Creativity and New Media

For this assignment, I chose a Youtube music video that I made, dedicated to my dearest beloved. I edited this video by downloading many Youtube video clips of episodes from the show Queer as Folk, and using Final Cut Pro I chopped them up and glued pieces of them together so that the rhythm of movement and atmosphere will match the audio - a track I chose by famous Dutch DJ Armin Van Buuren called In and Out of Love. A slight waning - this video includes chosen moments from what I believe to be the greatest love story ever portrayed in a TV series and it contains nudity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIrKlPsuLCg

Creativity

New media nurtures creativity in various and endless ways because it enables the DIY attitude to flourish.The internet is making boundless information on any given topic available to any person with access, and therefore all that is needed to gain the knowledge necessary for new interesting ideas is the power of will, and a limited amount of talent. In the field of digital music, for example, a lot of vocal and instrumental samples that may be used for mixing appear on the internet, leaked by people who work in the recording studio or even by the artist herself, free and ready to use by anyone. In addition, easy-to-use software enable one to create or mash audio tracks. Acid Pro for example, is a software that enables mashups by putting loops of different songs both in time and in tune with each other. Other benefits of digital technology include the fact that you don't need a distributor, because, to quote Mark Vidler from the article The New Math of Mashups, known professionally as Go Home Productions, “your distribution is the Internet, and you don’t need a record label, because it’s your bedroom, and you don’t need a recording studio, because that’s your computer. You do it all yourself.”

Users of new media can also use their power of innovation to come up with ideas which would make social networking sites easier and more interesting to use, etc. An example would be Chris Messina, an early Twitter user, who came up with the idea, inspired by a convention used on other Web sites, to mark conversations about a certain topic with the # symbol. This way, many conferences, for example, can announce the so-called hash tag at the start of the event so attendees can mark all their posts the same way and people can search Twitter for everything written on the conference.

Modeling Reality With Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds can be used creatively to recreate lost but not forgotten pieces of the past in the form of places of historical importance or in which historical events took place. An example is a recreation of the Chelsea hotel where Mr.Brown constructed a version of the Chelsea Hotel in Second Life to bring alive the hotel's long gone old spirit.
" At Mr. Brown’s Chelsea, Mr. Hamilton happily reported, it was as if the upheaval of the past few years had never taken place."
Even evidence of the infamous incident of Sid and Nancy shows in this virtual world in Room 1000 where a visitor can find " a bloodstain on the bed, and a bass guitar leaned against a wall."
 Another idea for virtual worlds is to create a safe, relaxing environment for social interaction. Naughty Auties is a virtual space within Second Life dedicated to people on the Autism spectrum.
according to David Savill, who created this space, the benefit is "that visitors can practice social interaction and find information about the condition. The graphical representations of real people create a "comfort zone" that can coax users out of their shells and get them communicating with others".
Another advantage of the virtual reality space is that it creates opportunities for communication between individuals that would be otherwise unthinkable in the real world.  To quote the multimedia artist Annie Ok “There’s no way that you’re going to go onto a flat Web site or message board and instantly strike up a conversation with somebody who works for MTV or I.B.M. or the president of Harvard. But these things are possible in virtual worlds.”
In the world of business meetings, virtual environments such as Second Life can help by recreating the water-cooler experience(impromptu "water cooler" conversations that occur in a real workplace, where colleagues can share information they may have forgotten to communicate in meetings.) The virtual environments can also give a sense of place.
The cons are that it still doesn't compare to real life, and there are things you just can't do in virtual reality, like enjoying a drink. However, you can have a chat with the bartender. 
As more and more people become conversant with computers, I expect to to see this technology getting more popular amongst both explorers such as those who would enjoy the virtual lower east side and big businesses that might utilize the technology to their advantage when long-distance conferences are concerned.

Blog About Twitter

How does a twitter discussion compare to a blackboard discussion?
First, a blackboard post is not as limited in length as twitter posts (no more than 140 symbols).
In sense, this would make the twitter discussion faster and more erratic. Second, the blackboard discussion is easier to follow in terms of comment and response, because the replies are distinguished from the main posts.  Therefore, Blackboard doesn't have the news feed appearance of Twitter.
How does a twitter discussion compare to an in-class discussion?
In a sense a twitter discussion is similar to an in-class discussion because there are many quick replies/posts rather than long, well-thought ones. And as in in-class discussion, often there is no order of post and reply. The replier has to indicate who's comment they refer to, and if it's too far away in time they may have to repeat some of the comment in their reply.

