P2P

File sharing is the act of sharing downloadable files on the Internet with other Internet users. This act is very common and often illegal. Often times the files being shared are supposed to be bought but are being shared and dispersed to thousands of Internet users for free. There are many off-shore sites that people can visit to download torrents, pdfs, and more.

P2P is peer-to-peer computing which equally disperses the liability amongst the people involved. This means that people intertwined in P2P both upload and download the content being shared. A popular network is BitTorrent. BitTorrent involves "seeding" which means that a user can upload a file and allow other users to download the file as long as they stay online in the P2P network. The uploader provides the "seed" for the other users. As discussed in "The BitTorrent Effect" article, the more popular the original seed file is, the quicker it can be downloaded.

It is obvious why there are so many new laws being brought to light in regards to P2P sharing. Many industries such as entertainment and book publishing lose tons of money each year due to file sharing. The touchiness of the subject is discussed in "Should Online Scofflaws Be Denied Web Access?". The topic of freedom of information being a defense for online file sharing is brought to light in this article.

Privacy and Confidentiality

New media has made communication easier and faster than ever before. We are able to virtually connect with one another live any second of the day. Since so many people use new media to communicate, there is a ton of information stored on servers and websites like Facebook. This can cause some problems when it comes to privacy and confidentiality. Many people are not aware of the amount of personal information being stored constantly while they use new media. In addition, new media such as social media sites encourage people to post various things about themselves. This can include anything from address to selfies. With this social media trend, people tend to share way more about their lives than they normally would. All of this information is stored permanently regardless of whether or not the individual deletes their postings later on. This information can be sold to corporations or given to the government. In addition, many employers search through prospective employees' social media accounts which can be intrusive on their personal privacy.

Advice to Baruch College

If I were hired by Baruch to implement better use of new media, I would immediately revamp the Baruch website, Blackboard, and CunyFirst. In general, all three can use a lot of change as far as media upgrades. Blackboard has discussion boards which work similarly to a blog in my opinion, to encourage more collaborative discussions, there should be an option to create Blackboard wikis. The Baruch website looks very out-of-date, I would redesign the site to make it more interactive and visually appealing. CunyFirst is just a mess. New media can be used to make communication to administrators on CunyFirst much easier. I would install some sort of messaging feature so that students can easily talk to an admin when they run into problems (which is currently very often).

Creativity

As mentioned in my previous post, types of new media including virtual reality, can be used to manifest creativity. Traditionally, creativity and creation is often viewed as an individual effort. Reiff,  McKitterick, and Neill talk about this in their thesis: Creators, Audiences, and New Media: Creativity in an Interactive Environment. They talk about how the traditional way of viewing arts and creation is to view the creator as producing work that comes from a completely internalized place. New studies show that creativity can be, and is often, fostered through collaboration and interactive environments. They also talk about how these studies are easier to conduct in the world of new media because of new media itself. "In the Internet age, we can observe the process of crossing these boundaries. Creators can respond to questions about inspiration and can further address these answers later, expanding on them in instantly archived blogs, comments, or articles".

So, in addition to providing a platform to study interaction, the Internet is a good example of a modern day new media that fosters creativity.

Modeling Reality With Virtual Worlds

The topic of virtual worlds is very interesting because it's partially developed and growing yet is still relatively young and unknown. The directions in which we can take virtual reality are basically endless. In many ways this is both exciting and scary. Just like everything else and just like social networking, virtual worlds have benefits and drawbacks. As discussed by Dawley and Dede, virtual worlds can be of great benefit for educational purposes. They offer situated learning through immersive technologies to create learning situations that often contain a lot of features that real-life learning situations do not. For example, virtual worlds can be used for role playing. People can "go back in time" to learn history as if they were actually at the event.

A specific con of virtual worlds that I had not known prior to the reading, is the concern that they can be used as a place to launder money. In the article, "At Hearing, Real and Virtual Worlds Collide", other cons are briefly mentioned. Some of these include: child safety, religion and cults, economic problems. I think in addition to these concerns, a major con could be that it becomes habit forming and somehow takes precedence over reality. People may lose touch with reality if they get addicted and in a way "stuck" in a virtual world.

