The Next New Thing

Communication via the internet took another big leap when live video calling became available to anyone with a computer and webcam, or a smartphone. I think the next huge leap would be communication via virtual reality worlds in which virtual reality hang outs are possible. Hologram projection would also be huge. You commonly see it in movies where it's possible to look at and talk to someone as if they're right there in the room with you. Wouldn't it be wild if it became a common occurence?

Our Class Wiki - So Far

I have not contributed to the class wiki as of yet, but I did plan on contributing to the Gaming section of the wiki with info about live streaming games on twitch.tv, what partnership on twitch can do for gamers, and how job opportunities, and sponsorships are also a possibility. I also wanted to maybe add some basic knowledge on fighting games as it is mentioned briefly as one of the many genres of video games.

P2P File Sharing

File sharing, the act of transmitting files from one computer to another via the Internet, has become quite popular in today's technology age. File sharing sites like Mediafire and 4shared are commonly used to upload files directly from ones computer onto the web in which it becomes available for those who are permitted by the uploader (public or private). P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing is a form of file sharing in which multiple computers, known as peers, are connected to each other via the internet, and a p2p software program. The p2p software program connects a p2p network in which any computer systems on the network are able to access each other and share media files such as music, movies, books, and even games. Each computer on the network acts as both a file server, and a client. "BitTorrent lets users quickly upload and download enormous amounts of data, files that are hundreds or thousands of times bigger than a single MP3." says Clive Thompson in The BitTorrent Effect. uTorrent (a BitTorrent client), Morpheus, Tunngle, and Kazaa are some other examples p2p file sharing programs.

Privacy & Confidentiality

Today people have become lax when it comes to privacy and confidentiality. On social media, it is becoming more common to see people share more information than they should. Many link their phone numbers, or even put their locations in their account info. They also post information about where they work, what their daily routines are, info about their family members/friends, etc. Sharing so much info is very dangerous over the net as you never know who may try to exploit it. I recently watched a vid of a guy who pranked players in a video game by mentioning their actual names or locations over the mic to give them a scare if they messed with him. He was able to find out that much just from researching their usernames which a lot of the time also brought up their facebook accounts. There's an interview on it all here: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-virtuallyvain-finds-your-info-for-the-african-drug-lord-videos-2016-8. All in all, be very careful with what you share online.

Advice to the College

A lot of companies/establishments nowadays utilize social media as a means to communicate with their customers and potential customers Brooklyn College already have Facebook and Twitter accounts, but I feel that the college would also benefit from adding Snapchat to their arsenal. With Snapchat, the college could share brief videos of activities happening on the campus to all their followers in the form of individual snaps, or stories, which are a compilation of snaps. Sports games, career fairs, and class activities can all be shared basically as they're happening for those who have never experienced any of these campus events.

Creativity

New media allows one to share their creativity with the world and even provides an opportunity for them to gain from sharing their creativity. In the New York Times article Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers, Claire Cain Miller states, "Lego started a site called Design byME, where fans can use Lego design software to create their own models. Lego then sells the designs, effectively offloading the design cost to fans." Exposure, feedback, money; all of these are quite valuable to one who wants to put their creativity out there for the rest of the world to see, and with new media it is all very possible.

Creativity and New Media

Since I dabble in video games a lot in my spare time, I end up coming up with a lot of things that are either creative, funny, or could be useful to other people that play these games. With new media technology like Youtube, I'm able to share this content with anyone who's interested out there in the world. Here is an example of something creative in one of these games:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE1jw9tSkNg

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

In today's age, virtual worlds are a means in which people are able to roleplay, socialize, and express their creativity in ways that they may not be able to in real life. "But Minecraft is a virtual world. It’s digital LEGOs if you will, but it’s a space for kids to exercise their imagination and to connect with others to also want to build and create things." says Jacki Morie in the article After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get a Reboot? Of course adults also play Minecraft and have built some amazing things spanning from pixel art to replicas of real world cities. Games like Second Life allow people to roleplay and express themselves in ways they may not be able to in the real world. "Ms. Rayna, an avatar on Second Life, and her free-spending cohort can quaff Champagne, teleport to private islands and splurge on luxury brands that are the cyber equivalent of Prada waders or a Rolex watch. Real-world consumers may have snapped shut their wallets. But in these lavishly appointed realms it is still 2007, and conspicuous consumption is all the rage." says Ruth La Ferla in the New York Times article No Budget, No Boundaries: It's the Real You. Of course not every one expresses themselves positively in these virtual worlds. This introduces "e-thugs" who try to act a lot tougher than they really are, and "trolls" who try to cause arguments and chaos with provocative messages or actions. Virtual worlds can also be heavily addicting.Lately, virtual reality has been further developed and may very well be the future for virtual worlds. Advanced telehealthcare is also another big possibility.

