The Next New

The year is 2030.

You are sipping a fair trade, ethically sourced, Rain-forest Alliance certified, single-origin espresso, and you offer your friend a sip, then you both break out into hysterical laughter - it's nothing to do with the coffee, but merely the fact that you've forgotten (again) that your friend is not truly in the room with you, and is indeed in her apartment on the other side of town.

You see, AR has grown so ubiquitous and so realistic (not to mention how inexpensive it is, nowadays) that you can hardly tell the difference between your friend in real life and her projected form sitting on the couch beside you. A piece of nano-technology projects her image onto the seat, and dark patches give the illusion of an impression underneath her, where the couch would have sagged a bit under her weight.

This is the next new media. It's in your home, it's in your office, allowing many more workers to come to their place of work remotely from all over the world. Your child's teacher has set up a similar holographic messaging system, and routinely reminds your son to do his homework, rather than V-chat with his friends, or play one of the latest new games on his iPhone 21 6G, equipped with technology that is many hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than that which sent men to the moon. (Kendall)

Just last year, when the first woman stepped foot on Mars, you and your son watched it in stunning holographic 4D on your 6G network, much as the rest of the nations of the world did.

The future is here, and it's ours to build and imagine, so dream big and be ready - the next new is only around the corner.

Works Cited

Kendall, Graham. “Could an IPhone Fly Me to the Moon?” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 15 July 2019, www.independent.co.uk/news/science/apollo-11-moon-landing-mobile-phones-smartphone-iphone-a8988351.html.

P2P

1. What is file sharing?

File sharing occurs anytime one person or entity has a file and shares or distributes it, either directly with another person or entity, or online to a larger audience.

     2. What is P2P File sharing?

P2P file sharing is slightly different and more specific than file sharing. According to Margomin, "P2P file sharing is a peer to peer file sharing which allows individuals to access media files using software program that searches and locates computers that have the file that is wanted.

     3. What are some examples of P2P file sharing?

Some examples of P2P file sharing include Gnutella, BigChampagne, and Pirate Bay. Many of these have proven controversial and have resulted in multiple lawsuits.
 

Works Cited:

Margomin. “P2p File Sharing.” Margomin, 13 Apr. 2016, margomin.wordpress.com/2016/04/13/p2p-file-sharing/.

Wiki So Far

So far, my contributions to the Wiki are as follows:

1. I edited the page on "Dance" for clarity and grammar.

2. I edited the introduction to the page on "Toys" for stylistic choices and grammar.

3. I edited the page "Art and Technology" and added a section on "Artificial Intelligence and Art" under the subheading "Digital Art." I also added two images with captions.

4. I created a page called "Fanfiction" and added images as well as text with several references. I plan to add more to this page as the semester continues. I am continuing to do research on this topic.

Privacy

Privacy is a hot-button topic in today's modern, connected world. It can manifest in a variety of ways, and often proves to be a difficult issue to solve.

One need look no further than Facebook to see a tangled mess of privacy violations and their associated moral quandaries. For example, how long should a photograph remain on the World Wide Web, and how can Facebook protect its users against hackers who would seek to make personal, private photos public? And why is it that users must go to their settings to change defaults that would limit their ability to control who sees their photos and posts - why are these defaults not automatically set to maximize privacy? For that matter, what, exactly, does privacy mean in an age of hackers and constant contact in our interconnected world?

Twitter and other social networking sites have similar problems with privacy. What finds its way onto the Internet, tends to stay on the Internet, and what stays on the Internet tends to come back to haunt people when they are looking for jobs, seeking romantic arrangements, or other every-day activities that have been complicated by privacy issues.

Another issue related to privacy is that of minors. What sorts of protections should we extend towards underage Internet users? Given that their brains are not fully developed, nor are they able to give consent by law and that they are unable to vote even on issues that affect them, should they even be able to use the same social media that adults use? Children are making decisions that they often do not realize will affect them for years or even decades to come, and they should be informed of the risks of using social media well before they get an account.

All in all, privacy is a messy issue, with far too many facets to be comprehensively discussed in a brief blog posting. I suspect that as the Internet becomes more ubiquitous, more and more legislation will be passed regarding privacy, however, new issues are wont to pop up at any time due to the evolving nature of the WWW and the Internet of Things.

Advice

As a trusted contractor hired to bring new media into the realm of higher educational learning at Baruch College, my recommendations would be as follows:

I. Engage with students on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites. 

Invite students to follow the college's official social network sites on the first day of Orientation. Not only will this give the impression that Baruch has progressed from a storied history in the 21st century, but it will also help students keep in touch with the college in a variety of means, beyond the typical, traditional e-mail and Blackboard tools.

II. Feature students on social media, by having a lottery system where students can enter their names into a pool of applicants. 

