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.