The next new thing

It is difficult to come up with something that nobody has at least mentioned already when it comes to new media and technology. I would think that virtual reality can be a platform for new media, in a way that they can replicate the way companies share information in the real world. It sound redundant to say that my new way of new media is new media in a virtual world, but sometimes people pay more attention to information when they are immersed in a world of their choice.

Another way of new media that comes to mind, is a totally automated system that collects data and puts it in order. The system would work as a robot or computer, which its only task would be to create a huge database of real information about anything. This way, researchers would not have to go look for information in a lot of places and all of the junk and fake information would already be filtered out. The computer would always be working on collecting information from news, universities data bases and government databases as well.

Advice to Baruch College

The use of new media for college is already in use. I don't see a lot of room where the school can create their own platforms for the students to use. Rather than trying to implement their own software, I would advice them to encourage the students to use the best and most advance new media software that is out there. A school trying to compete with giants like wikipedia, 4chan or reddit, is in my opinion a waste of time and resources. Rather than compete with those sites, I would try to embrace them and figure out which sites are the students visiting more frequently. After having that list, then what would happen next is that I would try to connect the school to these sites in order to gain more relevance and obtain the attention of the students.

Privacy & Confidentiality

When my parents were growing up, all the means of communication were all between the 2 people who were sharing the message (the sender and the receiver). For example, when my parents were young, they would send a letter to someone with whatever message and that letter would only be seen by the person who wrote it and the person who the letter was for. There was very little risk of someone opening the envelope and reading confidential information. Today with new media all of this confidentiality has changed. Today when you send an email to someone, that email is saved in a database server and the people in control of that server have access to all those millions of emails. New media has brought us with this new style of communication in which every message is saved somewhere and it can be retreated from the servers where they are saved. So far it seems that people do not care much for the invasion of their privacy when it comes to text messages and emails. This is well illustrated by the not so big reaction when we all found out that the government had access to all of our calls and messages. This was all possible with the explanation that national security outweighs personal privacy. 

People only seem to care about privacy when its invasion means a direct hit to their personal lives. For example, when the information from your credit card gets stolen, you are directly affected by it as you are losing money. On the merge of this issue, the development of the microchips in credit cards came to light. in the article "Target works on security-heavy credit cards, after breach" by Dara Kerr. We can see how target only became more strict about the ruling on raising security measures after a problem occurred and all the information from credit cards was stolen. I believe that we have become less sensitive to the invasion of privacy, especially since social media like Facebook and Twitter is all about us sharing our personal lives with the world. 

Creativity and New media

I have mentioned before how twitter makes the users get more creative with what they say, since it only allows for a limited amount of characters. But for me that is not the most interesting way to get creative. To see creative creations you might want to check some of the cities build in minecraft. Like this city that is replicating a city from another video game called "the last of us" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv9YND9CZoE Keep in mind that the creator usually has to place block by block, and sometimes they can use some programming commands to make lines, but it still would take a long time to make something this big. How do I know this? I have a friend who loves Minecraft and he has spent countless hours making this stadium. Here he personally gives you a tour (in spanish) https://www.twitch.tv/softkidoshki/v/8591886

Creativity

New media has given us more tools to play with on the internet without the need of becoming a programmer or a C++ expert. Before, for you to have a website, you would have to know the coding in order to create it to your own liking. Now, there are plenty of tools that lets you simply drag things around and create a nice website without any expertise. I feel tat the more freedom the user has with these tools, the more creative the person is. This is because they can do literally whatever they want without having to worry about limitations or concerns. Twitter is a perfect example since it is one of the most unregulated social media as it comes to censorship and what users say and do. Having this freedom, it lets its users feel comfortable enough to bring in the best of themselves on twitter and show it to the world. The best thing about it, is that Twitter itself can benefit from the freedom it gives its users. They do so by adding the content that users suggest. This is discussed in more detail in the article "Twitter serves up ideas from its followers" by Claire Cain Miller. In this article she discusses how the idea of the hash tag and the "@" to tag people did not come from the executives or the developers of twitter, but from the users themselves. So at some point, if someone comes up with a good idea to add to twitter, these person can simply suggest it to the public. If it is accepted and widely used; then twitter incorporates it to their core features. It sounds hard to believe that a huge corporation like twitter would take suggestions from a random person, but it makes a lot of sense in the big picture. Twitter can hire a few hundred engineers to come up with ideas or they can watch the ideas from their many million users.

Creating original and attractive content is another way that new media fosters creativity. A user who wants to have many followers has to think: "what do people like and how can I provide them with that content". After the user answers that, they have to come up with original content about whatever topic they chose in order to get a decent amount of followers. This requires a lot of thinking and a lot of creativity to keep people interested and entertained over a long period of time.

