The Next New Thing

Modern society's new media is usually involved in computers or smart phones which we are using and carrying all the time. However, there is one more device we live with on a daily basis but most of people forget about. It is television. Even though new technology allowed us to watch TV shows on the internet, most of people still wait for their favorite TV shows’ new seasons and would like to watch them on television. 

What I realized about television is that TV was not really developed a lot when it comes to “interaction”. We can have social interaction by using computers and phones. On the other hand, television still stays in a one-way system. Information is delivered only from producers to viewers. I am expecting the one-way relationship to be a two-way relationship in the future by adding a new technology. For example, if a live-chatting system is adopted while viewers watch TV shows, the viewers can discuss about what will happen in the TV show they are watching or share feedbacks about the TV shows with producers or writers right away. 

Our class wiki so far..

I have not contributed to our class wiki yet so I will just describe what I have done on my research paper. My research paper’s topic was “loss of privacy and social networking”. When it comes to social networks, the privacy problem becomes a serious issue in our modern society.  I basically stated the significance of the problem and several types of social networks in my introduction. And I categorized the issues by three aspects; generally, economically, and morally. In the economic aspect, I used some articles related to loss of privacy at work and how it can affect employees at work. Also I mentioned about increasing cyber crime costs. In moral issue, I used scholarly article which is about participatory surveillance. Also, I stated responsibility issue caused from loss of privacy on social networking. Since I researched about privacy issue, I am planning to contribute about this topic on our class wiki under Privacy section.

P2P File Sharing

File sharing is basically the practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. In IT society, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing has become popular for the Internet users who want to share information by uploading and downloading. 

BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay are the most successful peer-to-peer programs which let users quickly upload and download enormous amounts of data, files that are hundreds of thousands of times bigger than a single MP3. Back then when people just started having an idea of P2P system, Napster was popular. However, it was usually used just for the free videos and television shows. Unlike Napster, people can be connected to the communities in the BitTorrent for the purpose of sharing information between like-minded thinkers to share their passion, such as politics and science.

Citation

Choi, David Y; Perez, Arturo. Online piracy and the emergence of new business models (Conference Paper). USASBE/SBI 2006 Joint Conference Proceedings. Tucson, AZ. ed. Toombs, Leslie A. 2006. http://www.sbaer.uca.edu/research/usasbe/2006/pdffiles/papers/cases/016.pdf

http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-largest-file-sharing-sites-110828/

Privacy & Confidentiality

Nowadays, almost everyone is involved in new media such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, or LinkedIn if they know how to deal with internet. People find their old friends and keep in touch with them or find jobs by using these social networking sites. However, it seems like people give up their personal information so easily just to join social networking sites on the internet. They put their real information like their address, phone numbers, birthdays etc, but one important fact they easily forget is that identity thieves, scam artists, debt collectors, stalkers, cyber criminals and corporations seeking for a market advantage are using social networks to collect various data from the users of the websites. 
This issue causes another serious problem "Confidentiality". Users who put their real information usually trust the websites they use, but the employees who work for the websites' system might get tempted to sell the users' personal information to others. And this is the starting point where you get all spam text messages and advertising emails from random people or companies. However, it's not something that we can always avoid by not putting our real information. A lot of websites make us to put our phone numbers or emails to send us confirmation codes. It is mandatory for people who want to join the websites these days. Now, who is going to take the responsibility of privacy issue became everyone's homework. The users? the companies(websites)? or the government?

Advice to Baruch College

First of all, I would suggest to make a better version of Baruch college app for smart phones. Baruch College already has an app where students and faculties can get some information regarding to school such as calendar, news, course catalog etc. However, most of students don't even know about this app. It looks simple and has core information about school system, but it's just pretty much same as the Baruch College website. I would like to make this app better and more useful for students by adding some systems.
 I will make this app available to put students' current courses they are taking and this system will be connected to blackboard, so that students can be informed when their classes are canceled or they can check new posts on the course blackboard without logging on blackboard on computer every time. Of course, this proposal needs another system which is alert. It is kind of annoying to go check website's calendar every time I am not sure if the school is closed or not like today. Today was a veterans' day and I expected to have no school since it is national holiday, but the school was open and I took some time to check if the school was open on the website. Also, this alert system will be helpful to inform students and faculties when the school has to close due to unexpected heavy snow or tornado.
There is another section called "People" on this app. When I clicked, there was nothing that I can do with. I can make this section to chat with classmates in a casual way. Students can have a short discussion about their projects by using this app.

