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.