Creativity and New Media

Last August, I went to a blink-182 concert. If you don't know blink-182, they're a pop-punk band that was very popular in the late 1990's and early 2000's but then went on hiatus for awhile in the middle of last decade. When they got back together in 2009, every blink-182 fan was abuzz with the news, excited for new music and hoping some great memories could be revived.

It took awhile for them to have new music ready, but last August when I went to see them in New Jersey, it was slated to be the first time anyone ever heard some new songs from them since 2003, the year their last album was released. The August 5th date at PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel was the first night of the tour. I saw this as an opportunity to get a lot of YouTube hits for a bootleg video. A "bootleg" video refers to any live music performance not recorded by a professional.

Throughout the show, I was ready for when they'd play some new tunes, and when they finally did, I had my phone ready to record video. The iPhone 4 recorded with surprisingly great audio quality, and that night when I got home I hurriedly did a little editing on the beginning and ends of the video and uploaded to YouTube. I used tags appropriately and took to a blink-182 fan website's discussion forum to show it to some people. Much to my surprise, the next morning the video's view count was in the thousands! I was ecstatic at the prospect that my video had gone semi-viral, or at least as viral as it could get for a topic like this. At the writing of this post, the video has 3,599 views. You can view it here and I also embedded it below.

Creativity

Creativity and new media go hand in hand. New media almost forces the user to have some degree of creativity in order to really get something out of it. I particularly enjoyed the article in the New York Times that can be read here, where it describes how the creativity and community of Twitter users in the early days of the website has greatly shaped the features and culture of the site today.

I remember when I first made my personal Twitter, the "retweet" feature was non existent. Like it says in the article, in order to retweet something, you had to copy the text, place "RT" in front of it, and manually post the tweet yourself. This now commonplace feature on Twitter once only existed as an unofficial way of communicating on the site. The creativity of the user base was the driving force behind the feature, and has continued to be all the way to today.

New media most notably fosters creativity with sites like YouTube, with almost all their content being user-generated. Whether someone is trying to create a viral video, making a mash-up, or creating their own short film of some sort, YouTube is the center of creativity on the internet, and it's amazing when you consider the sheer volume of creativity that people have participated in in just a few short years.

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds are a compelling use of technology today. People from all parts of the world that would never have met in the real world can "meet" each other in virtual worlds. Friendships can be built and lives can be changed from the people you meet in virtual worlds. There are many pros and cons to be discussed here.

The first pro is that virtual worlds can be gateways to social interaction for people that wouldn't have been able to do so in their real lives. In this article by Nicole Saidi, she cites Yale Professor Dr. Fred Volkmar as saying "Although not much research is yet available, there is clearly considerable potential in use of new technologies for fostering social skills." The article is about young adults with autism, a mental disorder where social skills can be severely inhibited. However, this same idea can be used to help all sorts of people with social problems.

A second pro is an answer to the question "How do virtual worlds foster creativity?" Virtual worlds represent an explosion of creativity! A person can use their avatar to give them whatever appearance they want. If someone dislikes anything about their appearance in their real life, they can change it in their virtual life. In your virtual life you can create whatever house you want, have any car you want, and use whatever combination of color, decoration, and furnishings you want in each thing. Further, creativity extends to the entrepreneurial nature of some of the virtual worlds, such as Second Life, where users create their own places for people to spend their time.

A third pro to virtual worlds is their place in business. Businesses have adapted to virtual worlds and have found ways to profit through them. In this article by Brian Hindo in Business Week, he explains how Webkinz, a popular toy a few years ago, were sold with a unique code to be used online in their virtual world to activate an online version of the toy. Several other companies, at least eight, according to the article, tried to follow Webkinz's lead.

With all of the pros to virtual worlds, there are also cons. Virtual worlds can sometimes be so gratifying for a person with social problems that they actually prevent them from being social in the real world. Rather than enhancing their real world social skills, users of virtual worlds can become addicted and more socially inept than ever. Virtual worlds also pose the risk of people lying behind a computer screen. A person can create an avatar of a young teenager and prey on young girls, when in real life that person is an older man who would never dare to do such a thing in person.

What are the futures of virtual worlds? Safety and addiction are probably the two largest problems facing virtual worlds. However, where do we place the blame? The creators of the virtual worlds simply make a platform upon which the users can choose their level and type of use. Do virtual world creators have a responsibility to police the actions of their users? How about a responsibility to encourage real life interaction and combat addiction? These two issues definitely have created a negative perception of virtual worlds that may hurt their continued use in the future. At the same time, with so many positives, such as business models, collaboration, social skill building, and more, it is unlikely that virtual worlds will disappear.

Social Networking Sites

Every social networking site has a different feel to it. Every social networking site has a different niche. Some of them come and go, but some have established a foothold on their little place on the internet and are here to stay. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are probably the top four social networks, and we'll look at each one, evaluating the impressions they give off when you visit them.

First there was MySpace, and to the amazement of some, it indeed still exists. Admittedly, I did not join MySpace until 2009, when it was way past it's prime and well on the decline. However, I feel I still got a pretty good feel for the site and how it works. MySpace has become largely corporate in nature. The home page is littered with ads for different MySpace pages. In line with this, MySpace is still a good destination to listen to a new band's music, whether they are signed or unsigned. A key feature of MySpace that differentiates it from other social networks is that it is just about 100% customizable. Each person's page is their own "space", complete with their own font, wallpaper, music, and color selections. This kind of customization gives MySpace a bit of a bad reputation in my opinion, since it is often difficult to navigate pages since every single one is different. MySpace has watched it's traffic steadily decline, and may not exist in the near future.

