Creativity and New Media

New Media allows people to do whatever they want and be whatever they want. Many people have completely different personas on social media than they have in real life. Some people are comedians, others are musicians, others display art and photography on their pages, some sell clothes. The possibilities are endless! Me personally I make music and model. I use social media to connect with thousands of people and even got opportunities to work with companies including Fresh Empire which is an anti smoking campaign that has ads all over the internet and even tv stations such as MTV and VH1! This is one of the shots we took.




                                      

Creativity

New Media has really shown how creative people can be. A great example of this would be "memes." For those who are not familiar with the term, memes are basically pictures from movies, viral videos, tv shows, or even drawings with captions that relate to many different people. The creative part comes in where there are a variety of different versions of memes for one picture. Some memes have hundreds of different versions of the same picture and can get very creative because they require a lot of thought and wit to come up with seeing as that certain pictures are only trending for a couple of weeks, so you have to come up with one quickly for a trending picture before nobody cares about it anymore.

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality allows for people to live whatever life they wish they could have through a digital world in which they can communicate and interact with other people who want to do the same thing. VR is good because it allows for people to be creative in a space where they won't be judged by their peers in real life. This gives them complete freedom to do whatever they want without the fear of any consequences. However, people can start to lose grip of reality and think that they have as much freedom to do whatever they want in the real world like they do in the virtual world. Some people may even spend more time in the virtual world than they do in the real world.

Refrences:

1. Social Influence and the Diffusion of User-Created Content by Eytan Bakshy, Brian Karrer, and Lada A. Adamic. Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, July 6-10, Stanford, CA. Available at: http://www.personal.umich.edu/~ladamic/papers/SecondLife/SocialInfluenceEC.pdf

2. "In Room 100, It's Sid and Nancy All Over Again,"by Saki Knafo, The New York Times, May 3, 2009, p. CY6. Available at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/nyregion/thecity/03virt.html

Twitter

Twitter discussions are quicker and easier to have than a blackboard discussion. The app itself is just more accessible and easier to use on any device. Often people use their twitter account more often than their blackboard account anyway. However, an in class discussion would probably be the most efficient and intimate way to have a discussion if all of the students in the class are comfortable speaking with one another. Sometimes you find that people are more comfortable voicing their opinion about certain topics through a computer screen rather than face to face.

Social Networking Sites

So the four social networks that I have chosen to compare include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. At first glance all of these apps have different feels and seem to have different features as well as appeal to different demographics. Many people I know personally use all four, including myself. When I first started using Facebook in high school which was about 5-6 years ago it was mainly used to connect with people whom you knew personally. Among young people it has evolved into a social media that has evolved into one that doesn't require you to necessarily know someone to keep up with them thanks to the addition of the "Share" button and the "Follow" button. Twitter on the other hand was more popular for the heavy amount of celebrities who used it and connected with their fans through the social as network. People would retweet each others posts and use hashtags to keep up with a diverse range of different trending topics. Instagram also has heavy celebrity traffic and was strictly only used for posting pictures. The app allows for anyone to follow you if you allow it similar to that of twitter. Over the years it has evolved and taken different components from other apps to keep up with new technology. Snapchat is the newest of all of these social networks and has recently became extremely popular thanks to certain celebrity ambassadors. People love the creative filters that the snapchat team allows it's users to play around with and adds new filters just about every week. As all of these networks age they add new features. Many of these features they actually take from one another. For example, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram now all allow their users to live stream which was originally a feature that Twitter had first by partnering with another social network called Periscope.

Blog Social Networking

Ever since social networking came into existence, businesses had no choice but to quickly adapt to the quickly changing world of online business. For example, many jobs stopped accepting job applications by paper and now only accept applications through the internet. They also search for candidates to fill their positions through social networks such as LinkedIn. While these social network technologies have benefits for both the company and the employee they also have it's dangers because since there is so much information online, just about anyone has access to it and can do whatever they wish with such information if it isn't protected properly. Companies also have more access to private information on their employees or potential employees through social media. In some cases I would say this is invading privacy but it's hard to defend that statement when you post the info on the internet for everyone to see. For example, say your Facebook account had a lot of pictures at parties or pictures of you drinking and the job you want to get goes through all of your social media and finds this. They may deny you the job just for this even though this has nothing to do with your capability to get the job done in the workplace. In the future I only see social networking taking over more and more areas of peoples lives if they haven't already.

1. Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting by Frank Langfitt, NPR, March 16, 2008. available from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6522523&sc=emaf

2. Knowledge @ Wharton, "Leaving 'Friendprints': How Online Social Networks Are Redefining Privacy and Personal