information.

Analysing Twitter...

  “Web 2.0 has brought about several new applications that have enabled arbitrary subsets of users to communicate with each other on a social basis.”  (Balachander Krishnamurthy) For my term project I decided to conduct analysis of Twitter – a web based application that allows users to send and exchange short messages.  I want to explore why people tweet and what are the potential positive and negative effects of Twitter on our society. So is it a new beneficial to our society medium of information sharing or is it destroying our communication? We shall see…