Social networking sites

Facebook

Even though it is currently not the most popular among the younger crowd, Facebook is still currently the most dominant of all social platforms. It is mainly useful because of how ingrained it is across people of all age groups, so it can be a nice way to keep in touch with old friends and family that you do not see very often. However, the way that it handles news feeds can be very annoying, and it can be extra obnoxious when people try to use it as a platform to have gigantic political debates where they link useless articles. Facebook has definitely catered toward the spread of misinformation in the past, though there are hints of them starting to change that.

Twitter

Much like Facebook, Twitter's main issue is how people try to have debates or try to make profound statements that do not come off well due to the character limit. Twitter is one of the best places to get breaking news on various subjects very fast though, as it is usually the first platform that people go to so they can share any events that happen near them.

Steam

While platforms like Facebook and Twitter are for universal audiences, Steam is a platform for people that play video games on their computer. It started as a storefront, but it has a built in community section where people can chat on message boards for every single game that is sold on the platform, or people can share custom modifications for the games through the platform. This helps foster creativity and can even act as a substitute for official troubleshooting as games often have issues on the PC platform that gets resolved quickly by the fans of the games.

Reddit

While this site tends to get known more for the negative things that go down on it, like the Donald Trump board's trolling, Reddit is still a very useful site for discussion about very specific topics. Since Reddit allows for communities on any subject to start they own message board on it, this allows for people with similar interests to gather around and have discussions on that interest. Reddit is basically hundreds of thousands of smaller communities all held under one website.

Next New

Virtual reality is currently gaining traction. While higher end VR headsets are not exactly very popular outside of the gaming community due to their price of entry, some of the cell phone attachments have been much more popular. It is clear that this will be a viable platform for a form of new media. While the technology gets better, I think that it will be the place for future MMORPG video games like World of Warcraft, or a social media platform with a level of interaction that was not possible before, or even a viable way to hold company meeting, or gatherings for some sort of presentation or convention for people that cannot travel for some reason. Virtual reality will probably be the future of "new media".

P2P

File sharing is when one person uploads a files to the internet to make publicly available for anyone else to access online.

P2P (Peer 2 Peer) file sharing is where, instead of uploading files publicly, users connect directly to each other, typically using a program of some sort, so they can share files like music, videos, programs, or various other documents.

The most notorious examples from when P2P file sharing started to initially get very popular was music sharing services like Napster and Kazaa. These days, most people use torrent sites like The Pirate Bay, which give you files that you can open up in a program like BitTorrent and it allows you to anonymously establish a P2P connection with various uses to help share files.

The problem with P2P file sharing is that it is frequently used to pirate stuff like music, films, TV shows, video games, and even books. Companies like the RIAA are constantly trying to find ways to fight against it by aiming to take down sites like The Pirate Bay.

There are legal usages that can benefit these companies that has mostly gone untapped though. The Econsultancy article "Content producers should take advantage of P2P, not fear it" talks about a documentary film that was released several years ago named "Steal This Film - Part One", which looked at the people that set up online P2P and to talk through the negatives and benefits of it. They distributed this film for free through BitTorrent and made their money through donations, which turned out to be a success for them. They ended up discovering that there was a big market for people who would support media monetarily if it was made easily available to them and without advertisements to hinder their experience.

The other major benefit of using P2P to legally share files is that it does not requiring online storage, which typically has to be paid for if the files are big enough. Some MMORPG games have used this when they update their games with major patches that their users all have to download. This reduces their server costs by a very large amount, as these games typically have users in the millions all hammering their servers.

Wiki So Far

Most of what I have contributed to the wiki so far is adding specific information on some of the more popular genres of video games. They have evolved to the point where a lot of the genres blend, or there's variations on many of the genres, so it can be really hard to describe what a video game is like to a person that does not know these genres. Having a baseline idea of the main genres can go a long way toward helping people quickly understand what someone means when someone calls a game a "first person shooter" or a "MOBA".

My other main contribution so far was adding a page for professional wrestling. I only added a basic description on the origins of it and a short explanation on how it evolved into what it is today, but in the future I plan on adding information about a lot of the main organizations in professional wrestling, as it is not only the WWE as most people seem to believe. I also want to add pictures and videos highlighting some of the top performers in each of the organizations.

In the future I also want to add content to the music page, specifically more information on rap artists and even a section for music from video games, as I have a lot of personal interest in them.

