The Next New Thing

Technology is growing and changing very fast. There maybe new inventions everyday but we may not know it because it could be the low demand or something that didn't became popular. Something i have in mind is a local private network for mobile where we can connect easily and share things easily. It is something similar a many connection bluetooth but this one we can do more than bluetooth and faster. These networks are created by one mobile phone and can be created as public network or private network. Connectors can play games, share files, create chat group, etc. and the network is limited to about 250 feet. Except for socializing tool, this can also serve as a tool for work place. For example employee within a building can easily reach each other without have to wait for the phone to ring or when the person is out of the table.

P2P File Sharing

P2P stand for peer to peer and it is a computing network where each computer can act as a client or server to send or receive data. People can share any kind of files through p2p like there is no limitation. Some of the most famous p2p application are bitTorrent and Foxy . According to the article "The bittorrent effect" bitTorrent is one of the most successful p2p application out there and about 1/3 of the internet data sent is by bitTorrent. Lots of illegal activity are done through p2p such as sharing movies, copyright material and private files.

Privacy & Confidentiality

Privacy has been an issue for new media, because all the information posted on the web are public so many information can be found on the web. More and more people are posting information on the web and people liked to share something about themselves so all of these information are open to everyone. For example Twitter allows you to share your location so people surrounding the location can see where you located and similarly Facebook also share location of the person by using something called tag.
But as the issue became bigger, company like Facebook tried to add new features such as sharing information to limited people or having the option to deny the right to share the info.

Advice to Baruch College

I believe Baruch College should put more effort in expanding their new media network. For example Baruch sent out lots of email each day to notify students and faculty about upcoming events and current news but most of the student probably spent most time on Facebook, twitter, or something similar so it may be more effective in communicating with students.
One thing I think Baruch should have is a notification program for class registration such as when all the seats for a class  is filled then a student can sign up for alert when there is opening through twitter. Baruch actually does have a system like this but communication is done through email and the system is not fully functional.

Creativity and New Media

 

Picture word a thousand word so twitting picture should take over all of those little twits. 

This is a picture of a sleepy dog

Creativity

As new media took over the old media, new ideas are also generated along with the shifting from the old media. Twitter is one example, where it was created for posting short message into a message distribution tool. An article from NYT titled "Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers" also wrote about how twitter has evolved. The idea of changing and adding functions to twitter was mostly generated from its users. The engineer of Twitter outsourced the design to the users rather having all the ideas generated internally. This is important because if something is not able to follow changes or cannot catch up then it will be hard for them to catch up. This is probably one reason why there are many outage around the webs because many new things are being implemented.

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual world is a online virtual community. The largest one i have heard about is Second Life. Second Life's community is so large that it seems like you can find whatever you want there and if there are something you cannot find then you can create it yourself. . This is also one pro about virtual world that we can create something easily and could model anything on there. Users can also use it to do what they wished and fulfill their wishes that cannot done in the real world. But there is also cons about virtual world, there are people that is so addicted to virtual world because of the ideal life it provides. The addiction could cause people to give up the real world and put so much into the virtual world.

Virtual world can also serve different purpose. In the article "Avatar II: The Hospital " from New York Times, universities uses Second Life as a virtual training tools for medical training and education. Instructor can throw in different situation and control virtual patients when teaching students. Another use of virtual world is also exposed in the article where the users can rent what they created in Second Life in exchange of real money. Ramesh Ramloll who is a computer scientist rent out space in Second and also work for client if they wanted to create a virtual environment accordingly. 
Another article from New York Times named "I've Been in That Club, Just Not in Real Life" a virtual Lower East Side where people can live and experience LES without going outside of their house.


Lots of creative idea can be created from virtual since any imagination can be created. I have seen virtual life photography where an artist explore around virtual world and take screenshot.
There isn't a point where I think virtual world is heading to. There is no clear direction of it and there could be many possibilities.  But something I believed is virtual is still virtual and people may have to spent money to use the virtual world service so people may have to come back to real life.