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds are a growing reality that some people are oblivious about. I have mentioned before the rapid growth of the gaming industry and the colossal investments that corporations are making in the gaming industry in order to come at the top with the best technology. For some people gaming is limited to the nintendo, xbox and playstation, but there is a huge market for the computer gaming. Games in the computer can be a lot more immersive and addictive. Some games like second life, take the player to a completely new world where they can be whoever they want and say and do anything that pleases them. Games like this are not limited to gamers alone. Some people use them to have a meeting with people from all around the world and to try to model constructing ideas in order to be able to see how it will look when it is finished. One example of these uses is in the article "Going to the Virtual Office in Second Life" by Mark Tutton. In this article, Tutton illustrates how some companies use second life as a tool to have meetings in a virtual office that resembles a real life place and situation. This way they cut on travel cost and having the characters that look like the actual people who are using it, it makes it a little more personal than a conference call in Skype.

To be up to date with the latest virtual world breakthrough, one has to be reading about it every day. The technology developed over the past few years has improved dramatically. For example, in the article "after second life, can virtual worlds get a reboot?" by Diane Mehta. They talk about second life and even minecraft as the latest breakthrough in virtual worlds. This article was written in 2013; only 3 years ago. But the technology that can be involved with virtual worlds has changed drastically. The person being interviewed talks about 3D modeling as a new feature that she expects to be developed in the next few months. Only a few months, not years, not decades; this is how fast things can change. Today we not only have all of the virtual worlds in our Ipads and Smartphones. A virtual worlds are now being developed in a way that no one could have imagined 10 years ago. A way that the user can almost feel the environment around them in a virtual reality. Virtual reality is a game changer in the gamer world, as we drop the joystick and keyboard to control the game and we start using the actual movement of our body. In my opinion, virtual reality will take over the gaming world in the ear future. Right now you can go to the store and get an "oculus rift" and get immersed in a virtual reality world. 

Blog About Twitter

Twitter is in my opinion superior when it comes to discussions compared with blackboard and in class discussions. Compared to blackboard, twitter's comments have to be short and concise; as opposed to the long paragraphs and essays that you can find on blackboard. This makes it easier to read everyone's opinion and also forces the students to find a way to cut their thoughts to 140 characters. Compared to the classroom it has the advantage that the students can take as long as they want to craft their thoughts before putting them online. In a class discussion, students have very limited time to think before adding their opinion to a discussion. On top of that, it is not easy for everyone to talk in front of crowd. Twitter gives the comfort of not being watched and takes that pressure off from the students. However, students should not rely only on this to speak their minds, since social skills are required in order to succeed in almost every career. Twitter could be used as a "warm up" of the topic to be discussed in class. This way students can prepare before coming inside the classroom. Out of the 3, I find blackboard the hardest to keep up with. It is messy, confusing, not user friendly and often clusters a lot of information.

Social Networking Sites

For this post I have selected two of my favorite sites in addition to Facebook and Twitter. These sites are Youtube and Twitch. Most of you probably are not familiar with Twitch.tv as it targets a specific group of people: Gamers. One thing about all these social network sites is that if they are similar they try to "copy" what the other one is doing in an attempt to replace it. We have seen it in Facebook's status messages and tagging people, imitating Twitter. Youtube is no stranger to copying a potential competitor. Youtube added "Youtube Gaming" in order to offer similar services that have been in Twitch.tv for a while.

One thing that all 4 sites have in common is that they all let people communicate with one another and share original content and all sorts of files. Facebook concentrates more in the social life aspect of people. As in the main purpose of Facebook is to share any life event trough pictures and videos. Like pictures of the bar you visited Saturday night, or your cousin's birthday party. I feel that most of the time, these posts are an attempt from the person posting it to seem interesting, cool or to be accepted to certain social group that he wants to belong.

Twitter seems to be more professionally and academically accepted as a social network tool. Not that it is bigger than Facebook, but it seems more appropriate at a business and academic level. Having a limit of the amount of words per tweet makes people more creative about what they post. I see twitter used as a tool that supports the content of a specific project. For example, many people who make videos in Youtube, often use Twitter to let their followers know what they are working on and when their next project will be ready, as well as updates that have to do with delays.

Youtube has been around for a while and its main purpose is the making of videos that range from cats being cats; to classes of economics. Youtube users often concentrate their content in one specific audience. For example, there are channels that will only post videos about basketball and others will only post videos that have to do with video games. Youtube seems like the most profitable social network if the user can get a constant amount of viewers. There is an interesting trend in youtube, and this leads to my discussion of Twitch. The most viewed videos are music videos, having at the top "gangnam style" with 2.6 BILLION views. However the channel has 9 million users subscribed which is more important that a video view since it remarks how many people are going to see all of the content that you post. On the other hand we have "PewDiePie" gaming channel. It is the most popular channel with 48 million subscribers. Even tough his most viewed video accounts for only 78 million views, it counts with the persistence and support of 5 times more people than the "gangnam style" channel. Making it more profitable.

