Creativity and new media

New media fosters creativity because the amount of things you can do in a virtual world is unlimited. In the second life, a virtual world, my character started out in a deserted island, but I was able to instantly transport my avatar to a Chinese mansion setting.  You can see the amount of effort put into the scenery to create this Chinese aspect. This means that in many different scenario, people can join a scenery to their liking and also create one.

Creativity

New media fosters because it provides efficient brainstorming and allows our minds to be open. In the article, "Twitter serves up ideas from its followers", shows how twitter can useful to big and small companies. These social media platforms allows owners to find out what their customers like and what they wanted to change. It allows the company to evolve and tweak its performance to bring in more customers. Twitter can change and upgrade their basic functions which helps their users. A change would be instead of writing "retweet", it can shortened to RT. New media allows people to answer questions such as "Why are people using this and how could we make that better?". This questions allows creativity to expand.

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds are computer based community designed by individuals to help interact with others and create a community. In a virtual world, individuals would use an avatar which is a representation of themselves to interact with the various users on the net. Virtual reality can be used in the study of science, playing games, and education purposes.

The pros of virtual worlds is that it can be used in various ways. According to "'Naughty Auties' battle autism with virtual interaction" by Nicole Saidi, shows how it can be implemented to treat disorders. The virtual worlds allows for avatars or real people to create a comfort zone. The comfort zones allow users to feel relaxed when meeting new strangers on the net than going out in real life to see them. The virtual world help people with autism because it sets up situations they may come across in their everyday lives. Other various ways virtual worlds are used for socializing, education, political expression, and military training.

Besides the pros of virtual worlds, there are cons. Some cons are the hardware required, training, and people escaping the real world. According to "Virtual world may impact real-world behavior" says how you represent yourself in a virtual world may affect how you behave towards others in the real world. It states that in role-play virtual environments as either a hero or villain can easily cause people to reward or punish anonymous strangers. This shows that virtual reality possess a negative effect on the user depending how they play that they wouldn't normally show in the real world until they feel that the real world is similar to a virtual world.

Virtual worlds foster creativity by the users creating a virtual world that displays the reality mixed with unrealistic aspects that cannot happen in the real world. Different virtual worlds can call for different things such as the collaboration of a group, building worlds and tweaking it to what they feel is right. I feel that virtual reality will continue to grow in the future and change everyday lives. There are also developers trying to create VRMMO such as what happened in the anime Sword Art Online.

Blog About Twitter

Twitter in a way are less effective in creating a discussion than an in-class and blackboard discussion. Twitter has a 140 character limit unlike an in-class and blackboard discussion. Twitter allows for concise messages and prevents a full discussion to happen unless there are multiple tweet. In a blackboard discussion, there is more liberty in writing and allows an easier way for the collaboration of ideas. Unlike Twitter, blackboard cannot use hashtags or key words in finding similar post which makes it harder to find data in a simple way. An in-class discussion is only limited to those participating in the class, but in twitter and blackboard we can find much more information from a variety of audiences.

Social Networking Sites

Facebook : Facebook is a social networking website which allows us to connect and share with your family and friends. It allows users to create profiles, upload photos and videos, and send messages. In everyone's profile, there is their personal wall which is filled with posts of text, pictures or content the user is tagged in. After the wall, there is newsfeed which consist of recent post from friends, friends of friends, likes, or advertisement. I feel that using Facebook is an easier way to stay connected with anyone. I feel like its a faster way in sending messages to my friends rather than texting because everyone normally has data or WiFi on their phone.

Twitter : Twitter is a short social networking micro blogging site. Unlike Facebook, Twitter's tweet is limited to 140 characters. On twitter, short conversations can be weaved into a general topic with the use of hashtags (#keyword). Twitter allows for quick follow up on certain people such as celebrities.
I find Twitter is useful in keeping up with popular people, but I'm not about that life.

YouTube: YouTube is a website designed in sharing videos. In these videos, there are many different contents users could upload. Some of these videos can be informative, how to, blogging, viral, and much more.  It is considered a social networking site because after watch a video, users can comment on the video, share and respond to it. I like YouTube because its free and it practically connects you to the entire world. You can find almost anything on YouTube.

Reddit : Reddit is a social network site where people would post information similar to a blog on a certain topic. A user would upload a post about anything and various other users would gather around and begin uploading similar content which would turn into a thread. Users would comment about the post and would allow downvotes and upvotes. I feel like reddit is one of the best social networking sites out there. It is free and very resourceful in about anything.

Social Networking

Social networking has rapidly grown over the years incorporating itself as a part of everyone's everyday lives. Social networking is used to communicate with friends and family, but can also be used an infrastructure for a business. Social networking has been a quick and easy way for people to build relationships and sharing information.  According to Frank Langfitt's article, " Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting", he states social networking technology is absolutely the best thing to happen to recruiting. Sites such as Linkedin, a network filled with millions of professional around the world, has helped find high quality suitable candidates that cannot be found elsewhere. Websites such as these have promoted an readily accessible way for people looking for jobs in specific fields along with employers looking for specific candidates.
Although society has benefited the work force, public and private relations there is the "Dark Side". The dark side of social networking would be the privacy of sensitive information. According to Rebecca Greenfield's article " Facebook Privacy is So Confusing Even the Zuckerberg  Family Photo Isn't Private", illustrates the sister of Facebook founder couldn't figure out the privacy setting. Randi had posted a family photo and set the privacy to friends only, but the photo was seen by another person who wasn't a friend of hers. In my opinion privacy conditions should evolve with the evolution of social media. Everyone shouldn't be able to access all sort of information about another person. Users of social networking should be more aware of the dangers and risk of publicizing themselves over the net. Even if a photo or information may be deleted currently, it still could be saved on a log or database somewhere else. People should be careful about their own identity and should fear the dangers.

Blog V. Wiki

Blogs and wikis are similar in a way that has provided a source of communication among various users in sharing information. These websites are easier for people to update and upload information than a formal document or a traditional website. Although blogs and wikis are similar there is also different aspects to each.

Blogs are written by a specific group of people who provide information and insight. The specific group of people or individuals also known as bloggers have administrative access to the settings and preference of the blog. A blog allows for the entry of chronological content which makes previous post obsolete. Blogs are typically a form of opinion sharing where users are allowed to comment to posts written by the blogger. Blogs are used to form a collaboration between large group of people.  According to Michael Wilson's article, "Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid", a blog was used to help police track down and arrest criminal in the Brooklyn neighborhood. This shows an example of collaboration. The people of the Brooklyn neighborhood used the blog to spread awareness of the risk and dangers of drugs.

A wiki is a web site that allows various users to collaborate together on a certain project. After a person creates a page, everyone has the permission to add content, edit content, and add supporting links. A wiki evolves as people add and revise information. Information provided on a wiki are constantly changed and updated.  Wiki are known for knowledge sharing. According to Ezra Goodnoe's article, "How to Use Wikis for Business", shows a wiki can be implemented for the rudimentary elements of the business. It allows employees to manage documents with a minimum amount of effort, lag, and risk or redundancy. It allows companies to run a project management tool that is cheaper and easily accessible. The wiki will provide a central information where documents are shared between colleagues.

Blogs and wikis have provided a way for the world to converge together on certain topics. Blogs provide collaboration when users comment their opinions on the topic. A new way for wiki that has not been collaborated yet would be the collaboration between students and teachers. Students can gather together for a specific class and provide information between each other such as class notes. This can help students who missed the class catch up with the notes or what happened during that day. It can also provide the collaboration on school work or studying for an exam. When studying for an exam, we can find faster information on the important parts of the chapters instead of reading all the chapters useless filler words.