BLOG: Advice

     If I were to be hired by Baruch College to improve there New Media system would be to revamp Black Board online system and develop that website into a phone application. This would allow students to be able to pick out there professors notes at a moments notice. If one were to lose WiFi or signal service when taking the train as many students do. They could preemptively download there professors notes to study from. I know this happens to me personally. I have to constantly dig and dig inside of blackboard to get some notes and save the page for offline reading then transfer the file to my phone constantly. If a application were designed to make this process a lot smother then it would overall help the students at Baruch College.

BLOG: Creativity and New Media

     When l started the game called Second life I was brought into the tutorial after selecting my avatar. There were many avatar options to pick from what was interesting was that their was a Halloween themed ones. I didn't pick those personal because it stood out to much instead I choose the male that looked like a cowboy.



After doing some of the tutorial I saw a random person in the picture above doing some type of dance it was interesting because they were the only one doing the dance. I didn't even know how to do the dance animation myself.


I eventually got to point in the tutorial where you could fly, I was surprised that it affect my real body I was getting goosebumps from flying even though I do play my fair share of video games almost none of them had this free range of flying as Second Life did.

     Overall my experience in Second Life was interesting, I never played a game like this before I tried to communicate with other people but they didn't respond, although I did get a random friend request which is nice. To bad the game is a bit dated being created in 2003. This game gives me the vibe of SIMS a other game that is designed on the virtual world concept.

BLOG: Creativity

     New media does foster creativity because it encourages uses to discuses with other about there ideals. Each person has a different perspective on someones idea. People can build upon other people ideas however, if the idea is never talked about then the idea can never be improved on. This can be seen in the article Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers which says "This is in large part because the Internet lets people exchange ideas easily and rapidly with large groups, and computing tools let people design new products cheaply." This shows the media system twitter is becoming a platform to spark new ideas.

BLOG: Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

     Virtual worlds can not only be used for entertainment purposes like Second life but they could also be used for educational purposes. If a virtual world were to be designed with proper physics. One could theoretically build a home for a customer. If the customer decides to change there design they can do so in the Virtual world so that when the house is actually created in real life you wouldn't have wasted all the extra labor hours into a slight change into your home.
     Virtual worlds could also be used to stimulate experiences that you never could have before as can be seen in article Virtual world may impact real­world behavior " take on identities and experience circumstances that they otherwise can't in real life, providing "a vehicle for observation, imitation, and modelling". This allows people from all backgrounds to learn about new cultures that they never been introduced into.
     In the article Going to the virtual office in Second Life states that "Not only did we save travel time, but because the environment was so engaging, a lot more ideas came through," he said. This clearly shows that virtual realities can foster creativity because they no longer have to be in a office to hold there meetings, they can be in a different area. One of the pro was that you can save a lot of money by reducing travel costs. However, a con can be that you would have to teach anyone who wants to join in onto the meetings the new system due to it being such new technology.

BLOG: Twitter

     A twitter discussion is more informal to me personally, you can have a open use of slang, emojis, or typos. This leads to a more friendly conversation that can generate more ideas from different backgrounds. However, with Blackboard discussions people tend to be more serious with there answers which is good but this creates a lot of unnecessary stress on the writer. The writer shouldn't have to be constantly worried about making a simple grammar error in there discussion. However, this does generate higher tier conversation due to no character limit but the amount of feedback would certainly go down because no one wants to be caught doing a simple grammar mistake.

BLOG: Social Networking Sites

     The sites that social networking sites that I have chosen to compare are Facebook, twitter, Skype, and discord. Facebook was the first site that I used when I was younger it has a good system to communicate with you friends and family by sending instant messages. Facebook also gives you your own personal profile page when you create you account. This allows you friends to see what you are up to in life.
     Twitter I didn't really have much knowledge on before this class. To me its more of a rant site where people can let out there anger due to the charterer limit however, I have seen several twitch.tv streamers also use twitter to let people know when they stream.
     Skype I have used forever this is what I used for most of my life to talk with my freinds pre-discord era. Skype is really helpful for voice chating and video chating. Skype does have some intergration in insant text messsages but its core feature is video and voice chatting.
     Discord however basically took all of Skype good features and made it even better however it has yet to integrate video call. It is currently being implemented into the system. Ever since discord came out I basically let go of Skype. You can create free servers with your friends or family to talk or text with each other it basically one big group chat. Discord is also written in C++ language when I looked it up who knew.

BLOG: Social Networking

          Someways that corporate or in this case the president of the united states Obama, as said in the article "How Obama Tapped Into Social Network's Power" he was able to use his resources to develop a extreme data base system that has a person likes and dislikes. Instead of the regular political base. He then was able to reach out to millions of his supporters instantly, instead of having to communicate to them one by one. Now that we have these technologies in place it is easier to communicate with like minded to scheduled important events such as meetings, scrimmages, bake sales, and political rallies.
          However, this data base system is created by "mining the data" as the article depicts. Each time you like a topic or share it as Facebook usually allows you to. A computer system in the background would take a recording of your likes and dislikes and then by using certain algorithms they can show you advertisements that would interest you more then others. This can be seen as troubling because if the computers can and will more then likely advance to a point in the future where they can control what a human likes and dislikes which can be used to sway the political election in the future. This is all in theory of course.