Social Networking Sites

Twitter can be viewed as having multiple facets. One can register and selectively "follow" others. In this case, the messages from followed profiles are streamed like an RSS news feed. if the user wants to narrow down their news feed, they can create lists that include parts of thier followed by users. so the social medium is a  personalized news service about topics of your choosing. With twitter one can also attend conferences virtually or following group discussions by searching for the right term following a "#". witter is working on ways to deliver news nearby, like alerts about an earthquake or the closing of a bridge. Twitter’s list of trending topics can now be searched by city. Finally, twitter can be used to get quick answers to questions.
   Myspace seems to me like a platform that assists mostly unknown or up-and-coming bands and musicians, as each profile on myspace has its own very unique style, and in the center of it all is the playlist that the artist created. So it's an easy platform for artists to display samples of their work. Unlike facebook or twitter, it's not very useful for constant status updates or news feeds.
   As twitter, Facebook can be used for quick status updates or new feeds, but only within the social network of your friends. What you see is limited to who you're Facebook friends with. A new application, Graph Search, will make it possible to search for friends by keywords, such as their interests or what their plans are, making it easy to find common grounds between people and make plans together. Like Myspace and Twitter, Facebook also allows the sharing of videos and pictures.
   Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, and effectively an online community, the service is widely used by photo researchers and by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media. Photos and videos can be accessed from Flickr without the need to register an account but an account must be made in order to upload content onto the website. Registering an account also allows users to create a profile page containing photos and videos that the user has uploaded and also grants the ability to add another Flickr user as a contact.

Social Networking

The advantages of social networking to society are both career-related/corporate and social.
The business networking site Linkedin, which started in 2003, makes it much easier for employers to find employees, and vice versa. To quote Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting, by "Typing keywords into a search engine", an employer could "scrape the entire network to dig out high-quality candidates that she can't find elsewhere." Such sites also help job hunters market themselves online by setting up profiles, listing work history and specific skills.
Another advantage mentioned in the same article, is that "With social networking, I don't need to go to Bob directly to find out who Bob's friends are. Or Bob's friends' friends. So, effectively, I have a thousand contacts that could potentially lead me to 100,000, now I have 8,500 contacts that could potentially lead me to 4.5 million."
From a social  perspective, it is much easier to keep updated on friends' lives via social networking sites such as facebook if they live relatively far from each other or don't have much time or the means to socialize. On the downside, facebook privacy settings can be very unclear or confusing to the avarage user, resulting in embarrassing or unwanted consequences. An example of this situation was presented in the article Facebook Privacy Is So Confusing Even the Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn't Private, in which a photo posted by Mark Zukerberg's sister, Randi, was published on twitter in a way that she felt violated her privacy.
From the article: "Randi has indicated that she only wants her friends to see photos that she has posted. But the way Facebook works, friends of your friends tagged in a photo album also see the entire roll, unless you choose otherwise in the settings of the album posted. (It's not a universal setting.) The term "friends" in this album at right indicates my friends and all the friends of people tagged in the post. Changing that involves clicking "custom" and unchecking a box that reads "friends of those tagged.""
Another downside to having  a social networking site such as facebook in such widespread use is that spammers might take advantage of the data. these spammers might send you an email addressed to you by name, containing a link to a website that might result in downloading malware unto your computer. these scammers are exploiting the fact that  you're more likely to click on a link if it was sent by a friend.
From BBB: New Wave of Phishing Scams Uses Facebook Info for Personalized Spam:
"Scammers find your information through Facebook or other social media accounts. Some set up fake accounts and send out friend requests. When you accept the request, they can view your friends and personal and contact information. Other scammers rely on social media users not locking down their privacy settings, so basic information, such as your name, email address and friends' names, is publicly available."
 As I've read in the article Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network's Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out, it seems Facebook's makers have a vision for the future of the internet as "Facebook - centered" rather than Google-centered, as it now is. To quote, "Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this "social graph" to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search."
I personally think social networking have great potential in terms of advertising and key word search algorithm because of the amount of users in those networks, especially facebook. I don't think they could be a good replacement to vocal or visual interaction, but a very useful addition indeed.