Next New Media

A virtual personal assistant. Maybe like artificial intelligence app that does emails and scheduling and all the other tasks that may be needed or maybe I'm a little biased and jealous because I just saw Avengers last night and Jarvis(Tony Stark's computer/personal assistant) is a total bad ass. I think it would be cool, but very far off in the future. With a personal assistant like Jarvis people can be hands off on a lot of the daily things they do. Some examples would be -Scheduling -Making phone calls -Posting on social media -Doing little things like checking the weather, news, and other tedious things related to technology Yes, there are applications that do that on the phone, but I'm thinking large scale around the house and you can walk and talk to it as you move without taking out a physical device. I also think that some type of google glass related technology will eventually change the world, someone just has to make it better. A A LOT better.

Wiki So Far

I edited the gaming page of the wiki. I included the expansions section in the World of Warcraft game because I have played the game since 2008 and I knew the history and how the game evolved over the past decade or so. I created a section for each expansion using my experiences with the game and some research on the internet. Then provided brief descriptions of each of the five games and the new features and updates that each expansion brought to the game. I also created a Dating media page that I have not edited yet. It is still blank, but I will use the research from my term paper to fill in the page with information that I have.

P2P

File sharing is when someone sends data or information of a file to each other. An email of my homework to a professor would be considered sharing my file. I think the reason its called sharing is because its an electronic asset/data can be duplicated so its never completely transferred to another person hence the "sharing" aspect. P2P stands for peer-to-peer and P2P file sharing is something thats been around for a while. For instance people are pooling resources of data to one person and it becomes a big web of file data transferring between people with the same file. This makes the process of downloading something like a file a lot faster because the file data is coming from multiple sources(Peers). Bit torrent for example allows data to be transferred over the internet and is a tool for finding people with those files to download it from. For example if you wanted to download music(illegally). Bit torrent helps you find peers who are hosting the music on their computers for other peers to find and allows you guys to share that music. With bit torrent, the more the merrier. Why? When there are multiple peers with the music file there will be more data funneled to you and making your download faster. Eventually when you receive the complete music file, you become a host(seed) and start sending out the completed music file that you downloaded to help others who are seeking the same file to download it off you. http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/bittorrent.html

Privacy

Privacy is a big issue in today's world and new media can be one of the reasons why. As technology continues to grow and companies continue to profit from gather information about people the privacy issue will always be an issue. Organizations want to understand people and their habits in order to market or sell things to them. Everyone on the internet are now trying to cash in on this because the internet is so large and there will always be data to be collected. The internet population isn't the problem, the new media is. I think that in today's new media, almost every organization or website will ask for credentials before you can access any of their content and we're basically giving our information to them every time we surf the web. The more we fill out these forms or acceptance of terms on the internet the more vulnerable and public our lives will be to the internet. An article about the University of Maryland spoke about the University being hacked and information of over 300,000 people's information being stolen. The information dates back to 1998. I understand that the University might have reasons to keep this information., but because they kept this information stored somewhere, bad people were able to access it. We live in a world where the more information that is collected the stronger organizations become. But in this case I can think of more reasons to maybe erase past data/information than to keep it. I think new media has changed people and organizations and slowly changed our society in to a bunch of information hoarders. Its become more of a obsession and using the information for whatever business plans they have in store is just an excuse.

Advice

New media can be used to improve the college. The purpose of new media is to inform people of things, so I suggest that they have a school-wide social network. Registering with your Baruch email only to keep miscellaneous people out and make it a Baruch students and faculty only network. Kind of like a linkedin,, but Baruch only. This way we can have students communicating with each other and maybe interested parties can get together. Networking with alumnis to help students kick start their careers. Also I think that Baruch's twitter would be worth following if it tried to connect to its students more instead of advertising its accomplishments. I feel like kids at this school come here because its a respected school and already know that, people want to see that an institution actually interacts with its students and not trying to sound like theyre getting you to acknowledge how good it is. Yes it may help with bringing in new students, but I think there are better places to do that than twitter.

