About My Project

This is late but still..

My project basically tried to describe the different perspectives in new media usage. It was a broad topic so i decided to divide it in to the usage and the issues sections for each and every perspective described. Of all the four perspectives provided, the technological and ethical seemed to be the hardest to talk about while anthropological was interesting and educational was easiest to do. Technological perspective is difficult because it is hard to understand what part is new media and what part is technology. Or the fact that should we even address to these things as technology.

Anthropological was interesting because of the cases I read through while doing the research. The fact that being such a positive thing to so many people around the world can also harm many indigenous people is very surprising.
The ethical perspective takes on a whole new level because this is a new era, the era where everyone everywhere has access to new media. So how do we decide what the right and wrong things to do in this situation are? It has taken us couple of dozens of years to decide where rights come in when related to property specially intellectual property. When New Media comes in to play, it is all broken because who knows what is right and what is wrong? Who is going to decide it? It is going to take us a couple of more years to decide when we have a green flag when we have red. Until then all we can try to do is to stay within what government says is illegal such as p2p sharing and do the right thing.

The next new thing

I think the next new thing might come in through the online video sharing. I recently read an article where a High school senior asked out this girl, who has put up videos showing makeup techniques, to prom. Seems like a weird but a regular story right? But the only difference is, he asked her out through youtube. He made a video asking her to go to the prom with him in which he played guitar and sang a song for her. This has become a new trend for teenagers. Well if not anything, this story shows New media in action. This is the reason why, I think the next new thing would be in this area. I think in the (near) future, people would use this video creating technology for much larger purposes. I can see a future where people from all over the world are contributing to the news by posting videos about what's happening around them. They'll basically become the news readers, and their opinion would be out there. This would replace the biased tv channels which broadcast news that they support. In my imagination, we could flip through channels showing different videos of people broadcasting things that happened around the places they live.

We can decide by flipping through the channels if we want to watch news from around the world, country or state. Though this has already happened, the presidents and high authorities of different countires would be online from a particular time when they would be asked questions online to which they would respond instantly. I think that Youtube and sites similar to it will go a long way.

Privacy and Confidentiality

Privacy, in this world where a person who really knows what they are doing with a computer can track down you entire history starting from the day you were born to what kind of toilet tissues you purchased online, is an important thing for everyone. New media has given everyone tools to track whatever, whoever and where ever they want. This is not to say that it is all of waste. The fact that new media makes it possible for security systems such as military all over the world to track criminals, catch users of illegal material, makes this a possible thing. But imagine every time you sit down in front of a computer you feel as if two eyes are watching every move you make, everything you type in. This is the negative effect of this kind of new media. When one puts in their information including their phone number, address and everything, it is an easy pass for an online predator who is waiting for an opportunity. Many sites that pop up or under ask you to give in your information claiming to be the original site. Many people who are just starting to use a computer would be very trusting and provide them with all the information becoming the bait for these predators. In a world of new media, where virtual worlds are used to train people in certain things and where technology becomes something that is being invented every single moment rather than a flash in every few years, privacy and confidentiality become major problems and threats.

Over time if people are not sure that the websites that they'll be visiting are fake-proof, they would probably stop visiting it all together. This is also the reason security has become such a huge industry these past few years. People need to be assured that visiting and using an online system to get work done faster is okay. And after so many things that did go wrong, this seems like it would take sometime until everyone trusts the new media.

Advice to Baruch College

Baruch college, since it has rebuilt its buildings years ago has been an icon of modernisation with in the cuny community. It has come to put in to use many of the new media technologies. But what I would advice Baruch college to take up that doesn't already exist are the following:

1. There are all kinds of students in this college. Some are very good at interacting some are not. Keeping those people in mind Baruch college should create a virtual Baruch world where people that are shy can interact and get to know people. The same can be used to help freshmen get used to the campus and ease them in to the college life.

2. Some professors already have a twitter or a facebook where they can interact with students. This should be done college wide. If students and professors get to know each other outside oft he classroom it wld help create a better learning environment.

