The technologies that are part of the New Media include many computer softwares such Flickr, Picasa, Adobe Photoshop that replaced photography from the Old Media. Also included are the compressible gadgets like PDA phone and laptops. Social Networking also play an important role in the New Media,as Laura M. Holson explains in her article, "Tweeting your way to a job", social networking websites are not for the sole purpose of keeping contact with friends and family but it is also considered an extension of customer service, resolve any quick problems customers may have and to keep customer satisfaction in check. Customers, if were to be dissatisfied about the service of an industry, and decided to blogg about it on Tweeter, a company has the perfect opportunity to take those factors in account and aim for a better solution as well as aim for higher standards regarding the product or the service.
Frank Langfitt in his article, "Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting," emphasizes the importance of social networking websites, claiming many recruiters have started looking for job candidates using social networking technology such as MySpace and Facebook.
Part of New Media also includes the 3-D Virtual world, such as Second Life, to help people with Autism or to rebuild a historical monument. Big companies such IBM are using SL to train their employees, and to effectively manage the cost of their annual budget.
Internet is the most important part of the New Media, without internet access it's virtually impossible to fully use the technology that is part of the New Media. Such as Second Life or the Social Networking websites. Internet provides the opportunity to get easy access to any first hand information regarding any topic.
The Old Media is gradually being replaced by the New Media, a few good examples are books to eBooks/Hypertext/ Amazon Kindle, journalism to blogs, radio to pod-casts, Blockbuster/ Television toYoutube, and from direct mails to Emails. Laura M. Holson's article, "Who Needs a TV? I'm Watching on a Laptop," talk about how she watches her favorite shows on her laptop and doesn't feel she has to own a TV.
People seem to prefer New Media, over the Old Media, primarily because New Media is easily accessible, it's free of cost and not to mention less time consuming.
3-D virtual worlds on the Internet, such as Second Life, are helping many people construct a virtual setting and hang out in them. Saki Nafo says in her article, "In Room 100, It's Nancy and Sid all over again", when the long time manager in hotel Chelsea was changed there were more than a few disturbing changes around the hotel with its new renovation. But with the help of Second Life, hotel Chelsea was able to restore its old renovation. They were also able to keep Room 100 as a crime scene where Nancy and Sid stayed, when Nancy was killed. It's a prime example of modeling reality with virtual worlds, that shows that even if a historic place has been demolished there is no reason why visitors should feel remorse any longer since those places are now able to exist, if not in real world, but in virtual world which is as close to reality as it can get, and better than just "distant memory".
Nicole Saidi talks about people with Autism in her article, "'Naughty Auties' battle autism with virtual interaction", a step forward for people with Autism as they have an easy access to the internet, interact with people in their comfort zone without having to step outside. Bignell, known in-world as Milton Broome says, "For people with autism, we've found it's a very nice way of setting up situations they might come across in their everyday lives. For people who have social, emotional, communicational problems ... we can get them familiar with an environment before they actually try it out in real life."
Virtual worlds are not just for use in personal lives, big companies such as IBM are also catching up with Second Life. “New IBM employees separated by thousands of miles will be able to mingle, interact and share ideas in the virtual world before their first day on the job,” Ted Hoff, IBM vice president of learning, said in a statement. “They can learn real-life working skills such as signing up for benefits, developing code as part of a global team, and ramping up sales skills before they meet with IBM clients.” (http://www.workforce.com/section/00/article/24/61/08.html)
Reportedly, online virtual worlds are more effective and a drop in the bucket than corporate training market that reached $55 billion last year in the US. Ted Hoff also explains other advantages of Second life, he says that it also adds a dimension to training because employees don’t perceive it as learning. That makes them more willing to take risks and be more flexible in their thinking.
Although it seems like a great achievement in technology, it also has a few down sides to it. Disadvantage of SL are addiction and distraction. Some of the distractions are very pleasant, but they create the possibility that employees will be playing when they should be working. Personally, it's also very easy to become addicted to using SL and spend hours on the system and become sleep deprived and neglect real life activities. Professionally, company HR personnel will need to monitor the behavior and attitudes of employees who are heavy users of tools like Second Life. I believe that in future SL could actually take over office space. Because almost every corporate is looking to efficiently manage their resources and looking for strategies for cost cutting, this could really help some businesses. With SL, employees could meet on Second Life and discuss any important matter they need to and do the rest of their work from their homes.
It's almost unbelievable how social networking websites have proven to be so valuable both in professional as well as in our personal lives. Frank Langfitt explains in his article that many recruiters have started hunting for job candidates using social networking technology like MySpace and Facebook. One such site is Linkedin, a network of 8 million professionals that also includes executives from all of the Fortune 500 companies. Although it seems a fairly easy method to scout a group of job candidates in just half an hour using Linkedin, as Company co-founder Konstantin Guericke says, but if he wants to develop a relationship with any of them he says there is no substitute for a much older social networking tool: the telephone.
