The Next New Thing

I think the next iteration of “new media” is already on the horizon due to recent new developments in virtual reality (VR) spurred on by the gaming industry and the first modern prototype – Oculus Rift. Virtual reality was once tried in a terrible fashion back in the early 1990s when the technology was not up to par, such as the infamous Virtual Boy made by Nintendo:

However, now with recent advancements in tech it is possible to fit all that into a smaller size, lighter weight, sleeker design and with better graphics and immersion. The two largest and competing companies in the console game industry, Sony and Microsoft, have stepped up to the plate. Sony announced this year that they will be releasing their new virtual reality headset, Morpheus, sometime in 2016.

This new media of virtual reality is taking one step further the sense of immersion felt in video games and is similar to the new media of Second Life and MMORPG’s. Currently the VR is a single player experience, but I suggest a new media will emerge when it is able to connect the experience of many people into one virtual world. You will be looking through the eyes of your avatar/character  and control them in a brand new way to interact and socialize with people all around the world. VR not only applies to gaming, but could be used to “see” and experience places all around the world through picture perfect created virtual environments from the comfort of your home. The possibilities are endless for this new media.

P2P File Sharing

File sharing is simply what it sounds like, the act of sharing files. In a new media setting, however it specifically refers to the sharing of digital media files such as videos or music.

P2P file sharing stands for “Peer to Peer” file sharing. It is a specific type of file sharing using a certain network protocol and software that connects many computers through the internet in order to search and share files easily. The most common software to do this currently is BitTorrent.

Some examples talked about in the article, “Should Online Scofflaws Be Denied Web Access?” were the Pirate Bay and Rapidshare. The Pirate Bay actually hosts torrents, which are  what people call the files that they share through the BitTorrent P2P network. The owners of Pirate Bay have on numerous occasions been arrested and different countries have tried to prove them guilty of copyright infringement. However, due to the nature of the torrent network the authorities can never really shut it down because anyone of the millions of other users of Pirate Bay can start it back up with their own servers.. Rapidshare is a unique situation because it can be used for the legitimate reason of uploading an important file to share with others, but instead it has been flooded by pirates that upload copyrighted content to share. Due to the password protected option to share files, it became a prime target for file sharing.

Even before BitTorrent though, Napster was probably the first popular iteration of P2P sharing that got shut down in courts due to rampant illegal copyright music sharing.

Source:

• Should Online Scofflaws Be Denied Web Access?” by ERIC PFANNER, The New York Times, April 13, 2009, p. B4. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/technology/internet/13iht-piracy13.html

Privacy & Confidentiality

New media allows us to share and collaborate easily due to the internet and technological advances. However, with this ease of sharing and increasing digitization of all information comes issues of privacy and confidentiality.

The first thing that comes to mind is the social networking giant, Facebook. It has been plagued constantly the past few years with issues of privacy. The potential of customer information being used as a valuable source of revenue to be sold and traded has made privacy and confidentiality pressing issues in new media. No body enjoys having their information being sold and traded without their knowledge, yet millions of still go on Facebook even though they have agreed to it. Vast majority of people don’t read terms of service that they agree to and give up their ownership of their information for the most part.

Even in the corporate world where confidentiality is supposed to be protected greatly, there has been numerous incidents of corporate hacking or leaks that lose all their customer’s credit card information, addresses, social security numbers and more. All of this information is stored in the numerous huge retail stores that offer you credit cards or membership cards to store your information and purchasing habits. Information is the new valuable commodity partly due to data mining to find patterns in customer behaviors. The motivation of these hackers is the same as Facebook, they know that the information is very valuable and can be sold or used in identity theft for even greater profits.

Due to these new issues of privacy and confidentiality, new industries have even emerged to satisfy this need of protection. Identity theft protection programs have sprung up with fees and alerts for unusual purchases on your credit cards are commonplace now.

