The Next New Thing

What I would like developed for a new type of media is really a combination of two types of already existing products. It would be a online experience where multiple people could watch a movie or TV show over the web and be able to talk to somebody with VOIP technology. So what I am trying to say is that someone could watch a TV show with someone and talk with that person all in one program. This would be a combination of a couple of programs like Netflix or Hulu and Skype.

Our Class Wiki - So Far

I have not added content to the wiki as of yet. One of the things I anticipate adding would be more information about virtual worlds like second life and things like that. I feel like that area of new media has a lot to be explored and I would like to learn more about it as well as sharing more information about it with my fellow classmates. That's all I have so far thanks!

BLOG: P2P

File sharing is the act of distributing or providing access to digitally stored items. Peer to peer sharing is someone uploading a file like an audio, video or text file onto the internet. Then people can download that file through torrents or similar ways. Some of the more known types of peer to peer file sharing is BitTorrent, Kazaa, LimeWire, bearshare and there are many more examples out there. Torrents usually have faster speeds as people seed the content they have already downloaded giving people faster download speeds. The only problem with peer to peer file sharing is that downloading is faster then uploading which was brought up in the article in Wired by Clive Thompson. The main reason stated in the article is because internet providers sell high download speeds but low upload speeds as their normal offerings. This problematic because it causes a bottleneck for people wanting to download certain things.

Privacy

Privacy is an important issue now that new media is around. More now than ever there are more websites that are useful that require people to log-in to use them. This is important as a key logger or virus on a computer could divulge everything that a person types into the computer making those accounts compromised. This also comes up with social networking as many people post a lot about their personal lives and do not have the correct security settings or do not have them at all. Some of these people may divulge when they are not going to be home at certain times which make that person very susceptible to being robbed when they are not home. Even more to the fact is that many people put their whole lives on these social media sites including what their phone number and other very private information that could be used against that person. Also many companies are having problems securing data that is used in everyday life. Many online banking and money exchanges like amazon payments or PayPal may not be secure enough which leads to people hacking into them and stealing money from people that did nothing wrong.

Advice

Some of the ways new media could improve Baruch College are vast. One way is to make all announcements known on social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). This is important as more people are buying smartphones and it is easy to set up social networks to give updates straight to your smartphone. Also it would be imperative to have one person dedicated to monitoring the social media feeds. Another thing that the college could do is to offer more online classes. A way they could do this is to set up a professor in an empty room with a camera or have students in a physical classroom with the professor and teach the class. After the class is over the technicians that were handling the camera could upload the video onto blackboard and students could view the lecture from anywhere. This could also be done in regular classes as it would give students something to look back on to improve their knowledge other than just the notes they took in class. Lastly there could be a blog of all the different types of events that are happening daily. Instead of flooding people’s inboxes with information they could just follow the blog and it would be easier for the people that want to look up the information at a later date as well.

Creativity in New Media

Some of the thing you can do with new media is quite fun. For my example i typed into "photo editor" into Google. I clicked the first site Befunky.com and uploaded a photo I took from Google Images and played around with the settings. It was very easy to play around with the options and get exactly what you would want your photo to come out like. At the end you can either upload to some social media sites if you so choose or you can download it back onto your computer. Also there are is an app for Befunky in the app store and google play. The finished product of image is below.

Before

After

BLOG: CREATIVTY

New media technologies such as social media foster users to come up with new ideas. One example of this as seen in the article by Claire Cain Miller in the New York Times states that companies have been monitoring twitter through their followers to come up with new products or improve their existing product or service, even twitter does this. In the article it states that an early twitter user by the name of Chris Messina came up with the hash tag symbol to mark conversations to have them linked to a certain topic. Twitter replied that many people would not understand it but it is now part of twitter and used by many users to tag certain posts for events that they are tweeting about. Ideas like Messina’s are creative and help the companies to better their products or services while using new media technology.