Creativity and New Media

I did this about two years ago, me and my friend were hanging out late in a nearby neighborhood park in the middle of the summer. We were talking about the things that our parents do culturally when were around people. We ended up having a huge laugh about how similar our parents act because of our culture and how we grew up. Then thought about it and we really don't see too many youtubers who speak my language or at least use it in their videos. I speak a dialect of chinese called thai shan. So I decided to create a cover of the song "Call me maybe" in my dialect for fun and received a lot of praise for it. Thats my way of creativity i guess... heres the link to the video

Creativity

New media allows people to be creative by giving them the freedom to express themselves. I think that in today's media more and more people are allowed to express their creativity because most of these people can remain anonymous to other users and they can express themselves without being judged as an individual. For instance there are people on new media websites like Youtube.com that are creating their own versions of popular music videos with popular cartoons. Without the Youtube platform they would have never thought to create such videos and get some many views and expect to go viral. I think new media allows someone to create a username for a specific social platform and have a different personality. This in a sense allows a someone to be someone he normally isn't and not judged in a sense. Whether the comments are negative or positive, people see the username and not the actual person freeing them from judgement. In the New York Times article it says that big companies that own the rights to the cartoon characters actually don't mind these parody videos and actually think they are funny. Everyday people are coming up with new ideas in to how to make new and creative ways to use all the existing new media.

Barnes, Brooks. "Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But Why?" The New York Times. The New York Times, 23 Sept. 2007. Web. 31 Mar. 2015.

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds can be identical to reality or built for fantasy reasons. Virtual worlds can be used in a variety of ways. A virtual world allows users or players to do things that they normally can't do or prepare for something they don't have experience with. For instance, there are people who work from home because of devastating injuries and the virtual world allows them to do things that they can't do in reality because of those injuries. The ability to walk, fly, socialize with others, and create a platform for people of similar situations.

Ways that virtual worlds can be used are for people to potentially "practice their real life". It may sound bizarre, but people inventing worlds where users can practice/simulate real life situations that may occur. one example would be practicing a profession. The virtual world has garnered interest in professional studies, that colleges like the University of Michigan and Stanford are using it in their medical schools. They put students in a hospital environment and basically allow students to make decisions on the fly within a certain time frame. This helps students practice their future profession in a simulation to help benefit their decision making in the future.

Another way that virtual worlds can be used are for health issues. Jacki Morie speaks about recreating a war zone/towns where soldiers have fought and enabling them to enter these virtual worlds as a for, of therapy. By adding friendly foreign civilians and people, it helps soldiers overcome post-war phsychological issues.

The pros of virtual worlds are the creation of healing spaces and people coming together with similar backgrounds. It brings similar minds together and when people who have similar goals and views, things tend to get done. It allows people to do things that otherwise couldn't do in reality. I think the cons of the virtual world are that some people get too caught up in the virtual world and maybe start to depend on it. When people are on virtual worlds for too long it often causes problem in their health in terms of their physical beings. Another con I think that virtual worlds come with is their social skills may deteriorate. It may be acceptable to speak or act a certain way in the virtual world, but not necessarily in reality. I think the future of virtual worlds will continue to grow as institutions find more ways to integrate this technology in to their organizations like colleges and fast paced organizations.


Simon, Stephanie. "Avatar II: The Hospital." WSJ. The Wall Street Journal, 13 Apr. 2010. Web. 20
Mar. 2015.

Mehta, Diane. "After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get a Reboot?" Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 30 Apr. 2013. Web. 19 Mar. 2015.