3. A blog should be started for every single class and the professor should blog if not everyday once or twice a week. This would give the professor a chance to get his/her concerns or appreciation to the class as a whole. This is specially useful for lecture classes.

These are some of the most important things Baruch College should consider taking up.

Our Class Wiki - So Far

In our class wiki, I have taken up the responsibility to be the editor of the New Media Ethics and Law page. Though I haven't contributed a lot to this page yet, I have gathered up neccessary resources to make this page much easier to understand. New media ethics and law is a very broad topic and so it is a hard task to keep the information conice and interesting. The former contributors and editors have done an excellent job collecting the data and placing it under sub headings. What I am going to change and to an extent did is the layout of the whole page. It seems a little bit unorganised with so many thoughts and definitions all around. I have read most of the page a couple of times and i noted some errors in either spelling or the writing, that is going to be fixed by the time I finish editing. There are a few links in the page that do not work anymore, I am going to replace them with links and part that do work. In the end, the new media page is a great source for information about the relationship betwen New media and the law and ethics. I am going to be adding a few subsections to the Ethics part of the page because it is just as important to know the ethical issues concerning New Media as to know the laws behind it.

NM Class so far

So far this class is the most interesting of all the classes I am taking this semester. I never get board reading the articles for the class and I never get tired of listening to what every one in the class has to bring to the table. It has given me a new insight in to what new media is all about. I better understand the concepts of social networking, blogging, using wikipedia and many other things. I know the many pros and cons of many existing forms of new media, I understand the huge role they play in our everyday lifes. But so far the most exciting thing about this class to me has been the work on wiki. It is just so fascinating to be able to contribute to the knowledge of everyone else. The inner workings of the wiki is interesting in itself. To be able to put in the content everyone would read is time taking and a huge responsibility. So to me the New Media class so far is a great experience and has been teaching me a ton of things I would otherwise have no idea.

VIRTUAL WORLDS

Virtual worlds are one of the newest ways people all around the world can collaborate. The first thing that pops in to our minds about virtual worlds is that, a person can talk, interact and do the stuff he/she wouldn't be able to do in a regular world. So the first and the most basic use of virtual worlds is to create a place where people with disabilites, problems or merely shy could break out of their shell and talk without being worried about people judging them. There are many ways virtual worlds can be helpful. Huge companies these days are using virtual worlds as a interaction center where they could train their employee's. It is helpful to the employee's too in a sense that they get to do or practice the stuff they don't understand over and over again without being embarrassed about it. Similarly, the army has also started using the virtual worlds to train the newly joined army officers.

Virtual worlds help foster social networking skills, it gives people a chance to escape to a place where they wont be judged. It is time saving in the sense that the army and the companies dont have to spend a lot of time training their new employee's. It also saves resources, like the space and money that they have to put in to train these new officers or employee's. It also saves time for many high profile people by being able to conduct conferences over these virtual worlds. While these are some of the pros of virtual worlds, the cons are not ignorable too. The first thing that virtual worlds tell us is that it is a waste of time. Poeple spend hours in front of the computer doing and taking to people they do not know and doing stuff that isn't productive in many ways. People start living in a very unrealistic world with unrealistic expections. And their social skills suffer even more.

Virtual worlds of the future would look in my opinion, very real and I think we'll advance in a way where people can change their apperance and enter these worlds themselves without the use of a cimputer.

Social Networking

There sure was a time when relatives and people close to ones heart moved away and they never got to see each other again. There was a time when keeping in contact with people we love became a little bit easier with the use of telephones, then came a time of e-mail and now we finally have enough proof to believe that social networking technology is the easiest way to keep in contact with everyone you want to. The relationships between people are much better now because people do not have to remember to call people and see how they are doing, or visit them to keep in touch with them all they have to do is log on to their account and shoot a one line greeting saying "Hey, how are you doing?" and that is all it takes to keep people in touch. As we discussed in class there are many ways there technologies are being used in work places, government, army etc. People are using these social networking technologies to find jobs, find people that can help them progress in their careers etc. As pointed in the article, "40 percent of Twitter messages 'pointless babble" most of these messages and posts on these social networking are just silly one line "what you are doing's", but this babble might help some one know that their family is doing okay and might help someone get a job.
As many uses there are to social networking, there is an "evil side" to it, people get stalked and sometimes we hear stories of people who meet people online and think they know them and end up getting in a lot of trouble. Since online networking is an easy way to mask one's identity, everyone should be careful when talking to someone they do not know.

