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.