Blog About Twitter

Twitter allows for people to "tweet" which is simple voicing their opinion to the general public, a specific group of interested users via "hashtags", and people that follow them. BlackBoard discussions are private and shared only with people who are enrolled in the course. Twitter on the other hand is public in that anyone following you can see your activity. The similarities that the two is that you're voicing or talking to only the people that know you exist. For example, when you post on BlackBoard your opinion is only seen by those that are also on Blackboard and for Twitter it is by the people that you allow to follow you (only if your profile is private). So in a way both platforms allow you to start discussions with people that you want to get answers from. When comparing Twitter to an in-class discussion we think about people participating. In a class discussion people are usually taking turns voicing their opinions and their thoughts about a subject. These discussions are also usually taking place within a confined space like a classroom or a lecture hall. Twitter does the same thing, but is a lot more flexible in that it allows for people to contribute to a discussion via Tweets. There isn't anything such as "calling out" or "raising your hand" in a Twitter discussion. When people tweet(voice) their opinions, its instantly seen(heard) by the people they're directed to on someone of a real time news feed. Now the discussions on Twitter are happening instantaneously without waiting for someone to finish talking and they can instantly voice an opinion on someone else's opinion. Twitter is in the internet space so there is no confined space for discussion and anyone who wishes to chime in, can do so. By using hashtags Twitter discussions can be specified in that only people who are explicitly looking for a specific hashtag or subject will see it. One unique feature that I think Twitter has that makes having a conversation or discussion so engaging is the limit of characters you may use on a response or tweet. I think short answers allow people to answer tweets quickly as well as read through them quickly. We don't want to hear a kid in the classroom talk about something for an entire two hours, so I'm sure we don't want to read a tweet that is three pages long. We have old media for that.

Social Networking Sites

Here are my impressions of some social media sites that I use or have used.

Facebook

Facebook gives me an impression of an interactive contacts book. There is a messenger on the side in order for me to communicate with friends and also a news feed that allows for me to see whats going on with people. It gives me a feeling of staying in touch with people you may be friends with, come across in the past, or updating others about yourself. Its not very clustered and the information and functions are in easy to spot areas and allows for seamless navigation.

Twitter

I made a twitter account for the first time about a week or two ago and I thought that twitter was very overwhelming. Maybe because I was used to Facebook, but the sign up process took longer than expected because twitter almost seemed to forcefully make you sync your contacts or suggest what seemed like a never ending list of people to follow. The worst part was I couldn't find a way to skip this step of the sign up process. As I played around with it for an hour or so, twitter seemed to be a very simple application. I followed some classmates and also followed some public figures and companies. Twitter seems to be more of a news source. Twitter provides people updates with whats going on with the world outside of their world and allows for people to know whats going on in lives of people that they might not know in person but know as a fan.

Instagram

Instagram to me just seemed like Facebook, but strictly photographs. In this day and age where everyone uses phones with cameras, people are always sharing things that they come across through photos. Instead of text, people are using photos to update their "statuses" or what they're up to. People are allowed to comment or like the photos. Overall Instagram just seems like a film roll of photos taken by the people that you follow.

Meetup

I had a chance to use Meetup in the past and I think this social networking site is one of the better ones. This one allows people of common interests to meet each other through those interests. For instance, if I wanted to start a soccer game on Saturday, I would create an event and those who are interested in playing soccer would sign up for the event and then users can get together to form groups that continue to expand as these events start to expand. It sticks to its name of "Meetup" because it brings people together. I was fortunate enough to participate in a meet up in the past and I had a great time and met some really interesting people.

To really sum it all up Facebook is more of a keep in touch tool with the people you know and provide them with updates about your life as well as a way for people to interact. Twitter seems more of a news feed for just about anything, a simple hashtag and you can find news and updates on a subject you're looking for. Instagram, I would say is a Twitter and Facebook put together, it provides news and people can follow just about anyone as long as you know their usernames and most of the time profiles are public. Instagram allows you to see what people are doing visually rather than textually. I think Meetup is the odd one out in the fact that there is no following others and posting and updating people with how your life is going. It simply is a platform for people to get together and meet in person to enjoy activities that they have in common. You create groups, search for groups, set up events, and attend events. The only thing that it may have in common is that these groups or events have message boards that allow for people to organize their events or talk about their common interests.

