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.