Next is Facebook. Facebook found it's success in being quite the opposite of MySpace in many ways. Though it is also very corporate in nature like MySpace is at this point, Facebook pages for both people and companies all have the same format that is familiar and easy to navigate. Facebook is always refreshing it's users with new features, such as the most recent "timeline" addition, and likely isn't going anywhere any time soon. Facebook learned from MySpace's shortcomings and has developed a superior social networking site.

Third on the list to discuss is Twitter. Twitter is my favorite social networking site. I've been using Twitter for years prior to this CIS class with a personal account, and I've been addicted. Twitter's main draw is the 140 character limit per tweet. Because of this, there is no room for unnecessary information. Updates are quick and to the point. The best part about Twitter is you can keep your timeline to only things you truly want to get updates about. On Facebook, you see old friends from high school posting photos and other updates. On Twitter, this is not the case. You choose to follow whatever companies, sports teams, musicians, celebrities, politicians, and people that you want. Twitter is kind of like a news service to me. Of course, there is no backup or citation for a tweet, so further investigation is usually needed for something important. Overall though, Twitter is an amazingly fast paced social network that is whatever you make it.

Finally we have LinkedIn. LinkedIn is pretty cool because it is the only "professional" social network that is influential enough to be useful. You can upload your resume, fill out your professional details such as education, prior and current employment, and specialties, and add people to your network. Each person you add to your network expands your potential list of contacts through connections. LinkedIn also is useful for finding employment. Many companies post job listings there. I think of LinkedIn as the professional alternative to Facebook. Like Facebook, LinkedIn uses a standard, easy to navigate interface on each user's profile. I look to use LinkedIn more and more as I get closer to searching for work after college.

So there you have it. Each social network has it's benefits and unique features, and there are so many more. Part of the fun is observing how the same person represents him/herself across multiple platforms!

Blog about Twitter

Which medium for discussion is best: Twitter, Blackboard, or in-class discussion? To compare Twitter discussions to Blackboard discussions or in-class discussions, I think the best way to break it down is by ranking them by ease of understanding.

Of course, an in-class discussion usually provides the most clarity. It's traditional; it's what we all know very well. But are the other ways better?

Blackboard discussions are my least favorite of the three options here. The Blackboard discussion board is not user friendly in my opinion, and it's a bit cumbersome to navigate among several posts, especially within the same thread. I've used traditional phpBB forums before and found them to be much easier to navigate. If Blackboard used that software, it'd be significantly better.

Then we come to Twitter. Short, to the point, and easy to read with hash tag topics like the one we use for our class, #3810NET1A. I've been a Twitter user for a few years now and have had many discussions with a whole slew of different people on it. Twitter is an amazing platform for discussion and, in my opinion, ranks first among the three options we're considering here.

Social Networking

There is no doubt that social networking is changing the world. Everyone is on a social network, and even every THING. Corporations, causes, products, artists, entertainers, and just about any division of the aforementioned have a social networking presence. What started as a way to connect with people has evolved into a way to connect with anything.

There are many benefits to this on a societal level. On one hand, you can easily connect to a company with a product question, feedback, or a problem. With increased transparency, products, customer service, and customer experience are all made better. Another aspect of societal benefit is the ease with which one can contact someone. In an emergency, a person is just a click, tweet, instant message, or wall post away. As Steve Chazin is quoted in the Stephen J. Dubner Freakonomics article, " Social networking tools have made it nearly effortless for me to keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues." That article can be found here: Or perhaps the desire to contact someone is purely for the purposes of catching up on an old friendship. A third reason that social networks benefit society is the spread of information. Natural disasters, celebrity deaths, sports news, and more are all brought to people instantly thanks to social networks. The newspaper's stories are outdated by the morning they're purchased. For these reasons (and there are many more), social networks have benefited society as a whole.

As touched on above, corporations have used social networking in many ways themselves. Connecting with customers for feedback and complaints is only one thing. Another huge use that corporations have for social networks is advertising and promotion. Facebook's ad program provides a great way to advertise to particular demographics, based on whatever factors the company wants. There are also promoted tweets and trending topics on Twitter. Corporations can also use social networks to run contests and spread information on their new products or services.

There is also a dark side to social media. Lack of face to face interaction with people has caused a decline in communication skills among the youth. As Hilary Stout writes in a New York Times article, "today’s youths may be missing out on experiences that help them develop empathy, understand emotional nuances and read social cues like facial expressions and body language." That article can be found here. People repeatedly use poor judgment by posting photos that are lewd or inappropriate, which negatively impacts their career chances. There is always the issue of privacy; most of the things we put on social networks are not things that would have been readily shared prior to the internet existing. The bottom line is that social networks come with a responsibility for the users. The use of the social network is entirely up to them, and it is their responsibility to keep their online presence clean.

How might social networks evolve in the future? This is a big question with many answers. We have already seen social networks connect with social gaming, a progression to short, quick status updates with Twitter, and the landscape on Facebook is almost always changing. In my opinion, I see social networks reaching a peak and then leveling out. In other words, their use will remain constant, and the number of new users on Facebook or Twitter will not be so great. Social networks will then be more directly and intentionally competing against each other, as the new users they will get will be taken directly from another social network.