Social Networking

Business intelligence has always been something that companies invested heavily on. More so in today's day and age because of all the interactions that people have with Social Media. Social networking is a way for various individuals or groups to interact and meet each other regardless of physical distance. Today's day you may meet a person of a mutual friend that you have never seen or heard of, Social Networking through the internet made this possible. This is where the business intelligence of companies come in. They bring in their Big Data equipment and start collecting the information that we as a society feed it. We may think that we're uploading pictures, posting a status, or checking in to a restaurant. Companies care about this and they want to know what we're interested in. Companies want to know what exactly we're interested in, where we frequently visit, how we spend our time. All of this information is important to these organizations because they can take the data they mine from our day to day activities and come up with algorithms that define us. By giving us a definition they can better market products and services to us because they know exactly who we are and we'll eventually give in to the things they have to offer.

In today's society we don't think too much about things such as privacy because we think that reputable organization's size means their security is equally as big. But what we don't realize is that we instantly click "I Agree" because we assume that all of the fine print are written in a similar manner and it doesn't hurt us. The dark side of social media is that people don't realize that the fine print of these websites are to allow them to collect and monitor our day to day actions. These privacy statements are written in a way that its long and confusing so the users don't even bother trying to get through the entire thing. If the owner of Facebook's family photos are allowed to be viewed by people over the internet, than anyone's photo can be too. In order to keep ourselves safe, we simply should not post anything anywhere that you would regret later.

Reed, Daniel. "Survey Reveals Generation Gap in Attitudes about Security and Privacy." JavaWorld. Communications of the ACM, 11 May 2011. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.

Greenfield, Rebecca. "Facebook Privacy Is So Confusing Even the Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn't Private." DEC 26, 2012 10:44AM ET Facebook Privacy Is So Confusing Even the Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn't Private. The Wire, 26 Dec. 2012. Web. 06 Mar. 2015.

Blogs vs. Wikis

Blogs and wikis are both media technologies that convey information to readers. Wikis are pages where there are multiple people who contribute in to editing these pages so that information is pooled and constantly updated. But because its more of an open source project the information can be changed and be deemed untrue. There are constantly updates to wikis until the perfect information is put together in which contributors feel is correct. Contributors are given some sort of recognition. Wikis although have multiple contributors, these contributors don't interact in terms of editing the page and moving on. If there is a disagreement there doesn't need to be consent for one contributor to change what another contributor says.

Blogs on the other hand is a more journal like source of information. In blogs the information is written by a single author and contributions to the information or topic come in the form of comments or responses which do not change the original post of information. The information on the original blog post may be bias to a particular subject, but the beauty of blogs is that users can comment and respond to the posts and creates argument which then leads to people holding valuable conversations via the responses. Blogs create more interaction between contributors and there is no "I'll edit your post because its wrong on the wiki" and more "I disagree or agree because...". Though sometimes the contributions do get personal and people do get offended, its a great way to get insight and opinions from various people across the web.

Wilson, Michael. "Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid." The New York Times. The New York Times, 25 June 2008. Web. 03 Mar. 2015.

Dowd, Maureen. "Stung by the Perfect Sting." The New York Times. The New York Times, 25 Aug. 2009. Web. 03 Mar. 2015.

Dating in New Media

For my research top I want to do an analysis on dating websites/dating applications(Tinder) and the effects that these new social media websites have on society and the way people interact with each other.
Some potential questions that I will be trying to answer fall along the lines of:
Is it good that more people are connecting because of new media and the term "small world" existing because of these new media technologies?
Connecting people based on preferences/interests maintain longer and more intimate relationships?
Does this ruin face-to-face social interactions between people when they meet? Does it change the way people interact in general over time?
How these dating apps and websites are affecting modern day dating/relationships and mostly some positive and negative effects it may have on people.

First post

Just created this blog and this is my test post to see how my blog looks like with some material. Thanks for stopping by and reading the things I have to say about stuff in CIS3810.