Virtual worlds can definitely foster creativity. Again, this is probably one of virtual reality's strong suits because the possibilities are endless. With the ability to access and/or create learning experiences, people can learn in new ways. This in turn will obviously foster creativity. For example, if I were to use virtual reality, I could maybe create a situation where I go back in time and meet Vincent van Gogh and learn more about his painting techniques. The information that I learn from that type of simulation would probably be much more engaging and memorable than reading about it in a textbook.

I think the future for virtual worlds is definitely full of possibilities but just needs to be harnessed and controlled the right way. Just like most other things technological, with such great potential benefits, there are always potential downfalls. I think our human race can learn and accomplish greater things with the help of virtual worlds. It can be life-changing for our species, but at the same time it could also destroy us if we don't handle it with care and good intention.

Blog About Twitter

Twitter discussion has its similarities and differences with Blackboard and in-class discussions.
Firstly, all three of them rely on the interaction of two or more people. Any discussion in general requires people to communicate their thoughts, ideas, opinions, etc to one another. On Twitter, I find that it's quite difficult to have a long, complex discussion due to the 140 character constraint. Although, you can make your way around this by tweeting multiple times, but I find that it's overall constricting the thought processes. On a more positive note, Twitter is an easy and fast way to get thoughts out into the public and directly to the people who follow you. It is also a more casual way to communicate, which makes short-hand more acceptable than Blackboard. Blackboard discussions are more formal and structured than Twitter. In-class discussions are obviously very different from the two because it consists of face-to-face interaction. I think that of the three, in-class discussions is the most demanding and elaborate. It requires immediate responses from one student to the next in order to keep the conversation flowing. On Twitter, people can respond to tweets within seconds, minutes, hours, or even days or years later.

Social Networking Sites

So I will be comparing the four following social networking sites: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr.

The similarities and differences between these sites are actually pretty interesting. Each has its own purpose and style. Each involves different types of social interaction.

In my opinion, Facebook is definitely the most socially comprehensive out of the four sites. It reveals the most personal information about its users. Each user profile displays their photos, name, location, age, birthday, relationship status, friends, "likes", and so much more. Facebook seems to encourage people to upload all of this personal information by advertising themselves as a friend-based network. When I say friend-based, I mean that Facebook has the "add friend" feature, therefore, any two users that are not Facebook friends have limited viewing access to each other's profiles. For two users that are friends though, all of this information is usually pretty accessible. Facebook also seems to have the most extensive messaging features. Nowadays, not only can you directly message people back and forth but you can video chat and send phone calls.

Twitter can also be used to display a ton of personal information, but through a different style. Twitter  communication is based on user "tweets". People are able to post statuses up to 140 characters long. It's really up to each user how personal they would like to get with these statuses, but this freedom allows people to get creative with what they are saying and how they are saying it. Twitter also has a privacy feature like Facebook. Twitter users can set their accounts to private which only allows their approved followers to view their tweets. Also like Facebook, there is a direct messaging feature, but much less extensive. In my opinion, most of the communication done on Twitter is done publicly. Facebook can be quite private with its extensive messaging. The type of interaction is quite different too. The idea of twitter is that users post a status. It can be a thought, word, mood, literally anything, but it is not necessarily to start a two-way conversation. People can retweet each other, which is like reblogging a post.

Similarly to Twitter, Instagram can be as personal as the user wants it to be. The most obvious difference though, is that this social network is entirely photo-based. People can still comment back and forth as they would on a Facebook picture, but there is no option to post anything else. They do have a direct messaging feature incorporated into the app, though. Just like the two other sites, people on Instagram can "like" one another posts, and there is a similar privacy feature. Unlike Facebook, and similarly to Twitter, Instagram is based on "followers" and "following" rather than "adding".


Tumblr seems like a hybrid of Twitter and Instagram. Tumblr originally, and for the most part, was created and is a blogging platform. But, it has become just as much of a social networking site as the other three. Unlike Instagram, many users on Tumblr post and repost photos that are not theirs. It is based almost entirely on reblogging. A seemingly unique aspect of Tumblr is the anonymous questioning feature. Users can write to each other's blogs anonymously. This site is also based on followers and following. Out of the four sites, this site seems like the most emotionally expressive one. People on Tumblr seem to express themselves much more than on the other sites. This could possibly be because many of users' posts are not of themselves, therefore can somewhat "live" or express vicariously through pictures that they find ideal or interesting.