Creativity and New Media

Need for speed: Payback is a racing game published by the company, Electronic Arts. It allows players to unlock different types of vehicles through missions. We can customize their car in their game garage. All cars and customization are based off the reality. In this case, I chose this Nissan 350z to customized. I can change the color of the car and add decals. Also, I can swap the OEM parts with aftermarket parts. For example, I installed the Rocketbunny fenders, used another front and back bumper, change the wheels and lower the cars. I love this game so much because all the cars and customizations are real, they would look the same if you purchased the car and installed the same parts in real life. In other words, this is kind of like a garage simulator. I think it is definitely a way for people to do something with their creativity. It allows us to build our own unique car and there are so many possible combinations. I see people often share their art works made in games on forum or the Steam workshop. Sometimes the developers even allow people to download their works or mods so that more people can use them and make improvement. In my opinion, that is one way how people use video games and social media to promote art making and thus foster creativity.

HW Creativity

Social media has connected all the individuals and allows us to communicate with each other instantly and simultaneously. It also provides a platform for people to express their idea and use their imagination to create some fun and interesting stuff such as memes and vine videos. According to the article on the New York Times, Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers, Twitter has become a great place for people to share their new ideas. “The company watches how people use the service and which ideas catch on. Then its engineers turn the ideas into new features.” In other words, Twitter doesn’t only allow people to express their ideas but also enable big companies and developers to get inspiration and feedbacks. It benefits both parties and fosters creativity as a result. In addition, it is pretty common that companies upload their latest advertisement video to their social media, and see how people react to it. Although sometimes people might react negatively and get criticized badly by the public, using social media is still a good way to promote their products. It is so important that the company can hear from the people because creativity needs criticism and social media is exactly what we need in this communication process.

Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers by CLAIRE CAIN MILLER, the New York Times, October 26, 2009.

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

It is fun to see people wearing a VR headset and playing games in front of you because everyone seems to enjoy playing in Virtual Reality. That is only one way of how we can use virtual worlds in our daily life. The virtual world is basically a computer-based simulated environment which allows users to simultaneously and independently explore the virtual world, participate in its activities and communicate with others.

            Since the virtual world is a simpler version of the real world, people like the military or plane pilot can use it in a training program. Basically, the virtual world can simulate all different kinds of possible situation and let the trainee learn how to deal with the situation. To ordinary people like us, we can now play VR games on the console. VR games are much more intense and require you to move more than traditional video games. Moreover, the virtual world can be a good tool for people to communicate and exchange information with each other. According to the article, “Going to the virtual office in Second Life”, the author shows that it is possible for employees to meet in a virtual world established on a company private network. It becomes possible for workers to collaborate effectively using virtual tools rather than using some more traditional ways such as a video conference or a telephone conference.

However, it is not an easy task to construct a virtual world. It is very time-consuming because it involves a lot of coding to set up the basic rules and laws of physics. Although the virtual world allows us to communicate with each other on the computer, we are isolated in some way. According to the article, “After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get a Reboot?”, we are “alone together”. The author suggests that it is lack of human interaction in these digital worlds and it brings a sense of isolation as a result. I agree with the author because we accomplish nothing once we leave the computer, It is totally different than go out and hang out with your friends. Although the virtual world can be a good entertainment, it is not the real life and the interaction with real people is necessary to our healthy life.

            I personally think that the technology of virtual reality is a good thing. It encourages people to create and do more with their imagination. It won’t surprise that the application of virtual reality will be widely used in the future as our technology on it is getting more advance from day to day. We can just sit in front of our own desk, have our lecture and interact with the other students without leaving our house one day. It is totally possible with the technology of virtual reality and I am looking forward to experiencing that myself in the future.

1. After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get A Reboot. April 30, 2013. http://www.forbes.com/sites/dianemehta/2013/04/30/after-second-life-can-virtual-worlds-get-a-reboot/


2.Going to the Virtual Office in Second Life, CNN.com: Nov 5, 2009http://www.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/11/05/second.life.virtual.collaboration/index.html

Blog about Twitter

After using both Twitter and BlackBoard to do the discussion about topics that we have in class, I notice there are some advantages and disadvantages on both sites.

            

First thing I notice is the word limit on Twitter. It can be a good thing or a bad thing depends on the situation. The word limit function definitely makes the tweets more concise and easy to read but it fails to provide each space for people to say all things they want in one tweet. On the other hand, we can write as much as we want on BlackBoard discussion.

          

However, Blackboard discussion is limited to our class only, meaning that only our classmates and the professor of this class can view the content we post on Blackboard. While on Twitter, we have the option to set it to private view only or share to the public.

            

In my opinion, it is more fun to tweet and retweet contents we want to share on Twitter. The process of doing it is much more interesting and people can get notified if they have the Twitter app on their phone. When we compare Twitter discussion and BlackBoard discussion to traditional in-class discussion, we can see that both the BB discussion and Twitter require a computer or smartphones in order to have access to the websites. Yet, in-class discussion gives a chance to talk face to face and have a more engaging learning environment. But then we will need to take note in class to record the stuff about the discussion, while online discussion stays on the web forever and we view and revisit anytime we want. Also, online discussion is more convenience in the way that when we want to make references to our information, we can easily insert links and pictures to give credit to the original author.

Blog: Social networking sites

Nowadays, we have so many different kinds of social media networking site for us to use. They each have a unique interface and some kinds of special features that attract new users every day. Today, I am going to discuss the 4 sites that I use in my daily life.

