The Next New Thing

Every year, new additions to new media never ceases to disappoint. Whether it be social networking to virtual gaming, new media platforms have exponentially improved and are continuing to improve. The next new thing for new media can be a combination of virtual worlds, video recording, and birthday cards (yes, birthday cards.) With an advancement in technology, people will have the ability and the option to send a "card" that can record a holographic message of the sender to the receiver (visuals and audio all included.) Now is the decade in which we started to conference with people all over the world through a screen. Soon will be the time in which we will start to interact more closely than ever through my "next new thing."

Wiki So Far

For the assignment regarding Wiki, I am planning to contribute to the religion section. I am researching on how new media has affected religion, more specifically the growth of specific religions. I am working to find solid statistics and numbers on which these would be able to make my edits in Wiki substantial.

P2P

File sharing is basically consisted of users on the Internet distributing files, whether it be documents, music, videos, etc. P2P is an example of file sharing, but it allows users to share without having to connect to specific networks and platforms. Some examples of P2P file sharing includes BitTorrent (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/business/media/05piracy.html.) According to Brian Shelter and Brad Stone, people have swapped copies of songs, tv shows, movies on the Internet for years. "Now, users do not even have to download. Using a search engine, anyone can find free copies of movies, still in theaters, in a matter of minutes."

Privacy and Confidentiality

New media has changed the lives of almost anyone who uses it. This is because of the issue of privacy and confidentiality. From loss of privacy because of social networking sites to loss of confidentiality due to illegal downloading and sharing, new media has raised a conflict that we all have to live with today. Social networking sites have recently become a target of privacy schemes. Many of these services either lost personal passwords, information, etc. to external users. The Internet has become way too expansive and information that goes on the Internet once stays on it forever. Privacy and confidentiality has definitely been breached to an extent because of new media.

Advice to Baruch College

New media can be used to improve Baruch College in several different ways. Using new media, the college can use methods of communication through social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The college is doing some sort of communication like this new, but it can be much better improved. Another way to improve the college with new media is the use of online classes and lectures. Yes, Baruch offers several online classes a semester for students, but not enough. Many students at Baruch work part-time and have other responsibilities. Traveling to the college is very time consuming, so if I could, I would implement a more vigorous focus on online classes available to Baruch students.

Creativity and New Media

Using new media, I was able to get on Second Life and explore the virtual world. With this tool, I was able to interact with other people on this platform through different avatars ranging from people to animals to even vehicles. My personal favorite was the dragon shown in the picture below. There are so much places to explore and I believe provides experiences with people all over the world who has access to this program.

Creativity

New media has revolutionized not only how society lives, but how it thinks as well. Over the past years, we have seen creativity become more apparent as new media rose. From art to music to even learning, new media has left a mark with the creativity if fostered in our lives. In the article "Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But Why?" we are informed that a youtube video of Winnie the Pooh and his fellow characters were mashed with the hit-song at the time, "Crank that" (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/business/media/24crank.html?_r=0). This video went viral and entertained millions of viewers all over the world. Another example of this type of creativity are song mashups. These mashups are composed of popular hits from the year. The following link is an example of the 2012 mashup that resulted in over 100 million views: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCkYw3cRwLo. New media evidently fosters and provides society with more creativity than ever before.