Privacy

With the rise of social media also came the rise of people being more willing to share their own personal information with the public. Before the initial popularity explosion of Facebook, most people were unwilling to share their real names online. Even when MySpace was popular, most people used an alias over their real names on it. Now however not only can you find people's real names, but you can easily fully profile a person based on what they share. Advertisers have noticed this and used it to great effect with their targeting marketing, especially through Google's ads, which run on an algorithm based on what you share about yourself online and even keeps track of products that you search for. This kind of information is highly valued by a lot of companies to the point where a lot of software platforms, even Windows 10, all ask you for permission to share your information confidentially, so they can make money off of the data.

While people are not willing to share everything publicly, they are willing to send people that are close to them very sensitive material either through text, or video. The problem is that this information gets stored on "the cloud" which is just storage on a server somewhere that can be accessed online, so access to this sensitive material is only a hack away from being public. Most people using these platforms are either unaware of this, do not want to give up the benefits of online storage, or as simply unwilling to figure out how to opt out of using online storage for their private material. Because of this, the importance of internet security is at an all time high.

Advice

If Baruch College hired me to use new media to improve their college experience, my I would help in setting up the integration of student social media accounts into their main website. The website would be set up similarly to something like Brooklyn College's web connect, but the general goal would be letting students who opt in have easy access to each other for various activities like offering tutoring services, selling their old books, setting up social events, or even group study meetings. This would be beneficial because most students like getting all their information through one source, which usually means whatever their preferred social media platform is. Integration like this would mean that it can reach students on those platforms with information that they might be interested in and they would be more inclined to participate, which would improve the college experience for everyone.

Blog Social networking

When it comes to ways to use social networking sites like Twitter, the main thing that comes to mind is selling yourself. Whether it is a person trying to sell their personality and talents, or if it's an organization trying to sell their product, the audience that you can gain on these platforms are invaluable. 

One specific method that is especially popular on Twitter is the way that hashtags are used. Companies can use hashtags to promote their product, which is usually done via giveaways where they ask people to use a specific hashtag and they randomly choose one or some of the people that used the hashtag to win some sort of prize. This spreads the awareness of the brand and can sometimes cause enough support for the hashtag to make it appear as a top trend, which gets even more attention for the company.

While companies can use hashtags as an advertisement for their product, one way that it can be used to specifically benefit society is to help spread awareness on important social issues, like help spreading the word on fighting against, or preventing diseases, or even to combat social injustices, which has especially been a hot topic on the social media front in recent years. For example the protests from Egypt which was talked about in the New York Times article "New Service Lets Voices From Egypt Be Heard" where social media platforms like Google, Twitter, and a new one at the time called SayNow, gave the protesters several ways to spread their message across the world. This would have been impossible a decade ago, but with the technology that was present at the time, the protests were able to be played out across the world for everyone to see.

One less important, but still useful way that social media has been used to benefit people is the power that it has to gain instant feedback from companies that deliver a bad product, or poor customer service. This is shown in the Slate article "Tweeting Avengers" which brought up an event where Bob Garfield, who was dissatisfied with Comcast's customer service after spending a month trying to get his cable package installed, had finally blogged about it and opened up a site where other customers could air their grievances with the company. This gained enough attention to where Comcast themselves could no longer ignore it, so they went out of their way to help those people out. This is something that couldn't have been done as easily before the social media age, because it was much more difficult to get an organized group going on something like this unless you were a celebrity, or you were another person of massive influence.

Despite the positive uses for social media, there is a dark side. While it can, and has been used to spread positive messages, it is also a hot bed for people who only want to harass others to congregate too. Giving those kinds of people a free and easy access platform to mobilize their efforts makes the spread of their negativity extra effective, and it is typically very hard to go against these groups, who unfortunately have gained enough notoriety so that they can influence public perception.

The world is still in this transitional period where it is very hard to predict the outcome of what this technology will mean for even the next 5 years, let alone 10. Hopefully we can find a happy medium that can get us away from the more negative aspects of social media and focus more on the benefits.

Creativity and New Media

One great use for new media is to advertise something that you do on the side. I want to use youtube to advertise my future video editing projects. I have a channel already set up with a few videos, but there's one that I want to show here.

A decade ago I used to participate in, what was at the time, an unofficial professional wrestling group. We used youtube to show off the stuff that we recorded. While I haven't participated in any of this stuff for the past 10 years myself, a few people from that group went on to do stuff in a more official capacity. A few years ago, I decided to edit together some of that old footage and make a music video highlight package for a class project. That is what I would like to show here.