Creativity and New Media

      I also used the app "Bitstrips" which is a new app and able to be connected to Facebook. People can create an avatar with this app and make their own cartoons to express their emotions or status. This app looks good by itself, but I want to add some more new technologies on this and make it better in a functional way.
Since Myspace has fallen in the social networking industry, I want to suggest them to apply this kind of app on Myspace. The best thing about Myspace is that people can share their favorite music. So, this app will work better with the code "music" on Myspace. The new app will allow users create their avatars and express their feelings not only with cartoons but also with musics that they want to share in order to show others how they are feeling at that moment.

Creativity

New media technologies are thought to be significant tools for enabling creativity and 
innovation. When we had only traditional media technologies (analogue), there were some limitations of  possibilities because the traditional media was usually based on one way system. However, as the technologies improved a lot, the system started having mutual interaction from one way. People started share their new ideas in more convenient way and they became main producers to make the new media technologies better. The New York Times article titled "Twitter Serves up Ideas from Its Followers" shows that how the users in new media are important and became innovators for new technologies. In the article, economists have long thought that producers — the people making products and running companies — are naturally the ones coming up with new ideas, Professor von Hippel said. In fact, he said, consumers often come up with ideas for products, and companies wait on the sidelines to see if they have mass appeal. 

Modeling Reality With Virtual Worlds

      Virtual worlds can be used in various ways nowadays. Virtual worlds can provide an opportunity for the people who have disabilities to communicate and interact in real world. Residents of digital realm can represent themselves with 3-D images called avatars and connect with each other over the Internet. Also, in avatar world, people can live their lives in the way they want without concerning their financial budgets. In deed, there was an increasing in spending in the virtual worlds throughout the recession in real world. As we can see the examples I mentioned so far, the virtual worlds can be good in the way of giving us a second life. However, we can find some disadvantages as well.

The biggest problem of the virtual world is that it will decrease human interaction in the real world. This will lead another problem. If the virtual environments become much higher quality, they will become attractive to those wishing to escape from the real life. More negatively, the virtual world can lead people to have low self-esteem, feelings of worthlessness and insignificance, even self-destructive acts. 
    
The virtual worlds already became very similar to the real world. People can buy the stuff  which we have in real life and make family or work in the virtual worlds. In the future, I think people even will be able to smell the food they eat with their avatars and they might have to actually use their body physically to work and live in the worlds. Thus, it will make people more confused about distinguishing the virtual worlds and real world.

Citation

1. No Budget, No Boundaries: It’s the Real You by RUTH LA FERLA, the New York Times, Oct 22, 2009 p. E1. Available at:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/fashion/22Avatar.html
2. iReport: 'Naughty Auties' battle autism with virtual interaction by Nicole Saidi, CNN, March 28, 2008. available from:http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/03/28/sl.autism.irpt/index.html#cnnSTCText

TWITR: Blog About Twitter

      I think Twitter discussion has more efficiency in some aspects, mostly time consuming. On Twitter, we share ideas and respond to each others’ opinion quickly compared to BlackBoard Discussion or in-class discussion. Also it is good to discuss with others in a casual way and we do not need to raise our hands and wait until each person gets a turn to talk. Moreover, we get the core information or ideas in 140 characters on each posting. 

Social Networking Sites

     I visited Facbook, Myspace, Twitter, and LinkedIn. I feel comfortable with using Facebook and Twitter than other two social networking sites. Since I am a user of Facebook,I think Facebook is something you can use for casual talk with your friends, planning get-togethers, or just sharing your opinion with other people. It is good for social networking more than business. Twitter looks very similar to Facebook in the way of using it. They both are generally used for sharing people’s opinion and pictures or videos they post. However, there are some differences between them. Facebook has no limitation of letters when you post something. Also, you can post a video and others can watch it directly from your facebook account which is connected to Youtube. On the other hand, Twitter is allowed only up to 140 characters long every time you post something. So Twitter is better when you spread news or ideas with short messages in a fastest way.

