Creativity and New Media

ok take two. the  first time i tried this it deleted after four sentences. I guess that is the downside of laptops.

Now where was I?... oh yeah... to be creative with new media. this is hard because i am boring. my youtube videos are boring.  I could be cliche and do a video of me explaining this assignment. or i could video myself typing this blog. but i am shy and don't like videoing myself. I don't even like using my real name on social media. or i can add boring images that i have created. to use is different new media applications.
I can't even find any of my animated gif images.and i know i have some flash media somewhere.

Creativity

New media can instill creativity , and it can also stunt it. How many people do we see doing the same thing that everyone else does! We all can’t be a Mark Zuckerberg, as cliche as that sounds. While, people like Zuckerberg create the canvas, it is the individual user that fills it in. it could be a user posting a Youtube video, an app designer or or someone posting that they just ate a taco. Other ‘canvas’ developer are Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson who created Myspace. this medium became over designed but none the less a way for users to be creative.

There are are sure to me new canvases to be developed. Some will be widely popular, as others will be fairly unknown. and others will find a way to use the existing canvases in new ways like Mashups. As Sasha Frere-Jones explains in “1+1+1=1 The new math of mashups”, these are “ in which, generally, the vocal from one song is laid over the music from another.”

Creativity is creativity, someone who is creative will express themselves regardless of the media used. This was a problem (and still is) with the traditional media of signage. Before computers were used to make signs you needed a sign painter who knew such things as air spacing and kerning. then came computers and anyone who could use a mouse and type (or hunt and peck) could create a sign. while sign painting is a dying art form, a good sign can be created by a creative and well trained graphic designer. Taking images from his/her mind onto the canvas of a computer screen to a storefront.

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

blog about twitter

a forum is a forum is a forum.....

Message boards go back to the days of dial up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS's).
Most are the same. you post a topic or a subtopic in a topic and people post replies.
it is basically the same for the Blackboard Discussion, a twitter discussion or sites like yuku.com.
Some may have different formats, character length or requirements. Sometimes I wonder if developers just try to reinvent the wheel and call it a new product.
Now an in class discussion is different, you need to be quick on your feet (or seat) you don't have the luxury to wait and think about it and respond at your leisure. If you did that, the class most likely be on a whole new topic, or sub topic.

Social Networking Sites

One of the origins of social networking sites come from user blog sites. I don’t remember the early ones, I think one was called Xanga or something. Then one of the earlier sites was Myspace. at First it was a personal page where you can link to friends; it had a generic format. Then users started formatting their pages with CSS and HTML and there lies its downfall. You go to most users Myspace pages now and you have layers of iframes, tables, backgrounds with uncontrasting text colors that makes it unreadable. After that, you will most likely hear music, and if you are very lucky only one song at a time. The user may only post a single song or jukebox (but some add muiliples) that auto plays, but then other users will add songs to comments. I have no idea how that seams like a good idea. So not only can you not read the page, but you can’t hear it clearly either.

As Myspace started it decline, Facebook started it rise. Facebook has a ridged format, on pages. Users have little control over how the content is displayed. Facebook will even make changes to the format against a users will. For example their new “timeline” format that many are saying will be mandatory soon. A feature that attracted (and still attracts) users to Facebook is the apps. Myspace has since added apps but I feel this was too little too late. The apps on Facebook can be user generated in there Application Development area. While most know the apps from big companies like Zyanga’s Facebook, Words with Friends, and Cityville, others are made by regular users like a now defunct app Human Pets.  Another feature of Facebook is Status Updates.

It is these status updates that i feel twitter got it’s idea from. Tweets are like a cross between a status update and a sms(text) message.They have a character limit of 140 and users can ‘follow’ and ‘retweet’ a users ‘tweet’. Businesses use (or try to use) twitter to promote their business like Samsung’s “Samsung Nation”. It was also widely reported that twitter instrumental in the “Arab Spring” revolutions. I feel this may be why nations are putting pressure on Twitter to ‘censor’ content in their counties that is ‘unlawful’.

Another type of social networking site is the ‘professional’ social networking site, like LinkedIn. This site is the site job seekers hope future employees look at, but that is not the case. LinkedIn is basically a extended resume site, with a social media spin on it. It shows who is ‘connected’ to the user. it shows the “professional networking” that the user has. this site has little incentive for users to come back. for an HR manager this may be a wonderful site, but most users won’t have a large use for it on a daily basis.