Creativity and New Media

I have used new media similarly to the Second Life examples to foster creativity by using avatars in an online virtual world. The above screenshot is taken from an MMORPG (Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game) game that I play called Final Fantasy XIV. By using the new media of virtual worlds, our guild was able to creatively organize a Secret Santa event in the game within our group. It was just like Secret Santa in real life except we exchanged in-game items and of course dressed in appropriate Christmas themed clothing.

Creativity

New media fosters creativity by allowing users to easily manipulate digital data through free or inexpensive editing programs that anyone can learn the basics of how to utilize. It also allows users to more easily collaborate and share their ideas. For example, according to the article ” Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers” Twitter has been relying on others to innovate for them. Claire Miller says, “the Internet lets people exchange ideas easily and rapidly with large groups, and computing tools let people design new products cheaply.” Many of twitter’s new features were user-generated or suggested. By harnessing the power of the masses of Twitter user’s creativity, twitter has found a safe way to implement new features that they know will already have mass appeal.

In the same vein, new media has fostered creativity in the music world by allowing easy creation of mash-ups through manipulation of digital song files. The easy to use editing software and wide availability of mp3 files of songs has allowed people to create their own versions of songs. Covers of songs are great portion of Youtube views even today.

Source:

• Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers by CLAIRE CAIN MILLER, the New York Times, October 26, 2009. Available at:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/technology/internet/26twitter.html

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds can be used for entertainment, learning, or social connection through the usage of avatars. Teachers  have started to use the virtual worlds of Minecraft as a learning tool and to foster creativity in children. Virtual worlds have also been used for training simulation for the military.  They have even been used as “psychological healing spaces” as mentioned in “After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get A Reboot”. The number of uses is up to your imagination.

The pros of virtual worlds is that it allows you to be a different person through your avatar and meet with a wide variety of people from the comfort of your home. It allows people to live their fantasies and connect with people in a more personal way through avatars. However, there are also some possible cons. As mentioned in “At Hearing, Real and Virtual Worlds Collide,” there are concerns over using virtual worlds as a means to money launder due to the fact that real life money is used to buy in-game currency to customize your avatars. There is also the possibility of the virtual worlds being unsafe for children due to predators and the unknown anonymity of the users.

Virtual words foster creativity by allowing you to create and mold the world around you to fit your needs. The seemingly endless amount of options and possibilities does not limit your imagination. For example in the article ” In Room 100, It’s Sid and Nancy All Over Again,” people recreated how an hotel looked before it got remodeled under new management because they preferred the older style.

I think the future of virtual worlds is already nearing us. The gaming industry is buzzing with news and anticipation  of the new virtual reality gaming headsets. The major gaming companies, Sony and Microsoft, have already created working headsets and are nearing release dates. The world will now be all around you and you will literally feel inside the virtual world instead of just looking at a screen. It will be an exciting time for virtual reality and virtual worlds.

Sources:

• After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get A Reboot. April 30, 2013. http://www.forbes.com/sites/dianemehta/2013/04/30/after-second-life-can-virtual-worlds-get-a-reboot/
• At Hearing, Real and Virtual Worlds Collide: Forget C-SPAN: Congress Goes Interactive. Washington Post, Wednesday, April 2, 2008; Page D03. available from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/04/01/ST2008040103032.html
• “In Room 100, It’s Sid and Nancy All Over Again,”by Saki Knafo, The New York Times, May 3, 2009, p. CY6. Available athttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/nyregion/thecity/03virt.html

Social Networking Sites

I visited 4 social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and Google Plus) to compare my impressions on these sites.

The site that had the most surprising impression on me was Myspace. I remember back when everyone used to use it, it was a place to add friends and customize your page (sometimes in overly ludicrous manners). It was a place to meet people and anyone could create a page, similar to Facebook currently. I haven’t visited the site in years since Facebook became popular and it seems that Myspace has redirected focus towards more of a popular culture and music route. People can stream music and radio, watch music videos and read about celebrity gossip  and popular TV shows. It is drastically different and I am not even sure it would be considered a social networking site anymore, most of the pages are of musicians trying to promote themselves, not your average Joe.