Twitch.tv is concentrated only in gamers. In this website people can stream in real life when they play at home. Anyone can watch them, talk to them and give donations. There are a lot of people who stream video games for a living and make a decent paychek (all from donations). Twitch.tv has been becoming bigger with the growth of video games popularity. Even Amazon.com just signed a contract with them and having an amazon prime account gives you benefits in twitch.tv as well. Its busiest time is when the League of Legends world championship runs every year; at this time they get up to 500000 people watching live. Streaming has been adopted by youtube and even facebook. Streaming games is growing rapidly and twitch is definitely a social network to keep your eyes on.

Social Networking

We all are familiar with social media and social networking. Most of us even feel that we know most of the uses that these social media platforms offer and the advantages that they bring to a business or a person. Most of us have heard about a case when through social networking a business has increased their revenues at little to no cost. Like the case that was discussed in my marketing class last semester about a restaurant that opened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The owners decided to bring the restaurant to twitter, foursquare and yelp. But not only that, they listened to what people were writing and they were actually acting upon those comments. Even sometimes the customers will give a recipe for a burger and the restaurant will actually use it and sell it. As you can imagine this boosted the revenues of the restaurant tremendously. 

Other organizations that are benefiting from social networking are involved in politics. Political campaigns are now publishing heavily on social media in order to attract support from all the social media users. This has been proved to be very effective, mostly because the people seeing the post by a politician can actually comment and give their opinions in real time. One of the first examples of this change is the Obama's campaign. When the president used social media in order to strengthen his campaign. In the article "How Obama Tapped Into Social Network's Power" by David Carr. We get a description of how the president was one of the first politicians to take use of the "unconventional" and non traditional social media for his political campaign. The use of Facebook and twitter to run a campaign ended up giving more power to the people and to the president himself; the ones loosing here were the bankers and lobbyists, as Mr. Carr said: 

   

           "The juxtaposition of a networked, open-source campaign and a historically imperial office will have profound implications and raise significant questions. Special-interest groups and lobbyists will now contend with an environment of transparency and a president who owes them nothing. The news media will now contend with an administration that can take its case directly to its base without even booking time on the networks."

Just as these social media platforms become more popular and powerful; they become more competitive with each other. Social media platforms are in a constant fight in order to grab more users and it seems that they all want to take over the other. Some social media platforms have not survived the competition from Facebook and Twitter (like Myspace). But even when we think that these two giants are very different from each other, they are actually very competitive. This is better illustrated in the article "Facebook Goes for Some Twitter Sensibility" by Claire Cain Miller. On this article, Miller explains how after failing to acquire Twitter; Facebook decided that it was time to imitate some of the features that seemed very useful by the Twitter users. One of these features that Facebook took from Twitter is the option to tag a friend in a status update. Before, the option to tag friends was limited only to pictures. Another thing they took was pretty much the whole Twitter layout in what is called "Facebook Lite". Search, and see for yourself; I hope you are okay with copycats. 

Blog v Wiki

Blogs and wikis have become so popular that these words feel very familiar to us now. So familiar that sometimes we even forget the actual meaning or in fact what these two words represent. Blogs and Wikis serve to gather information from multiple people into one web page. The main difference is that blogs are all about the authors opinions and the development of these ideas (with some criticism and collaboration from other bloggers). As we see in the article "Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid" by Michael Wilson; a bunch of people from the area of Brooklyn came together in a blog, providing information hat came from each blogger's perspective. This different information added up in one blog to become so detailed and accurate that eventually it was for use of the police to perform an effective drug raid in a house.

Wikis, on the other hand, serve as a collective effort to provide information. As opposed to blogs, the main article or piece of information can be altered in order to expand on the subject or to enrich the range of information that is provided. The most known wiki, is Wikipedia, which everyone has had used at some point. Sometimes Wikipedia seems so common that we forget the actual nature of the website and that pretty much anyone can add whatever they want to it (for a little time before getting edited by some other user who doesn't want people to fail their research paper). The purpose of a wiki page is very well described in the article "An Internal Wiki That's not Classified" by Noam Cohen, we get a picture of how a wiki page is used as an every day tool in the State Department. A wiki page is used for executives to come up with information about an important foreign politician that they have a meeting with. Now, instead of each executive coming in with their own piece of information about the politician; they all add that information in a wiki page in order for everyone to have the most accurate data for that meeting.

 I can not think of a way that wiki pages are not being used right now. With all the free flow of information sometimes we feel as everything that is to be invented, its already invented. I am sure that somewhere there is some blog and/or wiki page discussing on the multiple ways a wiki can be used that has been overlooked by most people.

Gaming and New media

In my opinion there are two sides of gaming. First, there is the side that the costumers see and enjoy, which is the game platform and all the features it offers for entertainment. Second, there is the developer's side. This is much more complicated and it is a process that a lot of people do not look into it. New media has affected both sides of the gaming industry by creating online communities where players communicate with one another. Adding to this some developers have turned their game process updates into something like a blog or a wiki page, where the players can give direct feedback and recommendations. I will look in more detail all the ways that new media has affected the gaming industry and how the industry is adapting to the merge of new media platforms.