Highlight Music Video

HW Creativity

The introduction of new media to the world through avenues like YouTube has allowed every day people to show off their skills in various ways to giant audiences from around the world. Some people like to use it to record some sort of talent that they have like singing, dancing, or even some amateur acting. One of the ways that personally interests me the most, is the way that people show off their creativity through unique ways of editing videos.

The New York Times article "Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of its Critters. But Why?" shows one of the earliest examples of unique video editing displays on YouTube, which is mashups. They are still popular to this day, but can sometimes dance around the legal grey area of copyright laws, but as the article states, sometimes companies are just willing to accept it as free publicity, just like Disney chose to. If an audience watches a mash up, it is only getting more eyeballs on their intellectual property because of the video, but the video is also not giving away something like a whole movie for free, then it is doing more good than harm for the company.

Other ways that people get creative with video editing is in regards to chronicling a news story. While there are some great political satire ones like Songify the news, this is not exclusive to political and regular news either. In regards to enthusiast news, there's a channel called CrowbCat that edits together strings of media coverage that tell a story of high profile, high budget video games that end up flopping in one way or another. From the beginnings of PR people talking up how great the game is going to be to news stories about how a game goes on a deep discount mere months after release because it was not selling well, CrowbCat uses video editing to paint an entertaining and generally amusing picture in regards to big critical and commercial failures in the video games industry.

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

A virtual world has a lot of uses, from providing a space for escapism from real life troubles, to allowing for training simulations for important tasks, to even assisting with mental therapy.

One such use was discussed in the Wall Street Journal article "Avatar II: The Hospital" which brought up a specific case of a medical facility using the virtual world of Second Life to train a staff on how to react to rapid response emergencies. This is an example of using the virtual world for a training situation. It goes without saying that having a way to practice important tasks in a situation where failure does not cost lives is a very useful thing, and this is something that people in both the medical and military fields have taken notice of, as they both use this to great effect. Whether it's simulations of combat scenarios in preparation for a military mission, or practicing high precision open heart surgery on a virtual heart, there are countless applications for this technology.

There are also unfortunately some downsides to virtual worlds. One is that they are always limited by the technology of the time, so things like the laws of physics, and 1:1 motion tracking have historically been limited, though in recent years, improvements in technology have made the virtualization of these a bit smoother. One big con that still strongly exists today is how these virtual worlds goad consumers into spending a large amount of money through micro-transactions. The New York Times article "No Budget, No Boundaries: It's the Real You" talked about how an average person was able to use the micro-transactions of Second Life to make their in-game avatar come off as a high class citizen. While it was mostly harmless in this specific instance, this has evolved throughout the years into ways to get people to spend absurd amounts of money on virtual goods that have no tangible value. This is currently running rampant in a lot of phone games, where they typically implement features behind very long timers and try to get you to pay real money to avoid the timers. This exploitation of people that overvalue digital goods is perhaps the biggest issue going with virtual worlds today, and will continue to be the biggest issue for the immediate future.

Blog about Twitter

The most interesting thing about twitter is how quickly conversations can move thanks to the limitation of the characters. This gives more incentive for viewers to look through more posts from various people rather than something like a long form blog on this site would, as they only need to take a few seconds to read what is posted.

When compared to a BlackBoard or an in-class discussion however, it can become quite difficult to talk in depth about a specific subject due to the character limitation, so it's a double edged sword. One good thing is that helps Twitter sometimes feel like an in-class discussion with various people commenting back and forth on a message chain. Messages on a BlackBoard discussion board are similar to Twitter in construction, but without the character limit, which also allows for more in depth discussions.

With all of this said, Twitter is currently the ultimate platform to have a quick discussion about several different topics, but it has also sometimes had a glaring negative effect on giving certain topics the gravity that they deserve.

Project Description - Crowdfunding and Video Games

For my research paper, I will be describing how crowdfunding has benefited video games. I will be discussing crowdfunding sites like kickstarter and indiegogo. I will also talk about about how this method of funding has helped revitalize genres of video games that were once considered dead, and also helped revive the careers of formerly prominent video game developers. Lastly, I will talk about the controversies involved around this type of funding, including failed projects and other projects that did not deliver on all of the promises that were made during their crowdfunding campaigns.