The first site I want to talk about is Facebook. I have been using it since 6th grade. I have most of my family, friends, coworkers added on Facebook. I would say that one of the big advantages of Facebook is that it is easy to use, well established and it has a large group of users. I use Facebook mainly to chat with my friends and look up other people post to find interesting contents. Also, I have a serval group chats on my facebook account whether it is about work or personal stuff. You can send instant text messages or send emoji to each other. Of course, you can also share pictures or videos with your friends.

On the other hand, YouTube as a famous video sharing social networking site, people can upload their video and share with the public. They can even make interesting content to attract viewers and make money from advertisement. For me, I mainly use it as entertainment. People have uploaded a variety of videos on Youtube, from car reviews or unboxing videos to daily vlog. You can always find videos about things you are interested in on Youtube.

The other social media site that I use but less frequently is Instagram. It is mainly about posting pictures and short videos, and share with your followers. Also, Instagram has an interesting feature which is the Instagram stories. It allows users to post photos and videos that will vanish after 24 hours. It definitely attracts people to go on Instagram more often as they know they won’t be able to see the stories any time after 24 hours.

Finally, as a new user on Twitter, I find it interesting how twitter works similarly compare to facebook but having a slightly different interface. Although each tweet has a limited amount of character you can type, it makes the tweet concise and easier to read. Even before I start using Twitter, I go on twitter to see updates about game server maintenance. Because I know that the first thing people do when they encounter a problem is to go on twitter to report their issue and complain.

Blog Social networking

There are so many ways that we can use social media to help us achieve our goal, especially when everybody else is also using it. We have social media such as Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn where we provide our personal information, so that people can contact you if they are interested in you. According to the article, “Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting”, LinkedIn provides an opportunity for Crawford to find high-quality candidates to hire. Also, social media simplify the recruiting process. For example, LinkedIn allows us to share our Rolodexes which can save us a lot of time making phone calls or sending emails. I think social media is definitely a great tool when trying to find a job or to recruit people. In my own experience, I have tried the website Indeed when looking for a job and got the job successfully in the end. It was very easy to use as I just needed to upload my resume to the website and send it to the jobs that I am interested in. After a few days, I got an email about setting up an interview with the manager. I didn’t know that getting a job can be this easy before using the social media. I think this is a very helpful tool for both the recruiters and job seekers.

            However, social media can be a bad thing sometimes. According to the article, “They're Back, and They're Bad: Campus-Gossip Web Sites”, the student creates a new online forum also called JuicyCampus for campus gossip after the first one got shut down not long ago. This kind of use of social media produce nothing but negative emotions and support unwanted activities such as cyberbullying and sensitive information leak. I think this is a good example of bad use of social media. Since social media is so popular and easy to set up, it is nearly impossible to stop these people from spreading false and negative information. In addition, there is almost no regulation for this local level of social media as the creator created this with no good intention. From this, we can see that social media can be a bad thing if it is on the wrong hand. Yet, this brings us to the point that if we want our social media to have a positive and open environment, appropriate regulation and laws are necessary for the future.

1.      "They're Back, and They're Bad: Campus-Gossip Web Sites," by Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle for Higher Education, Sept 4, 2009, p. A20+. Available at: http://chronicle.com/article/Theyre-BackTheyre-B/48220/

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

BLOG: Blog v Wiki

After I read the articles about wiki and blogging, I learn that there are many similarities and differences between the two.  A lot of people write a blog to share happy moments or things they find interesting to other people. They can write on their blog without limitation and other people can have free access to their blog at any time. Blogger can post a picture taken during a family trip or a video about her niece’s birthday. It is easy to use and it is a good way to keep and share good experiences. On the other hand, the wiki is more academic. People often use it as a tool to collaborate and communicate academically It gathers information and knowledge that people have and provide a platform for people to share and edit.

The blog can be used not only for sharing daily lives but also for collaboration. According to the article, “Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid”, police uses the information from a blog post as a source to raid a drug dealer’s house. From this, we can see that blog can be more than just a place for people to share information, as their information is helpful to the police and them kind of collaborate on reducing violence and drug selling activities. However, this can also be a problem because the first intention of the blogger is not to snitch information to police and that means we have no control over how the information can be used.

Wiki is another tool that people use to contribute their academic works and knowledge collectively to the online database. According to the article, “How To Use Wikis For Business” from InformationWeek, “Although wikis have been around for a decade, they're just starting to take off in business. Like the Web did when it first caught hold in the corporate world, wikis will likely go through a period of wild growth, fierce competition, and inappropriate usage.” In other words, the wiki is going to get popular in the next few decades. One of the big reason is that it has a low cost. If cooperation publishes and shares information in a traditional way, it would cost them a huge amount of money. However, thanks to the free access to the internet, it is relatively cheap for them to do so and implement a system that is based on open-source rather than having an expensive enterprise application which requires a sophisticated information management. In my opinion, having students use the wiki and contribute works and information to a database can be a new way to use the wiki. Since people are more focus on just getting information on the wiki rather than to make a contribution and to improve it, we can help invite and motivate people to edit on the wiki. Although information added to the database might not be accurate, it is a good starting point for us to sharing academic information to our peers and learn how to do it as it is the big trend of how large cooperation store and exchange their information on hand through a database.

Overall, I think both the blog and wiki are great tools for people to share information and work collectively. For us, it is a good starting ground to learn how to use them so that we can master these skills and apply them at work.

Work cited:

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

Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid By MICHAEL WILSON The New York Times June 26, 2008 available at:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/nyregion/26bayridge.html