I created a Second Life, the avatar I choose doesn’t really look like me. I can go to as different places I want, I can make it that I visit regular places like I do in my everyday life or places I don’t get to go to all the time such as the beach. I can change anything I want in this life.
New Media fosters creativity because it is combining two things, one being new and the other being old. One way new media foster’s creativity is creating mashups. From the article Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of It’s Critters, But Why? it discusses how YouTube users are making videos of Disney characters such as Bambi, Simba, and Winnie the Pooh and editing them together with rap videos. these videos are taking new popular songs and old popular Disney characters and creating something new. It will being more attention to the popular song and will bring new attention to these old characters.
Virtual worlds can be used in many different ways such as for business, education, entertainment and so much more. According to the article After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get a Reboot? Jacki Morie, a virtual designer says “You can use virtual worlds in education, in delivery services, or as an advanced form of telehealthcare that offers so much more than videoconferencing.” The pros of virtual worlds is that you are connecting with people, your avatar could be doing something that you never got the chance to do in real life. In the article Going to the virtual office in Second Life, “companies are increasingly seeking innovative ways of bringing employees together for conferences and meetings remotely.Virtual community Second Life is seeking to tap into that market by creating a new tool that allows businesses to have virtual meetings on their own computer networks.” Businesses are finding new ways for workers to interact. These virtual worlds also provide some kind of support system, the other people in these worlds are all doing the same thing and it forms a connection. The biggest con would have to be that the people aren’t having real life experiences. Virtual worlds foster creativity because you can change the space, such as in Minecraft people are building new places. I think the future of virtual worlds will be advanced, they will look even more life like and people will be able to experience more things in them.
A discussion on Twitter compared to a discussion on blackboard is that on Twitter people’s comments are more accessible to people to reply to. With Twitter because there is only a limited amount of space for writing the responses are short because people have to get straight to the point. While on blackboard there is more room for explanation. I think Twitter and in class discussions are similar because when everyone is talking in a class they tend to make short comments and more people response.
The sites that I compared were Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. All each of these sites you have some kind of news feed or dashboard where you view the things the people you are following or are friends with are posting. You can share pictures and videos on all of these sites. There are direct messages on all sites. Twitter has a limit on how much you can write. Facebook and Twitter are pretty similar because you can write statuses on both. Instagram and Tumblr are more for sharing pictures and videos. You can have discussions on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr can’t have a discussions on Instagram.
The ways social networking can be used, is of coursing interacting with people, it can be used to find employees and jobs, it can be used to start a business or even to become a digital star. Social networking benefits society in ways such as organizing political activities through the use of Facebook or jobs being found through LinkedIn. According to the article Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting, Maureen Crawford- Hentz says “Social networking technology is absolutely the best thing to happen to recruiting — ever.” Using LinkedIn you can find the specific group of people you are looking for by creating a network of contacts, which can always increase. As the article says “a thousand contacts that could potentially lead me to 100,000, now I have 8,500 contacts that could potentially lead me to 4.5 million.” One of the biggest benefits is that social networking is connecting people, whether your using Facebook, for example to provide people with information or using it to look up old friends and reconnect with them, as discussed in Is MySpace Good for Society? There is a dark side of social networking, which is the lack of privacy, just like people can find your information on LinkedIn and use it to hire you for a position, there can also be information online that people use against you. Which then can result in cyber- bullying. In the article Antisocial Networking the question that is proposed is that does social networking allow children to become more connected and supportive of their friends or does it diminish without the intimacy and emotion that are involved with face to face interaction. The biggest problem with social networking, is that yes you can have all these friends but do you really have some kind of relationship with these people? I think these technologies will just expand and try to connect more people.
Blogs and wikis are both easy accessible, you can express your own ideas on them, you can link to other websites and media, and are both good tools on how to stay current. The differences between blogs and wikis is that blogs are more likely to be written by individuals and they are the ones with the control to edit. While wikis are more suited for groups and really anyone can edit the content. The importance of convergence in today’s networked world is so people are able to access things easily and interact. Blogs can we used for collaboration, as shown in the article ” Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid” people were blogging about crime in their neighborhood and the police were able to make an arrest. As stated in the article ” How to use Wikis for Business”, wikis are used for more business purposes. Wikis could also be used as a news bulletin where people can discuss what events and news are happening in a certain neighborhood.
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