Myspace has a very stylized and professional interface while Twitter uses a simple white and blue clean interface. The homepage of Twitter after you log in is very streamlined and makes it easy and quick to read the latest tweets of all the people you follow. I also noticed their advertisements is through promoted tweets at the top that companies can pay to be at the top,  which didn’t bother me much.

Facebook uses a singular column of posts/updates similar to Twitter. However, different from Twitter I noticed Facebook actively uses its sidebars to promote other things to do on their service such as Games. Facebook also uses the sidebars to place multiple advertisements, compared to Twitter’s one at the top of your updates.

Google Plus impression was similar to Facebook except that instead of using a singular column, it tries to use the entire page to show you as much posts as possible. I kind of found this confusing to know the chronology of posts.

I also noticed all the sites except Myspace have a “Trending” or “What’s Hot” on the sidebar or on its own separate  tab, which tells you whats most popular on the site overall and not just your own circle of friends.

Social Networking

Social Networking technology is a powerful tool that can be used in many different ways. The most obvious and prevalent way is to connect with friends and family. However, the corporate world has also found ways for these technologies to be used in the ways of free advertising. Many companies have created their own social media groups on Facebook and accounts on twitter. Companies have become savvy to the fact that word of mouth is better received than paid advertisements. Social networking can be used as a inexpensive means of PR and advertisements. Many companies are also using social networking to listen to user feedback and comments to improve their service and better meet customers’ ever changing needs.

But what exactly are the benefits of these technologies? According to a survey done by Nicole Ellison to “assess students’ “social capital,” a concept that describes the benefits individuals receive from their relationships with others,” students who used social networking sites more often had higher social capital. These social networking technologies also enable millions of people around the world to access  more information and view the world from new and different perspectives. Social networking has also made it easier for people to find jobs.  According to the article ” Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting,” job-recruiting websites like Linkedin has made it much more efficient to search for the perfect candidates for jobs. What took hours scouring resumes before, now only takes a few minutes of typing in the key search terms.  In other words, this new technology has helped shape the labor market into a more efficient machine where people can post their qualifications and employers can find the exact people they are looking for.

Sadly there is also a dark side to social networking technologies.  The commercialization of social networking sites has lead to the selling of user information and ads based on users’ interests. This has also lead to major concerns regarding privacy protection. Many students are concerned about these privacy issues and more and more people have changed their privacy settings over the years on Facebook (Parry).  There are also many safety issues due to online bullying, which have led to some teenage suicides.  There are even online “campus-gossip web sites” where people trash talk their own peers anonymously (Young).

I feel that these technologies will evolve over time to find a balance between commercial profitability of the companies offering the services and the users being content with sufficient privacy protection. If a service pushes too far for commercialization and disregards privacy too much, users will move to a more suitable service until that equilibrium is met. However, all the privacy protection in the world will  not protect people if they do not use the tools provided. I hope that users of the sites will evolve to learn to use the privacy settings correctly and when all else comes to fail, if you don’t want it out there for the world to see just don’t post it online to begin with because once it’s posted, it’s almost impossible to take it back.

Sources:

• Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting by Frank Langfitt, NPR, March 16, 2008. available fromhttp://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6522523&sc=emaf
• “They’re Back, and They’re Bad: Campus-Gossip Web Sites,” by Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle for Higher Education, Sept 4, 2009, p. A20+. Available at: http://chronicle.com/article/Theyre-BackTheyre-B/48220/
• Is MySpace Good for Society? A Freakonomics Quorum by Stephen J. Dubner. NYT Feb 15, 2008http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/is-myspace-good-for-society-a-freakonomics-quorum/
• “Who Cares About Facebook Privacy? Students Do” By Marc Parry, NY Times, July 29, 2010, Available at http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Who-Cares-About-Facebook/25877/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Blogs vs. Wikis

At first glance blogs and wikis may seem very similar , both produce user created content that is shared online with the masses. Similar to most new media, both blogs and wikis focus on convergence of peoples’ thoughts and ideas all over the world by the power of the internet. A blog post can be read by anyone all  around the world and similarly and Wikipedia post can be edited  by anyone around the world.