Blog about Twitter

Twitter discussions of course are a lot shorter compared to Blackboard discussions due to the 140 char post limit. You'd have to tweet in parts, or post links if you want to get more information across. The more peole tagged in the conversation, the smaller the post limit becomes as well. However, discussion are a lot easier to read since they're shorter and right there on your timeline rather than having to open someone's post on Blackboard to see what they wrote and what others replied with. Being notified any time you get a reply is also a plus. With in-class discussions, the class will generally cover topics one by one and try to keep discussions somewhat brief so that there's time left to discuss the other topics. With twitter you can view multiple topics at once on your timeline and pick which ones you want to discuss further with another classmate.

Social Networking Sites

Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Ask.fm are all social media sites I use or have used before in the past. Facebook is primarily used to stay in contact with friends and family members. There are also games you can play, and invite other to play on facebook such as Farmville which I remember being pretty popular a while back. From my experience on facebook, a lot of people try to stay a bit more proper as their family members also follow their facebooks. I've even seen cases where people blocked their parents on facebook just so they wouldn't be a able to see their activities. A lot of people go to twitter to escape that. On twitter, most people follow their friends, fav celebrities or companies, political figures etc. It's a bit rare that anyone with a twitter account also has family members on their twitter, so they can cut loose in their tweets if they weren't able to in their facebook posts. Youtube is primarily used for watching videos on the internet posted by other users. If you find a channel that posts a lot of content you like, then you can subscribe to them so that you're notified whenveer they upload anything new. You may also make and post your own videos for the world to see. Who knows, it could end up going viral. Ask.fm is a website where people ask one another questions. Accounts may also follow one another and see what kind of questions and answers their friends are getting and giving. It is automatically checked off so that your question would be asked anonymously next to the question box, but you can opt for your username to appear so the other person knows whos asking them the question. These questions can range from small talk questions, to very personal questions. The intent of thes questions can also be harmless, or malicious due to the nature of appearing anonymous. Users also don't have to answer every question they are asked. The website itself also throws a random question of the day at the user.

Social Networking

In todays society, social networking is the big new media technology that allows people to stay in touch with friends, keep up with the news, follow the activities of their fav celebrities etc. Companies have even started using social media to hunt for job candidates. In the article Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting, Frank Langfitt states "Maureen Crawford-Hentz recruits for Osram Sylvania, the global lighting company. She says the new tools have changed her life...One of Crawford-Hentz's favorite sites is Linkedin, a network of 8 million professionals spread across the world." With Linkedin, employers and employees are able to connect with job opportunities, and keep in touch with one another. Barack Obama also used social media to his advantage during his campaign in 2008. "Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans...All of the Obama supporters who traded their personal information for a ticket to a rally or an e-mail alert about the vice presidential choice, or opted in on Facebook or MyBarackObama can now be mass e-mailed at a cost of close to zero." says David Carr in his article How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power.

Social networking is very useful for allowing people to connect with and keep in touch with one another, spreading news and other information, and for promoting content. Todays presidential candidates constantly use Twitter to reach out to their supporters and promoting themselves and their ideas. News and weather companies have also embraced social networking as they realized how important it is for communicating and spreading information. "I believe the benefits provided by social network sites such as Facebook have made us better off as a society and as individuals, and that, as they continue to be adopted by more diverse populations, we will see an increase in their utility. Anecdotal evidence of positive outcomes from these technologies — such as political activities organized via Facebook or jobs found through LinkedIn — is well-known, but now a growing corpus of academic research on social networks sites supports this view as well." Nicole Ellison says in the article Is MySpace Good for Society? A Freakonomics Quorum.

Of course with all the pros social networking brings to the table, some cons are also present. With social media and networking, peope are able to put all sorts of info about themselves (or others) out there for anyone to see. With this, exploitation, blackmailing, identity theft, slandering, and more are possible by malicious parties. In Jeffrey R. Young's article They're Back, and They're Bad: Campus-Gossip Web Sites he talks about school social media gossip websites in which students were able to talk trash about one another anonymously. "A female student found her name posted on JuicyCampus in a message calling her a "slut," a "whore," and other, more colorful and sexually explicit names." Actions like these can destroy a person's reputation in only a few hours and can possibly follow them for the rest of their life.