     Myspace’s popularity went down rapidly. However, some people still use it for music. You can stream any song you'd like on Myspace and connect with the artist as well. Myspace has changed a lot of things since its business is not good. But there are cons from this renewal. You cannot import your settings and profile information from an old Myspace account. Also, it looks like Myspace became more complicated to use and manage the settings.

      I have never been on Linkedin, but I heard that this website is good for professional networking with others. Even professional recruiters use this website to find their customer companies’ potential employees. The website looks simple to use and is good to search people and have a connection with them.

Social networking

         Since social networking service became so popular in our society, this service has been used in various ways. One of the examples is that professional job recruiters can find qualified candidates on the social networking services. Maureen Crawford-Hentz recruits for Osram Sylvania, the global lighting company. She says the new tools have changed her life. One of Crawford-Hentz's favorite sites is Linkedin, a network of 8 million professionals spread across the world. Linkedin says users include executives from all of the Fortune 500 companies. Typing keywords into a search engine, she can scrape the entire network to dig out high-quality candidates that she can't find elsewhere. (Langfitt)

There are more benefits of the social networking technologies. People can get informed the latest news by Twitter or Facebook. There was a gun-shooting accident in garden city, long island recently. All streets were blocked by police and people who were near there were trapped for a few hours and they kept posting what happened and how the situation goes around on Twitter. Like we see in this case, social networking service became the fastest way to inform people about what is going on around us.

However, this advanced technology has dark sides as well. The biggest problem is loss of privacy. Anyone can find someone’s personal information just by searching his or her name on Facebook. Even if the person makes his privacy setting strictly, random people still can see his profile picture or get personal information such as his education status or mutual friends. If you have mutual friends with the person who you try to know about, you can get more information about him or her.

Some people say that young generation does not really care about this loss of privacy. But there is a research which shows that that is not true. The researchers, Danah Boyd and Eszter Hargittai, report that most Facebook users modified their privacy settings at least once in 2009 and that “engagement with privacy settings increased significantly” between 2009 and 2010. (Parry) As we can see from this research, people including young generation care about the loss of privacy and they take this issue seriously.

Social networking service gives us a lot of benefits in modern society. However, it causes some negative issues too as I mentioned above. If these issues can be solved in the future while the benefits are growing, the technologies will make our lives better.

Citation

Langfitt, Frank. “Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting.” NPR, March 16, 2008.

Parry, Marc, "Who Cares About Facebook Privacy? Students Do" NY Times, July 29, 2010

Blogs v Wikis

Blogs and wikis are very similar in many ways. They both use web pages and web applications to get information to the web. Also, they require no knowledge of HTML and allow users for immediate publishing of content. However, they have several different systems in editing and posting by users.

For Wikis, multiple authors can edit the information or add new pages based on sharing their knowledge and expressing group thoughts. Moreover, the page they create can be linked to other wiki pages as well. So Wikis are usually used for collaboration based projects.

In contrast, for Blogs, single author posts contents chronologically and other bloggers comment on and response to the posts to share their opinion. Therefore, we can tell that the posts one single author creates can be linked to outside users.

In modern society, convergence has become very important role since various people work together as a group in today’s networked world. The group members can share their ideas and leave comments on the members’ opinion so they can improve and complete their projects efficiently and effectively by using blogs and wikis. 

Social Networking: A purposeful loss of privacy

As our society progressed, our technology also improved a lot. It made our lives easier and convenient in many ways. For instance, we get useful information on our hands anywhere anytime we want by using portable devices such as smart phones, tablet PCs, etc. If we think about when we used to buy newspapers to know what it is going on in the world, we can tell that new technology gives us many advantages in economic and educational perspectives. Also, we can make connections easily with various people online by using social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter, and this blogging as well. However, we hear some bad news about this social networking service frequently these days. One of the cases I read in an article was about loss of privacy. For example, companies check out potential new employees’ Facebook or Twitter secretly before they hire employees. Also, an innocent college student committed suicide after his roommates recorded and posted his gay sex video on Facebook. I am going to focus on and research about loss of privacy from social networking services since it became a serious problem in modern society. Furthermore, I expect to learn how this problem will affect our personal lives and influence the pattern of social networking services.