However, there are some glaring differences between blogs and wikis. Blogs are usually about sharing your own personal ideas and experiences. Blogs are also notoriously known for influencing the outside world, whether through political opinions being shared or through posting breaking news stories before even the mainstream media are able to (Gill). Wikis are used to collaboratively gather information easily and efficiently through editing and saving on the same central location. This makes them especially useful in a professional corporate or even government setting. Ezra Goodnoe in her article, “How to Use Wikis for Business,” points out this key difference: “[If] you’re looking for an exchange of views. Wikis are not the best tool for airing opinions or carrying on conversations. If that’s your primary goal, use a blog instead.”

The main means of communication and collaboration through blogs is through the comment system underneath each post. Blogger collaboration can be even furthered by following, promoting, and supporting other bloggers. A blog owner has ultimate control over whether or not to delete a comment and has full control over the discussion if abused. This is different than compared to most wikis, which are a collaborative effort where anyone can change and write anything. However, this freedom has been limited recently even with the famous wiki, Wikipedia. In 2009, according to “Wikipedia: No longer the Wild West?” by John D. Sutter, Wikipedia assigned editors to some of its more heavily edited articles.

A new use for a wiki could be an internal wiki during the research and development cycle of a company. It would be accessible only to those who are authorized within the company or R&D department. The wiki would enable a small R&D team to easily update what works and what doesn’t about each iteration of prototypes. It could also be used to propose new ideas for future prototypes. The managers, CEO, and the board could also view up to date progress on how R&D is progressing. A wiki would allow the R&D department to coordinate easily and more efficiently.

Works Cited:

• How Can We Measure the Influence of the Blogosphere? by Kathy E. Gill. Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem, May 2004. available from:http://faculty.washington.edu/kegill/pub/www2004_blogosphere_gill.pdf“How to Use Wikis for Business,” by
• Ezra Goodnoe, Information Week, August 8, 2005, http://www.informationweek.com/news/management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=167600331
• Wikipedia: No longer the Wild West? by John D. Sutter, CNN.com/technology, August 26, 2009. Available at http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/26/wikipedia.editors/index.html

Twitch.TV – An exciting new area of new media and social interactions

Hello,

My name is Fred Cho and in my first blog post I want to describe what my research topic, Twitch.TV, is going to be about.

Twitch.TV is a video game streaming website where anyone can broadcast as long as they have the software (many of them free) and access to decent internet upload speeds. Twitch.TV has become a global phenomenon with over 100 million unique viewers in 2014. For the project I would like to approach Twitch.TV from multiple perspectives. From a sociological perspective, a person streams on his or her own channel and this channel can grow into a brand and a community due to the interactive nature of the chat and the broadcaster. There has even been charity streams where streamers promote a charity for an extended period of time. For example, during the St. Jude Play Live event, $530,000 was raised by Twitch streamers. From a economic perspective, there is a large amount of money invested in Twitch.TV. Many people can live off of their streaming revenue and do it as full-time job. They do this through sponsors, advertisements, donations, patreon and subscribers ($5 a month payment). Another economic impact is the effect it has had on the professional marketing and selling of video games. What better way to see if you will like a game than to watch your favorite streamer actually play it? Some game companies have gone a step further and created their own streaming channels for their games or give free review copies to popular streamers to create buzz about their game and help promote it. From a moral perspective, there has been controversy over what should be allowed to be streamed on twitch and what is considered “gaming.” Since anyone of any age can watch what is being streamed, what should be allowed or disallowed? Should it all be up to the broadcaster? At what point should an administrator ban content? Online gambling has even recently been popularly streamed and has turned some heads. I would also look into expanding into the technological perspective of streaming, but would require deeper research.