This will help students find and keep friends. A common complaint among students at this large commuter school is that others are 'cold' or 'distant.' It will also boost self-esteem and self-image among featured students. The social media account that features students can post bi-weekly, and be student-run in order to avoid depleting the budget.

III. Use wikis to help students, professors, and other faculty connect with one another. 

Having a Baruch wiki system will enable more successful collaboration, and allow students to showcase the findings of their academic pursuits in a public sphere.

IV. Make student magazines, journals, and perhaps even papers, available online as open source files. 

This action will help foster creativity among the student body, a skill that is as vital in a business school as it is a fine arts college.

V. Ask students for their opinions, thoughts, and ideas via social media!

Soliciting the thoughts and ideas of students will allow college administration and faculty to become more sensitive to the needs of the student body. Though not all ideas might be viable, surely some will be novel and useful. Additionally, doing this through social media instead of traditional e-mail surveys will allow students to feel more comfortable sharing their opinions, fostering greater levels of creativity and novelty in the ideas they share.

Creativity

New Media fosters creativity in a variety of ways, from mash-ups to instapoetry to finding new ways to connect and communicate with others.

For example, Twitter users began using hashtags - those little '#' symbols we are all so familiar with, followed by a word or phrase, such as #tgif (short for 'Thank God it's Friday') or #catsofinstagram, to name just a few. Twitter took this a cue to innovate, and now hyperlinks hashtags. To me, that is a #win for creativity. The article "Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers" goes into more detail about how Twitter has learned from its users and implemented tools and features that were originally thought of as niche, but which turned out to be strokes of genius.

Mash-ups also foster creativity in that they encourage people to 'think outside the box' and create new ideas from old content, as we saw in the article "Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But Why?"

Fanfiction, such as that hosted on Archive of Our Own (of which I am a proud member) is also a form of creativity that stems from a combination of relatively old media (books, movies, TV shows) and new media, namely the Internet of Things and sites that allow users to share their stories en masse and gain followings as authors of fanfiction. Most notably, 50 Shades of Grey, widely acknowledged as one of the top 3 bestsellers of the previous decade, began as Twilight fanfiction.

All in all, new media is an excellent vehicle for creativity, and I can hardly wait to see what the future will bring as new media expands, grows, changes, and evolves.

Works Cited:

Barnes, Brooks. “Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But Why?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 24 Sept. 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/business/media/24crank.html.

“'Fifty Shades of Grey' Started out as 'Twilight' Fan Fiction before Becoming an International Phenomenon.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 17 Feb. 2015, www.businessinsider.com/fifty-shades-of-grey-started-out-as-twilight-fan-fiction-2015-2.

Miller, Claire Cain. “Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 25 Oct. 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/technology/internet/26twitter.html.

Russaw, Jeanine Marie. “E.L. James' 'Fifty Shades of Grey' Trilogy Ranked as Top 3 Bestselling Books of the Decade.” Newsweek, Newsweek, 21 Dec. 2019, www.newsweek.com/fifty-shades-grey-trilogy-ranked-top-3-bestselling-books-decade-1478690.

Creativity and New Media

For this assignment, I created a short video about the Lost & Found section of Craigslist, to illustrate both how new media connects us and allows us to be creative in a myriad of ways.

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual reality can be used for a variety of purposes, from the mundane to the profound. Workers can telecommute across the globe from the comfort of their living rooms or offices, as we saw in the article "Going to the Virtual Office in Second Life." People from around the world can congregate in virtual spaces, buy digital goods, attend live-streamed events, work, play, and learn. Virtual worlds have become so realistic and so expansive that one can do nearly anything in Virtual Reality, providing that it doesn't require a physical body.

Virtual goods can be bought and sold in virtual worlds, one can develop a persona (or several) across platforms, and have a chance to be a different version of themselves. Often, this self is empowering, and allows the user to grow as an individual, as is the case with soldiers who use virtual worlds to heal from war-related trauma and anguish. (After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get a Reboot?) However, there is a downside - people can be less authentic when they hide behind a screen, and they are free to do and say whatever they please, no matter the cost or consequences. Predators can prey on children, pretending to be younger than they truly are for nefarious purposes. Other cyber-criminals can lurk, preying on vulnerable populations, who they might hack or otherwise harm by installing malware, viruses, or tracking software to the devices of other players. Trolls can proliferate, and make virtual worlds uncomfortable for people who use them as a diversion or a safe haven.

Additionally, companies invest large amounts of money to make virtual worlds addictive, assembling teams of their best and brightest to keep people playing, even while they should be doing other things (such as working, spending time with their family, or even waiting for the red light to change to green).

However, virtual worlds can foster creativity. They can enable children to learn and grow with others their age, allow their teachers to create innovative and fun assignments for them to complete, and can be used in classrooms from nursery school to college to create a fun, dynamic learning environment. They can help people with autism and other neurodivergent individuals gain social skills they can apply to the real world, facilitating communication with loved ones and strangers alike.

