Creativity and New Media

The Second Life is a virtual world that I can create an avatar and experience things that I could not achieve or do in the real life. In this world, I can edit my own appearance, whatever I want to be, travel anywhere and experience many other things using the media tools that I cannot see or do in the real world. Also, this world has beautiful views and places that we may not have seen in the real life. I am not the only one in the virtual world, there are other avatars that I can communicate with and do activities together. The new media allows to create virtual worlds and my own character which satisfies my own interest and entertainment that cannot be fulfilled in my real life.

Creativity

As the technology improves tremendously day to day, new media also improves. In the reading, "Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers" by Claire Cain Miller discusses how new media fosters creativity. When Twitter presents a system and observe how people use the service, and engineers figure out whether they should keep this program, remove, or improve it, then engineers turn into new features which is fostering creativity. From the beginning, Twitter users started to refer other users by "@" symbol before their username. Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive and a founder said, “That one really took us by surprise” Since then, Twitter has added a section to the site where people can see every time they are mentioned with the @ symbol. It began hyperlinking the names so others can click on them to see the subject’s profile page. Twitter also gets ideas from the software developers who build Twitter applications. Based on the factors, Twitter and as well as other medias foster creativity through experiences and feedbacks.

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

The virtual worlds can be used for entertainment and self-satisfaction. In the reading "I've Been that Club, Not in real life" demonstrates that VLES the website that has lower east manhattan three-dimensional, Internet-based social network fastidiously modeled on a small but influential swath of Manhattan real estate. Through this people can satisfy themselves for the things that they cannot have or achieve in real life and entertain themselves in the virtual worlds by doing things that they cannot do in their real life environment. Also, in the reading "Going to the virtual office in Second Life" talks about the Virtual community Second Life. It is seeking to tap into that market by creating a new tool that allows businesses to have virtual meetings on their own computer networks. The pros are it provides people another world that they can live in and entertain themselves in that particular system. The cons are if a person is addicted in that system and lose the sense of determining what is real and what is not real and might cause serious problems in real life. The virtual worlds foster creativity by creating people's own world which requires creativity, if people are enjoying the virtual world and love to make their own systems or objects creativity comes in to play and therefore it fosters as time goes on. I think the future of virtual worlds will look a lot different from the real world, it would look more like in animations. 

Social Networking Sites

Instagram - Instagram only allows people to post pictures, not the words itself, you should post a picture in order to write something to share. If you are in private setting, strangers cannot see anything from your profile, posts are only shared to your followers who you gave permission to follow. When you tap on explore, there are many pictures that I might be interest in seeing, sometimes I screenshot them and save them for later. Also, you can have multiple accounts at once, you do not have to log off and log in every time you want to change your account. I prefer to use Instagram compared to other social networking systems, because it feels like I have total privacy and have interesting pictures.
Facebook - Facebook feels like it is more likely open to everyone. Some of the pictures are in public, you cannot edit the privacy. Posts that are liked and commented by your friends are on your news feed. Facebook has a page that you can share your information such gender, birthday, school, religion and relationship statue. You can make groups and let people join the group and shared their ideas or opinions for many purposes. Also, You can express your feeling on posts and comment. It was many advertisements on the site.
Twitter - Tweets are limited to only 140 characters long, for longer characters, you have to divide them into many tweets. It feels like everything is all over the place, you can see every comments that your follower posted which makes me to think that it is very unorganized. You retweet (RT) posts that you are interested in. Like Instagram, Twitter has the following system, it is not people are becoming friends, if someone follows you and you do not have to follow back you do not have to.
Snapchat - Just like Instagram, you can only share pictures but in different way. You can share your pictures to certain friends, you can send them to the friends you selected. If they screenshot your snap, you get notifications. If you want to share your pictures to everyone, you can create your story, when your friends click on your profile, they will be able see your story and you can see who looked at your story. Also, you can edit your picture, you can write on it, put stickers and other fun things.

About Twitter

Compared to BlackBoard Discussion, Twitter Discussion allows to see the comments directly, when I click on posts comments are at the bottom. Also Twitter sends notifications so that it is easy to know who and when someone commented on my post. However, tweets are limited to 140 characters long, if I want to share a long story, I need to divide it into many tweets. Compared to in-class discussion, Twitter Discussion needs time for people's comments because not everyone is on Twitter at the same time so that the discussion takes to much more time to finish. Also, I think face-to-face discussion is more polite than social networking discussion because when people are behind the screen, sometimes they do not consider about other people feelings and say whatever they want to say.

Blog Social Networking

These social networking technologies can be used for a tool for recruiting employees in this current society. Nowadays there are tremendous different jobs and positions in this world, in order for one to find a job that best suits there professions and interest, connections with people or searching jobs on a few websites or through recruiting posters can be limited and hard. In the reading "Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting" by Frank Langfitt, Maureen Crawford-Hentz, Osram Sylvania, the global lighting company said "Social networking technology is absolutely the best thing to happen to recruiting — ever." Social networking technologies helps to minimize the difficulty of finding jobs for the ones who seeks for a job and the company that needs employees. Through these technologies, it is the benefit for the society that companies are able to find many professions across the world that best suit in their company. However, social networking also have a dark side. Everyone around the world have their own privacy, some people like to show off their personal stories but some do not. In the reading ,"Facebook Privacy Is So Confusing Even the Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn't Private" discusses the privacy of social networking technology. Privacy cannot absolutely be assured on social media whether it is the systems problem or the person's misunderstanding of the system. People put personal information and pictures on social networking systems and this fact might negatively impact on the recruiting, because corporations search on people whether they are appropriate for the company. These technologies will evolve in the future, because day to day basis, programmers or engineers develop new systems and recommend users to update the system, this will continue as time goes by in the society.

Blog v. Wiki

Blog and wiki are social media systems. They similar but different. Blog is personal, it can only be edited by the one who created the blog, but wiki can be edited by many others who has the access to the wiki. In today's networked world, the importance of convergence is stated in the reading "Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid" by Micheal Wilson. In this article, blogs helped the police to capture the illegal action, "The bloggers seemed to know, sometimes chronicling daily activities in detail" like this sentence, if people have shared their personal websites, they get to see posts and know what other people are interested in or doing. With this fact, blogs can be used in collaboration within bloggers where they provide information so that they can sometimes capture illegal situations. As technology improves tremendously day to day basis, I can definitely think of a new use for wiki that has not been done yet. In the reading, "More on How to Build Your Own Wiki" by Margaret Locher,discusses how to build my own wiki in creative and unique way. With the improved technology systems and my own creativity, I can think of a new use for wiki.