Check out social networking sites

Even though there are so many social networking sites out there, the definition and the purpose of these sites remain the same. The most common thing I found in all the sites I have visited, like Myspace, Facebook, Friendster and Twitter is that they all have Home, Profile, Photos and a group of friends. I think these are the basic tools for any social networking site. My first impression of Myspace was that it was mostly teenagers who had accounts on this site. That explains why I had Myspace in high school. It gives you a chance to show off your creative styles by letting you select from a large range of backgrounds, different fonts for your name, or adding songs.

And then we have facebook and twitter. Everyone from a high school kid to a high ranking official have atleast of of these accounts. While facebook makes it more personal by giving you a chance to keep your profile and everything on it private, twitter bears it all for the world to see. Once you say something in your tweets, its out there. While in facebook you usually add people you know or have seen around, in twitter one doesnt neccassarily need to be a friend to follow what you are doing. This is the reason why twitter is used by a lot of celebrities, it gives them a chance to put their real person out there without the obligation of replying to any of the tweets their fans send them.

Finally friendster, I have heard of it before but never actually got a chance to make an account in it. I recently made an account for this class and so far its very close to facebook with the profile, friends and photos. This networking site is for more personalized space where having just your friends and connecting with them after a long time seems like a great idea.

Old vs New

Media keeps changing and that is pretty obvious because, otherwise we wouldn't have old and new. Old media can be defined as something that is replacable by something much more advanced and better in everyway. New media is the different things through which we communicate but these, we can not replace if we wanted to. If the new media was replacable then it would be old media. To give specific examples, gramaphones are replaced by cd players, huge tv boxes have been replaced with flat screen tv's, books have been replaced with atleast to an extent by e-books or digital books. As we see the new media is something that is better than what it was before. And maybe when we invent something better than the newest media right now, this media will become old.

New Media Usage: Anthropological and Ethical perspectives

When books came out and music wasn't still on CD's, people probably wondered who had the right to what. Did only the authors that write the books or the artists that made the music have a right over these things or anyone who buys it does? As media advances the question still remains but it is getting increasingly harder to decide because it is getting easier for people to share, copy and use these materials. In my presentation, I would like to look at both sides of the story and try to come to a conclusion as to what is ethical and what is not. Though there are ethical values as doing the right thing are in question we can not ignore the fact that this same new media is spreading all over the world socially and anthropologically. I would like to look in to the anthropological side of the New Media too.

What is New Media?

The technologies that are part of the new media are the internet, telephone, tv, and even radio can come under new media. But the newest form of media we all are accoustomed to are, social networking, blogging, wiki's, podcasting etc. These are all New media because they all give a new and much improved meaning as to what online collaboration, usage and communication are all about.

In my opinion all the above mentioned New Media's are so delevoped and new because of the availability of the internet. Imagine, if there was no internet, would there be a way to connect with people? Share new ideas or thoughts about the ongoing world with them? All these are made poosible only with the help of internet.

I think since we defined New media to be the internet, tv, telephone etc, the old media, printed books, newspaper availability only in the morning, purchases only in the store are being replaced by these new forms of media. But the replacing part is close but not very close. While not entirely replacing them, these new medias are enhancing them in every way possible. Like for example, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/nyregion/26bayridge.html this article shows how internet has helped catch illegal activities. And this one http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/26/michael-jackson-tmz-scoop shows how the use of internet as a new media for more accurate and faster news. Though old media is not being completely replaced, its being changed in ways that are good for the future of the coming generations.

First ever blog!

Hey everyone,

This is the first entry in my first blog. So just sending out hello's to everyone and i hope this will be a good semester un our New Media class.

Swetha