And like I stated at the end of my last blog, there are other sites like like Google+ that are emerging. so I think that is a good place to end this blog.

social networking

Most social networking emerged and is emerging due to entertainment. After that the business world takes over, or at least attempts to. that could have been one of the falls of myspace out of favor or as Virginia Heffernan says in the article "Being There: The subtle art of the Facebook update" that people wanted a more intelligent or witty social network so they are drawn to Facebook. When he quotes a college student “The Facebook interface is minimalist and not stupid or smeared with fingerpaint like MySpace,” where as myspace was a visual / musical art, then facebook is an literature based art. so myspace would be the song or painting and Myspace would be the poem or novel. Another feature Facebook implemented prior to Myspace is third party applications. This allows any user to create applications to be used by the rest of the Community.

But users of Social networking sites are fickle and tend to move to "the new thing" just six months after Virginia Heffernan wrote about people leaving Myspace for Facebook she writes in "Facebook Exodus" about the move away from Facebook for many reasons like "Another friend, who didn’t want his name used, found that Facebook undermined his whole notion of online friendship."

so who knows where the users will move to next, is it Google + or is "the new thing" an idea in a student's head. only time will tell, or maybe we can hire a psychic detective.

Blog v. Wiki (2012)

Wiki’s and Blogs are not really comparable. they serve separate purposes. Even though the wiki video on the dynamic course outline  show it being used to plan a camping trip, this is not a common use (to my knowledge). When most people think of “wiki”’s they think of Wikipedia, but there are many wiki’s that are not as proud but, based just on a single Subject, Item, Event, Etc. that have a wide base of interested people; like a television show. Besides being for a large group of people, they are meant to be long term. going back to the camping trip wiki, what happens to that wiki once the trip is over? some might say it can be expanded to document the trip. but does this need to be collaborative, and if it doesn’t “need” to be, does it make sense to make it collaborative? And if it is not used for this purpose will it just lie there unused? seems like a waste.

A better way to handle the second part of this mythical camping trip wiki may be to have each person write a blog write about it. If person A does not recall an event from the trip the same way as person B, they can just write there own blog account of what transpired, instead of rewriting the original. This is because blogs are individual expressions. The author expresses there own thoughts, observations, experiences, etc., and is no (or little) need for others to edit it. If there is a spelling error or a factual error, a user can leave a comment (if comments are allowed) or contact the author directly. like in The New York Times article “Pentagon Keeps Wary Watch as Troops Blog” by James Dao (8SEPT2009) when talking about censorship: “the reservist does not want his superiors censoring it.” This blog is his personal writings and stories and he does not want others to change them.

For the most part i feel blogs are static and wiki’s are dynamic. what do i mean by this? With few exceptions once a blog is written, it is not changed so, it is static. a wiki on the other hand is designed to be changed, either to correct errors, add additional information, remove false information, etc., so it is dynamic.  In another The New York Times article “An Internal Wiki That’s Not Classified” by Noam Cohen (4AUG2008) says “...Diplopedia has had impressive growth. There are 1,000 registered users, he said, 650,000 total page views...”  This an example of a wiki that is widely used (for an internal wiki) and serves a purpose in being collaborative.

It all boils down to the purpose and scope of the project. If it is a one person (or small group) project then maybe a blog(s) (or an independent website) would be best. If it is a large group of people that want to convey the information with “one voice” then maybe a wiki(or again an independent website)  would be best.

so in conclusion: Learn HTML, PHP, Python, C++, Perl, Java, etc and make your own website and don’t care what people call it, it will be yours...




"Wikis in Plain English" Youtube Video

Social Interactions of "New Media"

     My term project's topic for the course “New Media” is on the impact on social interactions as a result of "new media". I plan on researching the differences it has made to face to face interaction as compared to anonymous (semi-anonymous) online interactions. I will review several articles on the subject written by educators (e.g.: Professor Denis McQuail) and other students. I will also review online media (blogs, new reports, forums, other social media) to gauge an opinion of “new media” users. There are several social interactions I will research, to include: dating, networking, sports, education. If during the course of my research I find other interactions that seem relevant I will include them also.

test blog

I have no idea, what to post here. I don't really agree with blogging. It don't see the point in it. If people want to express their opinion there are message boards (forums) for them to post.