Blog: Next New

When I think of a new type of new media, Virtual Reality quickly comes into my mind. I think VR or AR (augmented reality) will become popular in the future and we will see a wide application of VR in our daily life. One example would the use if VR in online shopping. I watched a video made by Alibaba a year ago. It shows that customers were able to purchase an Alibaba virtual reality headset and it can virtually transporting them to international retail outlets. This new experience enables customers to shop with convenience while they are sitting in their house. Also, with the application of VR and other online payment systems, it makes the whole shopping experience much quicker. In addition, artists can also use VR in their art exhibition. It provides some advantages such as no more long journey to home, no waiting in line and won’t be affected by bad weathers. Also, we can make the whole experience more convenient with the use of social media or other live time communication tools. People can enjoy the show or exhibition at home and have more connection with different people at the same time. I believe that this will become much more attractive and doable when we have a more mature VR technology.

Blog: Wiki So Far

In the past few weeks, I started to look up different pages that are already created on the Baruch Wiki. I wrote down all the topics that I am interested in or I know something about it. I found some interesting topics such as gaming, new media use in automotive and privacy. I plan on adding more details on those topics with the information that I have and things that I have learned from the news. One thing I find fascinating is that although there is already lots of information filled in on the page for different topics, you can always find something to add on. It is because our digital society is growing rapidly and we have so much new technology coming out every day. Also, we are adding useful information to the database, so that others can view and learn from it. I am going to add those pieces of information and try to edit others’ work if possible in no time since there are only a few weeks left for this project. 

Blog: P2P

The term of file sharing basically means that we share our resources with others. It is very common that we share files such as music, e-books, and movies with our friends. Because of the technology of P2P file sharing, file sharing become much easier. Peer to peer (P2P) file sharing requires only users’ computer to share and receive files since both computers are connected via a P2P network. Users can share files with the P2P network and other users can search and download files from the network. According to the article, Peers Find Less Pressure Borrowing From Each Other, Google is teaming up with Lending Club and they are trying to promote money lender and borrowing services with P2P file sharing technology. They are able to provide a lower interest and a more direct loan process between lenders and borrowers. In my opinion, it is a good thing for both ends since it makes the process more transparent and quicker. As a result, more funds flowing around businesses and it can help businesses and economy to grow healthily.

 P2P sharing technology is giving us a lot of benefits. However, there are ethical concerns about P2P file sharing since we don’t know if the distributor owns the files that he is sharing. It is illegal to share copyrighted content without permission and downloading those contents can cause harm to the right of the original content creator.

Sources:

Peers Find Less Pressure Borrowing From Each Other May 10, 2013 http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/05/10/182651552/peers-find-less-pressure-borrowing-from-each-other

Blog: Privacy

The issue of privacy is nothing new in our society. We often hear news about personal information leak and it causes tremendous harm to the daily users. Privacy used to means just our right to own our physical space or property. However, informational privacy becomes a concern in this growing digital society. People give out their information on the internet every day and they ignore the fact that their information can be used somewhere else by some other people. They do it without the users’ consent and it is totally unacceptable. Some might argue that they got their consent through the term of service. However, I am pretty sure that people didn’t really want to agree with those terms if they had a choice. It might be okay to let the company that is providing service to use the information, but it is definitely not okay to sell it to a third party company and let people make a profit out of it. Trading users’ information can be dangerous, especially there could be a possible security breach and transferring information and hackers can take an advantage of it.
    Moreover, the issue of confidentiality is also a big problem in our society. People can spread false information or hate speech on the internet without getting caught if they really want to hide their identity.  Confidentiality can definitely help to protect people from potential harms including psychological harm such as embarrassment or distress. However, this also raises the problem of cyber-bullying which people, especially teenagers, can do harms to others without caring the consequences because they think that the others are not going to find out who they are and their real life won’t get affected anyways even if they are doing negative things on the internet.

Overall, I think there should a balance between privacy and confidentiality. It won’t do us any good if we either get too much of privacy or too much or confidentiality

Blog: Advice

New media allows us to communicate with others easily. If I hired by Baruch College to Baruch use new media to improve the College, I would create an official blog for the school. I would invite people from different clubs to post pictures and videos about their meeting during club hours. People can know that our school is full of interesting clubs and people and it can also motivate people to interact with their peers during club hours. Also, I think it is good to have a  twitter account run by the student government because then they can post emergency news on Twitter such as school canceled due to bad weather or other interesting conference or meeting hosted by the school. I think it would be more attractive compared to just sending email to students. Lastly, I would definitely create an official page on Reddit because I notice that people are more comfortable to ask their peers through social media when they encounter problems about school. For example, I see a lot of people asking for thoughts on a specific class or professor or having questions about credits and financial aid on Facebook. A lot of time people are willing to help, however, they just don’t have the right platform to let them ask their question and express their opinion. I think social media can surely connect people together and help the foster the academic community.

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