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.