Virtual worlds have a variety of pros and cons, all of which must be carefully weighed. Children should be monitored when online, either by a parent, guardian, or instructor, and everyone should be wary of trolls, cyber-criminals, and other nefarious types who enjoy or profit from harming others. However, I strongly believe that despite this, virtual worlds do more good than harm, and that they are a valuable educational tool, as well as being an important social gathering point and all-around fun place to be.

Cited:

Mehta, Diane. “After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get a Reboot?” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 1 May 2013, www.forbes.com/sites/dianemehta/2013/04/30/after-second-life-can-virtual-worlds-get-a-reboot/.

Tutton, Mark. “Going to the Virtual Office in Second Life.” CNN, Cable News Network, 9 Nov. 2009, www.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/11/05/second.life.virtual.collaboration/.

Social Networking Sites

I chose to visit Facebook and Twitter, as well as Tumblr and Instagram. 

I tried to look at each with a critical eye. 

Facebook:

On Facebook, I found a few memes from 'friends' - someone I had a class with a few semesters ago, and have not spoken to since, and another person whom I do not know in real life - only through online interactions. I found little of value, despite having tried my darnedest to modify my settings to show me only relevant posts a few months back. 

Twitter:

I found a tweet about fruit from December of last year. Interesting, I suppose, but dated. On the explore tab, I found out that Mike Bloomberg dropped out of the race, something I had already learned from a fellow Baruch student, who had shouted that out in the hour before my test this morning. Interesting, perhaps, but also not 'news,' at least not to me. 

Instagram:

I logged in on both my professional account and my personal account. I actually keep Instagram in a hard-to-find folder on my phone, so that I will not be tempted to use it excessively. I thought that I could make an exception for the purposes of this class, and ending up mindlessly scrolling for a good five minutes before I shook myself and got back to writing this post. 

Tumblr:

Tumblr also used to be a weakness of mine. It's a time-suck, pure and simple, but I love it. I no longer have the app on my phone, though I have un-installed and re-installed it several times on my iPad, mainly to keep up with my various fandoms. 

Conclusion:

Although I feel as though time spent on social media is rarely productive or engaging, I found myself lingering on each site longer than strictly necessary. Social networking sites are addictive by design, and I want to be stronger than the teams of IT experts working for ridiculously high salaries to keep me on their employer's website.
 

Twitter

The (in)famous Twitter Logo.

Twitter is a site that allows you to post your thoughts, musings, photos, GIFs, and other immortal words of wisdom on the Internet. The catch? Your message must not exceed 240 characters.

In my view, Twitter is aggravating a major problem facing our modern society - that of being bombarded with fast-paced, rapid-fire words and images with little time to process them and slot them into our larger world view. There is no time to analyze what the President says in his latest Tweet, when a Kardashian is featured just below, and perhaps Elon Musk has something to say below that, and on and on we scroll, mindless consumers of an endless feed that would take an army to process or put into some semblance of order.

In comparison to a discussion in person, Twitter seems merely like a fugue of voices, all shouting at cross-purposes with one another. There is little room for civilized, intelligent discourse in 240 characters, and yet the leader of our nation sees fit to use Twitter to address us, the American public and citizens of the world in what is surely an ill-omened precedent.

In a world where we are reduced to immortalizing our misspellings, mishaps, and misfires, is it any wonder that the nation and the world are becoming more and more polarized? In my humble opinion, 240 characters just aren't enough to say anything of more than trivial importance. Twitter might have its virtues, but you aren't likely to catch me extolling them. Brevity might be the soul of wit, but it is also the heart of confusion and the body of misunderstanding. 

Social Networking

Social networking involves Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social networking sites where people come together to share news, information, status updates, or merely a passing thought they believed the internet might find amusing.

It can be used in wholesome ways and for incredible good – an elderly couple who no longer drive can keep up with their grandchildren three states away, your cat can become Insta-famous without your dog getting jealous of all the attention it’s getting, your mother can share recipes with her book club, and on and on the list goes.

However, social networking is often used for nefarious purposes. Campus gossip websites can become vessels for harassment and cyberbullying. (Young) Other people can stalk you in cyberspace, and future employers might be vacillating between you and an equally-qualified other candidate, but that other candidate gets the job just because you made the mistake of posting a questionable selfie back in your first year of college. Employers, your friends, and you family will all be able to track you on social media and make judgement calls about who you are, and what type of person you are becoming.

Some people feel forced to quit social media entirely, either because it has become an addiction in their lives, because of privacy concerns, or because they felt it distanced them from their friends despite marketing itself as a means of bringing people together. (Heffernan)

In short, society at large benefits from the profits and jobs created by social networking powerhouses, but individuals, by and large, suffer the consequences.

