Creativity and New Media

I created an avatar that looks very similar to me. I love to smile, I have yellowish skin, black eyes, brownish hair, and so on. In this imaginary world, I still can be able to be myself, even though others might now know exactly what I'm look like, but it's a new way to get to know friends from all over the world. New Media fosters creativity. If I don't create this avatar, I don't even know that how will I look in Second Life. Will I make friends based on my physical appearances or my personality?


The second creative piece of art I made with New Media is this new model of a Mini Cooper. I designed it by choosing the colors and designs I like with my affordable budge. In this way, I will be able to design my ideal car that looks different and unique.

CREATIVITY

New Media fosters creativity. In this sociotechnical system, which is the society that combines technology and people. Information technology as well as new media has empowered us in many ways. It also expands the scope of time and place. In the past, communication between people will have geographical limit, such as sending mails or traveling to visit the person will take long time. However, with new media, information can travel globally in a efficient time manner. We don't have to do face-to-face communication to keep up friendships. As of for this characteristic of new media, it fosters creativity. How so? Since people can freely engage in any forms of social media, they can come up with ideas real quick, and they can improve the process with other users' monitoring, testing, and approval. In the article, "Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its followers", Miller suggests the fact that Twitter started offering little more than the ability to post 140-character messages two years ago. However, the idea came up from the people who use the service, and the company watches how people use it. At the last step, its engineers turn this idea into new features of Twitter. "the people making products and running companies — are naturally the ones coming up with new ideas ", Processor Von Hipper said. Customers are the one who actually uses the product, so designing a product that most customers will like is the optimum goal for all the companies. Therefore, in new media, company now is easier to communicate with its customer to know what they want in a time and cost saving way. Moreover, many customers or service users also will provide userful ideas or improvements. These sugguestions are very important to make the product or service better. 

Work Cites: 

1. Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers by CLAIRE CAIN MILLER, the New York Times, October 26, 2009. Available at:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/technology/internet/26twitter.html

VIRTUAL WORLDS

What are different ways these virtual worlds can be used? What are the pros and cons? Be specific. How do virtual worlds foster creativity? What do you think the future of virtual worlds will look like?

A virtual world is a computer-based online community environment that is designed and shared by individuals so that they can interact in a custom-built, simulated world by definition. It mimic lots of the real world situation for people to foster their creativity, or so called "Second Life". Virtual world can be used for many aspects such as working, communicating and so on. For instance, in article"Going to the virtual office in Second Life", a new innovative way to bring employees together for conference and meeting remotely due to the tightly in travel budgets. This virtual community benefits the company from saving costs to pay for employees to travel, at the same time, employees can save time and engage in the meeting anywhere as long as they have network connections.  However, some people think that they prefer to work in a face-to-face working environment instead of working in a virtual world because in this way, people can share the natioanl and organizational cultures, and "virtual workers should make a conscious effort to see things from their colleagues' point of view" saids Syrubder Kahaim the associate professor at Binghamton University. 

Lots of people playing online video games, and are abscess to it. Some research shows that how you represent yourself in a virtual world of video games may affect how you behave toward others in the real world. In "Virtual world mat impact real-world behavior", "Our results indicate that just five minutes of role-play in virtual environments as either a hero or villain can easily cause people to reward or punish anonymous strangers," says lead researcher Gunwoo Yoon of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. So, in some ways, that virtual world has affected our lives. In virtual world, people can just freely to choose any avatars or characters to be someone else, and imagine yourself to be that unreal "character". You might do things that you're afraid to do in real life. You can create entity, group, or any situation despite the real identity you have. Some people gain confidence because of that, they feel like being a hero or leader and feel the sense of proud that they never experienced before. However, people might bring this unreal "you" to the real life and cause harm to the society.

All in all are many pros and cons to Virtual Worlds, it can be good to many people who used it as a tool to better communicate with friends, coworkers and classmates, on the other hand, it can be bad for people to bring the abusive character out from the virtual role-play to real world and cause harm to others. I believe in the future, the virtual world will be used more often for school and companies. It will be advanced that when you put on some device on your body, your emotions and movements can be detected and other people can actually feel your emotions. The virtual world will be even more real!

Work Cited

1.  Going to the Virtual Office in Second Life, CNN.com: Nov 5, 2009 http://www.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/11/05/second.life.virtual.collaboration/index.html
2. Virtual world mat impact real-world behavior, Health24.com: Feb 10, 2014 http://www.health24.com/Mental-Health/News/Virtual-world-may-impact-real-world-behaviour-20140210

BLOG ABOUT TWITTER

Blog discussion is different than Blackboard discussion in the way that Blog is like a personal website, if you want to see my post, you have to click on my blog, and click on the articles that I posted. In Blackboard, all posts are there for us to see. For me, blog can attract friends that have interested in my posts while Blackboard is more like combination of individual's posts and it's easier to access. In class discussion is more causal, we can talk whatever comes up on mind, but in Blog or Blackboard, we can put more thoughts into our discussion and we can do research on it. However, in class discussion, we get to see each others' responses and it's more fun. Online, we have to type! I feel tired already! LOL.

SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES

I visted Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. First of all, I have been using Facebook for several years, and I just stared using Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn in these two years. So I'm more familiar with Facebook. It's logo is blue, so that I can I can recongize the app right away. It allows me to do my profile, post updates, articles, links, videos, photos and so on. It does not have character limit. User can "like" your friend or your favorite celebrities and organizations' posts without needing to navigate to your page, and you can commend under the posts. I just registerd for Twitter one week ago, so I'm still learning how to use Twitter to twitt something. Compare to Facebook, Twitter can only post up to 140 characters, so that we have to make the sentence short and precise. Based on my understanding, Twitter is more about share your life with your friend, like what're doing, or links to resources of interest. I can choose to follow people, and if I am instersting in someone's twit, I can retweet the post. I love to post photos via Instagram. It's a such amazing app to share life through photos. A picture worth a thousand word. We can post delicious food, selfies, anything via photos. Others can like your photo and commend under it. It's interesting to see friend's update, such as what did they eat, the new shoes that she bought, etc. LinkedIn is a very helpful social networking site that I can set up a profile which is similar to a resume and can link to other people I know. It's helpful because it can target at professionals so that we can make connection with professonals to ask for job related advices. 

Blog: Social Networking

Personally, I use social networking websites, apps everyday. Social Networks create bounds for people from all over the world. Language, ethnicity, and nationalities are not boundaries to us to communicate and make friends.  These social networking technologies can be used for people to make connections with each other. Also, we get to express our feelings and share our lives freely with our friends or potential friends to let them know us better, and it's a chance for us to know them more. Facebook as an example. We can create group chat and add members to it to discuss group projects or any other assignments. We can sell second handed stuffs on Facebook, such as textbook to save some money while benefitting others for buying a cheaper textbook. Social networks give us a way to spend our idle time. We can laugh at the jokes our friends post, like their "sefies" and reading the news that we're interested in. According to Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting,  "professional recruiters have started hunting for job candidates using social networking technology — like the kind found on the popular sites MySpace and Facebook." By looking at our profile online, a job recruiter can find a suitable job for us. Isn't it amazing?

There's "dark side" to social networks. Our privacy is in concern. According to Facebook Privacy Is So Confusing Even the Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn't Private, the sister of Facebook founder Ms. Zuckerberg's family photo went public and tweeted by other strangers, the reason is that the Facebook's privacy setting is too confusing for her. People remain copy right especially we're not celebrities. However, there's majority of people are not sensitive to privacy issue, and post inappropriate photos, comments, and they didn't know that all these strangers can access to your picture.  In my opinion, these social networking technologies might have huge impact in the future in the way that almost everything we need to do can be done online. Imagine 30 years from one, we can shop ecommerce store with our friends together.


Work cited:

Facebook Privacy Is So Confusing Even the Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn't Private,” The Atlantic Wire, Greenfield, R. December 26, 2012 http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/12/facebook-privacy-so-confusing-even-zuckerberg-family-photo-isnt-private/60313/

Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting by Frank Langfitt, NPR, March 16, 2008. available fromhttp://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6522523&sc=emaf

BLOG: BLOG V WIKI

Assignments: Compare and contrast blogs and wikis. Comment on the importance of convergence in today's networked world. How can blogs be used for collaboration? Can you think of a new use for a wiki that has not been done yet?

 Blogs and Wikis are all communication tool that people use nowadays. Based on my personal opinion, Blogs are more personal compared to Wikis to those individuals to express their personal feelings, beliefs, political views, and so on. Blogs is more like your personal page, if you write anything unappropriated articles or comments, it will reveal your personality. According to article Stung by the Perfect Sting, “The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,” says Leon Wieseltier.

On the other hand, Wikis is a more useful in terms of collaboration. At work, the whole company can contribute, posting is relativity easy; at school, the whole class can contribute to this Wiki cite to their best of knowledge. It can be more creative in terms of everyone's ability in certain field, and it's more flexible. According to the article How To Use Wikis For Business, " Wikis can centralize all types of corporate data, such as spreadsheets, Word documents, PowerPoint slides, PDFs — anything that can be displayed in a browser."  Blogs and Wikis can all provide us the real time information instantly, and people can communication to each other without meeting them in persons. So that our lives become much more easier.


For blog to use of collaboration, bloggers can comment of each others' blogs after reading each one's posting and giving out comments. The new use for wikis can be used in community, neighborhood or any other places, such as posting good restaurants around the neighborhood, barber shops, and so on. 


 Work Cited:

1. "How to Use Wikis for Business," by Ezra Goodnoe, Information Week, August 8, 2005,http://www.informationweek.com/news/management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=167600331

2."Stung by the Perfect Sting," By Maureen Dowd, The NY Times, Aug 25, 2009. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/opinion/26dowd.html