My YouTube Videos, enjoy:)

Hade a great Semester, learned a ton! Good luck on the Final everyone:)

Our Class Wiki

Didn’t work so well because of confusions and lack of consistent class impute and evolvement. Still I learned a lot about it, as all I knew before was about wikipedia and didn’t really understand that there was others than the famous online dic. Its a really powerful tool and I’ve started to employ it at work to keep a collective knowledge database with my team.

New Media & Society

Are and will be forever linked… Communication is an innate human need and part of the foundation of any society, without it there would be chaos. As we develop as a society and new media continues to emerge the link between the two will grow stronger and our ability to communicate in different ways will expand ever further into realms of which we can only dream of today.

Privacy & Confidentiality

Is a concern and related to everything that has to do with the internet, WWW and Web 2.0 especially since it encompasses tools that are very close to the persons personal life in ways that allow for others to gain information that those people may not even know they can get or understand fully how it may effect them. Just like in the “real world”, you have to be carful with your personal privacy, information and identity.

The Next New Thing

A new media much like twitter but with sounds only instead of text, called “WorldChatters”. I think it would be cool to connect with other is an audible manner and it would be interesting to see what people would do with it. Voice memos, factual and opinion statements, music and other aspects integrated in. For example if a new band wanted to get their sound out there they could “chitter” and “WorldChat” with their music’s audio file so the world could hear. Same goes for a person just wanting to express themselves vocally…

Advice to Brooklyn College

Some suggestions I would make using new media would be to first make sure Wi-Fi service was accessible everywhere on campus so all these great new media tools could be performing at there highest level and easily accessible anywhere within the College. I’m always having problems connecting to the Internet here or getting a nice strong connection when I do. After that I would just incorporate new media widgets into existing media assets in the school that provided communication through and between these new media tools, like putting a twitter section on the homepage or portal that would allow for a strictly Brooklyn College twitter experience – all tweets pertaining to things going on around campus. Also I think it would be great to have a school wide wiki, so everyone can have a chance to be heard, experience and master this new powerful new media tool and enjoy the collaborative shared experience as well as the benefits of a shared collective knowledge data base. It would be a large undertaking and have to have dedicated volunteers to keep it organized and focused but I think it would be a great way to connect people around this campus especially since Brooklyn College is not to community based and more of a commuter’s college. This would give all of us busy people a chance to create that more traditional college community environment on the go and accessible by all.

P2P File Sharing

Example: Napster! Big one and good example of how ethics come into play with this concept of new media. P2P means, person to person, and in this case they/we are filing sharing. It’s a really cool, liberal-ash, concept in which people share information. Napster, which was a music file sharing site/platform that was awesome, but became sketchy and eventually was shut down because this sort of activity is technically illegal due to the fact that products, software, applications, music, etc are being downloaded illegally braking copywriting laws, etc… Things that everyone used to have to buy, could now share and exchange files (apps, music, movies, etc.) for free… This was huge because now instead of everyone buying everything, people could get some and share some and get some all for free… Example I buy a JayZ CD and go to a P2P site, some one takes a copy from me and I end up finding a movie I really like and taking it from that person and so on, it’s a really cool and easy way for people to get incredible things for free, within a community where all benefit (except the people making the goods).

Creativity / User-Generated Content / Virtual Worlds

I agree with Jim from The Office… Second Life and other virtual worlds/MMOPG’s have lots of “losers”! It must take hours, days, years in some cases to set all this nonsense up; when real life is passing you by. I get the idea of a fantasy world in which you can do whatever you want, be whoever you want, act out your deepest desires; but its all fake, worth nothing in real life terms and ultimately not worth the time in my opinion; life is the ultimate “virtual world” and MMOPG. Maybe someday when technology advances and we have avatars and you can actually feel emotions and physical pleasures and pains, it will be interesting and realistic enough for someone like me to invest the time needed to indulge. I’ve played The Sims (virtual world), and used to love playing Diablo and World of WarCraft (MMOPG’s) – they were great fun when I was a kid and had nothing better to do after school or in between after school activities, friends and other activities in the real world. I did enjoy them, but fell away quickly from them in the same respect. Looking back I remember the “good times” but ultimately regret the time spent. The thing that is most appealing to me is the level of creativity involved, but no matter how cool a world you create, it will never exist in reality and so always came off as an obnoxious tease to me. I may delve back when virtual worlds start to actually exist and interact with the real world, that sounds interesting and worth some of my time.

Blogs vs. Wikis

Both allow communication of information by a single person or group of people creating an environment for feedback and conversation. Wiki’s do this in “letter” form enabling users to directly edit content. Blog’s achieve this via comments.

Blogs are individual, typically have a single voice and focus and are more ridged and controlled. Blogs offer a certain degree of security and integrity that wikis do not, although it depends on the person or group of people working on the blog. Blogs are factual and secure so long as the contributor/contributors are reputable, factual, and trustworthy and since you know who they are you can easily verify if the creator/creators and their sources are reputable or if they have any hidden agenda in mind etc. If they do have an agenda or lacking in factual and contextual integrity there is nothing you can do about it.

However, the freedom a wiki fosters allows anyone to contribute and edit the content and information, but you have no idea who they are and if they are lacking in the department of factual integrity and you cannot hold them liable, etc.… Still this freedom, the ability for any and every one to contribute has its advantages, as the saying goes two heads are better than one, think about how amazing millions of heads could be. Well, that’s exactly what a wiki is, a place in which a collective knowledge can grow and foster in an environment of absolute freedom of control and creativity, allowing the end users to shape and define this new world however they want, good or bad – and if it goes bad, the good can always come in a edit it back to great! It’s a cool concept and I believe has more applications and potential then a blog, take Wikipedia for example, yet they each have their purpose, strong and weak points respectively.

 

Blog: Security and control of content, people can be held accountable, information can be easily screened/monitored, ridged not as free, easy to keep content’s theme, intent and focus clear to audience.

Wiki: freedom of speech/every and anyone can contribute, “grass roots, decentralized control”, more collaboratively creative potential than a blog, more susceptible to “internet predators” than a blog, harder to keep organized, clear/focused, and accurate due to lack of control over content unless heavily monitored, a million head are better than one.

Michael Scott (The Office) video says it best: explaining both the pro and con of a wiki, as they go hand in hand and are in a sense one in the same. “Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want, about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information.”

Twitter is for Twits

What are people doing? It’s interesting to most people, keeps us all connected, even if it’s just about our day to day activities. It’s kind of like public texting. Fills the gray area of social media communications between blogs, e-mails, etc. We can see how people interact with others, and get a real time sense of what they’re up to. Twitter brings people closer to what and who matters to them. Tweeting is considered “micro-blogging”, has been used in recent years and shortly after its conception for political purposes and campaigning, Facebook is like twitter on steroids. I agree with reading by David Pogue’s and his main critique of twitter as a, “trendy internet time drainer”.

I don’t like twitter. My only experience with it was from this class but find it to be to limited for me to see it as anything really worth while, in facgt if anything it comes of as more a distraction and annoyance than anything else. Its cool I guess in certain ways, a neat way to link to things and get you voice/opinion out there in a really quick and easy way, as well as check out others in this same easy way. Still it seems to have no real fictional substance or purpose, and as I write that I feel like that’s the point; just a really easy, widely accessible and unique way to communicate and share information.