In the future, it is possible that social networking sites will become even more invasive. With more people spending more time on their screens, Facebook and other social networking sites have more time to monitor them and collect valuable data. We mustn’t forget that Facebook isn’t just a site – it’s also a corporation, with monetary interests at heart. The data it collects from its users is worth money, and in the end, we are just another set of data points to them. I don’t see a reversal of this trend anytime in the future, and indeed expect that the situation will only be exacerbated.

Heffernan, Virginia. “Facebook Exodus.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 26 Aug. 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/30FOB-medium-t.html?_r=2&ref=technology.

Young, Jeffrey R. “They're Back, and They're Bad: Campus-Gossip Web Sites.” Chronicle.com, Aug. 2009, www.chronicle.com/article/theyre-backtheyre-bad-/48220.

Blog v Wiki

In our society, our technology is a vital part of the invisible infrastructure of daily life. We wake up via an alarm on our cellphones, go straight to the computer to check our e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, or some similar such social networking site or means of communication. Then, after a brief interval in the real-world, perhaps eating with a family member while playing an iPad game, we rush off to the train, where we spend the entire commute scrolling Tumblr or reading our favorite blog.

It’s not just us. Companies have detailed disaster-recovery plans in the event of an Internet outage, or a data breach, or some other unforeseen catastrophic failure of their digital assets. Banks have plans for cyber-attacks, and on and on to the highest levels of government with encrypted messages meant for high-ranking officials sent across the digital airwaves.

This is a picture of our networked world, where we are always in touch with one another, and our cell phones rarely stray further than our pockets. In some ways, convergence of technology is very useful in such a digital environment. Instagram now proudly proclaims that it is ‘brought to you by Facebook,’ Yahoo bought Tumblr (Schroeder) in the Spring of 2020, and many other more recent mergers and acquisitions can be cited. However, it is noteworthy that convergence brings with it risks – if all of the Internet is one ten platforms, and two of them are breached in a cyber-attack, nearly one quarter of the Internet is at risk of privacy loss, hackers, or even more unsavory digital elements.

Let us now examine two of the Internet’s most lauded tools – blogs, and Wikis. Blogs can serve as a log of daily life, as in the case of the blogs of deployed servicemen (Dao), or as community bulletins and a means of creating meaningful change, as in the instance of a Brooklyn blog that helped lead to a drug raid, creating a safer, more wholesome community (Wilson). In this way, blogs have been used for collaboration amongst community members. They could likely be used for collaboration in other ways as well, perhaps in workplaces where all employees are invited to work on a private or public company blog where they relay information to senior management and their coworkers.

Wikis, too, are commonly used for collaboration. Unlike blogs, workplace wikis are generally company-specific, and private. Blogs provide a more public sphere, while wikis provide an ease of communication and real-time editing features that blogs often lack or fall short of.

A discussion of wikis would hardly be complete without mentioning Wikipedia, the online free encyclopedia that any literate individual with an Internet connection and a keyboard can edit. Wikipedia has taken the idea of an encyclopedia and revolutionized it. In a similar vein, I would love to see a novel-writing wiki – a wiki where people come together to write and edit one or more novels. I believe that would not only be an interesting idea, but also an – ahem – ‘novel’ one.

Works Cited

Dao, James. “Pentagon Keeps Wary Watch as Troops Blog.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 9 Sept. 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/us/09milblogs.html.

Schroeder, Stan. “ Yahoo Buys Tumblr, Promises to Not 'Screw It up'.” Mashable, 20 May 2013, mashable.com/2013/05/20/yahoo-officially-acquires-tumblr-promises-not-to-screw-it-up/.

Wilson, Michael. “Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 26 June 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/nyregion/26bayridge.html.

The Intersection of Poetry, Literature, and New Media: An Analysis

The online world has changed the way we read and consume literature, as well as the platforms through which authors share their work with a wider audience. I have chosen to research and analyze the intersection of literature and new media, particularly the impacts of new media on the literary form of poetry. I would be interested as to whether the rise and proliferation of new media has led to an corresponding increase or decrease in poetry readership. I am also interested to learn whether or not an increasing number of people are encouraged to become poets due to the popularity of 'Instapoets' such as Rupi Kaur, and others like her who have been able to use Instagram to create a platform and gather an audience for their work. In going about this research, I will explore Instagram itself as a primary source and as a starting point; then I will conduct the appropriate academic research utilizing what I have learned from the posts and profiles of various Instapoets, as well as their interaction with their community of readers. I will also research alternative platforms other than Instagram through which poets and writers share their work with their audience in order to gain a comprehensive understanding on how new media has changed the way we read, write, consume, and share poetry.

Hello, World!

Hello, world! This is my new blog for my New Media online course. I hope you enjoy reading and browsing through it!