Regarding the future, I don't really know how much social networking will evolve, but it would be crazy to see it evolve to the point that online voting is possible.

Blog v Wiki

With technology constantly advancing, new ways for people to communicate, and collaborate with one another were developed in the process. Two of these new technologies are blogs, and wikis. Both are websites used to communicate information/knowledge with the rest of the world. However, they both have different methods of doing so. A wiki is a hub of information/knowledge in which anyone who has a wiki account may contribute to a wiki page by editing it, and adding more information. This collaboration of information, for the most part is based on facts. A blog is more like an online journal or diary in which a user may post their opinon on a topic. Only the original poster may edit a post on a blog, while other bloggers may comment on said blog post and also share their thoughts. Basically a wiki is the collaboration of multiple authors working together on a page so that it has the most accurate information possible, while a blog is a single author sharing their thoughs on one or more topics. Despite how both platforms do thinks differenly, they are similar in the sense that the anybody can create a blog or wiki; no matter how experienced they are. "Most blog authors are amateurs with a passion; many are subject matter experts." says Kathy E. Gill in her article How can we measure the influence of the blogosphere? 

With the convergence of media in today's networked world, communication has become much more efficient as the interconnection of information, media, and communication technologies leads to more accurate and widespread forms of information and media, as well as new innovations in technology with like smartphones. Cellphone were simply used for mobile phone calls before, but now you can read or watch the news, have video call with others, and so much more on these small devices. Media orginizations now try to cover several bases such as text, video, podcasts, and even livestreams to get informations out as quickly as and acurately as possible to the world. To have the most optimal form of communication possible, convergence is definitely necessary in today's networked world.

Though blogging is more independent rather than collaborative work, blogs can indeed be used for collaboration. If one blogger posts their thoughts on a topic and other bloggers comment on the post, also sharing what they know on said topic, you now have a network in which mutiple parties are expanding on their own knowledge due to info they're gaining from other posters. In New York Times article Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid, bloggers in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge shared complaints on local blogging website BayRidgeTalk.com regarding two neighboring homes located on 93rd Street. The posts spoke about suspiscious and violent activity they noticed surrounding the home on the daily. One post about the activites then got a reply to which another neighbor stated that the home was a crack house. Another poster then shared his knowledge on recent deaths in the neighborhood which were definitely due to drug overdoses. Eventually the bloggers began to take action. "'At the end of the day, it was about putting aside anonymity, putting aside the HTML and physically showing up,' said Jason Miller, 37, the pet shop owner, better known to many as PetShopBoy, his login name on BayRidgeTalk.com." (2) Said action would then lead to narcotics investigation which then let to the raid of the home and the arrest of 5 indiividuals. Their shared information on activity regarding the home would lead to a major problem being solved.

Since wikis can be updated by anybody at any time to be as up to date as possible, a format like that could be very useful for news websites

Twitch.tv: Changing gaming today

I'm gonna be doing my project on twitch.tv and how it's transforming gaming today. Twitch is a website where people are able to live broadcast whatever video games they're playing to the entire world. The scale of these live streams can go from a someone simply playing through a video game in their room, to a large eSports tournament with thousands of dollars on the line, or huge charity events. Some people have gained enough popularity from streaming on twitch that they are able to make it into a job. This is made possible through applying for twitch partnership, where you gain a subscription button on your channel where viewers may subscribe (typically for $4.99) to gain access sub emoticons, and more depending on the streamer. Special requirements must be met to gain a sub button of course (viewed here: https://www.twitch.tv/partner/signup). Fans will also donate money to their favorite streamers, which can aid them in buying better equipment to improve the quality of their stream. Running ads every now and then during the stream is also a factor. I play fighting games, and travel to tournaments to compete as a hobby. Most of these tournaments are streamed on twitch. The most famous of these tournaments is the Evolution series, held in Las Vegas every July. Evo started out pretty small as just a tournament at an arcade, but has grown into a colossal event held in a huge ballroom for 3 days with high quality live streams with commentary, and so much more due to exposure.

Hello! My name is Kevin Rodriguez. I'm a CompSci student currently attending Brooklyn College. Nice to meet you!