Laura M. Holson writes in her NYT article "Tweeting your way to a Job", that recently many companies have begun hiring someone specifically for what they call a "social media whiz". Because of the explosive popularity of Twitter, a social media whiz monitors what consumers are saying about the company or their products on Twitter and take a more personal stance towards it. Laura also quotes in her article, "To marketers, it seems, personal relations (such as this) have become the new public relations." For a corporate, this has an absolute advantage. For instance Paul Gillin, a technology journalist said in the article, “All anyone has to do is tweet their dissatisfaction and a company will cave in to their demands.” Because the consumers are mostly average human beings, it’s important that a company reaches out to them and be much more personal than the average corporate P.R. guy, and Tweeter is definitely one way to do this.
Of course, Tweeter is certainly not without its limitations. Twitter was not devised to solve difficult problems. Josh Bernoff, a Forrester analyst and co-author of a book about social technologies, quotes, “You have to be careful about what you say while, at the same time, be much more personal. You need people who understand the mores and etiquette. Not everyone knows how to do that.”
As for our personal lives, social websites are definitely popular for keeping contact with friends and family without being too personal and without feeling like an intruder, and definitely for people who have a reserved personality and somewhat shy to socialize in person. Consider someone who's autistic, an autistic person has more advantage on a social networking website than an actual social setting. With Facebook and Tweeter, life gets easier as friends and family see my updates of important events, i.e. engagement or pregnancy, as opposed to I personally making phone calls to spread the news, which is really more time consuming.
This website has some interesting way a college student can tweet besides hunting for a job and keeping in touch with friends.
Though, social websites seem like a great tool for both personal and professional use, it has its dark side as well. It seems as though sex offenders are at advantage with these websites, many have been successfully able to lure young girls to come out of their safe zones and fall into the traps that was set by these predators. Some were fortunate enough to escape though profoundly scarred emotionally, while others were not as fortunate to live.
I believe these social networking websites will be more prevalent in the future, it seems unanticipated at first that Tweeter or Facebook would go as as far it did now as far as its usage is concerned. Perhaps people would start sending out invitations on these websites, and save a few bucks there as we all know how expensive wedding, anniversaries and birthday parties can get sometimes. Or sending emails would cease to non existence because the trouble of typing so many emails gets old quickly, the convenience of typing a single sentence to update everyone of your recent event seem a lot more enticing.
I was in my early years of college when I had an account with MySpace and hi5. I signed up for hi5 primarily because my high school friends were sending me requests to join, and I thought the best possible way I could keep in touch with them or friends I haven't seen for a while was to accept their requests. But I deleted my accounts eventually as I felt there was a definite loss of privacy in those social networking sites. With MySpace, I felt it was directed more towards the youth and the teens. It has fun layouts and music to put on the profile, and it has a lot other options to "pimp the profile" as they like to refer to it on the site.
Although I never had an actual Friendster account, I had the permission to sign in to my friend's account. I always thought it was somewhat boring. Atleast, to me it definitely seemed so. Facebook seems a lot more exciting to me and is the only social networking site I'm addicted to at this point in time. The popularity for Facebook has grown over the years, and it also encouraged reserved individuals, such as myself, to sign up and stay active. The fact that everyone's joining the site makes it that much popular, the chances of running into an old friend or friends I haven't seen for a while are likely to be higher now that almost everyone I know is there. I could connect with them without being too personal or being too awkward, as it happens when you suddenly meet an old friend from old times and don't have much to say to each other.
While Blogs and Wikis have differences between them, they also have many features in common. Similarities such as they both present easy web publication and lightweight content supervision, also can be set up for free by anyone who’s willing and in general provide spaces for comments on each page or post, through talk, discussion pages and comment features. In both cases, new posts or pages and modifications appear on the webimmediately, and they both allow the writer to preview changes.
On the contrary, a blog consists mostly of multiple essays presented in reverse sequential order; one that is last written is first read.That's the heart of a blog. A blog normally has authors and readers and Blog posts arenotopen to direct editing by readers. When they do, normally by the author himself, earlier versions arenotretained.
A wiki is a collection of web pages typically designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify the content. That's the heart of a wiki: ease of multiple contributions and editing, whether by all or specific users. A wiki typically has a much broader range of contributors (authors and editors) than a blog, and that range frequently includes all readers or at least all who choose to register.Wiki pages are frequently edited, and wikisdoretain previous histories for each page.It also lets writers identifyneededpages by linking to them even when they don't yet exist. One common question for Wiki is what if someone creates disinformation or vandalism? As Noam Cohen stated in his article,"An Internal Wiki That’s Not Classified", " Mr. Johnson of the State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy inWashington, who recently gave a talk about Diplopedia atWikipedia’s annual conference in Egypt, was asked — a not-infrequent question when the topic of wikis comes up. He pointed out that unlike Wikipedia, Diplopedia does not allow anonymous contributors, so bad actors could be tracked down. He then observed, “There are plenty of ways to commit career suicide; wikis are just the newest one.'"
The importance of convergence in today's networked world is significant. Considering that anyone has the access to all kinds of information on the internet, it can definitely cause an overload of information (much like the BING commercials, but not as obvious!) By Wikis & Blogs, which is a mean of converging, we could definitely communicate in a more efficient manner and work with a more strict time constraint.
Although, wikis seem to be more at advantage for collaboration, blogs can similarly be used for the same purpose. Though, the readers do not have the opportunity to contribute to the page, they are allowed to collaborate by leaving comments, or share ideas and thoughts on the articles posted.
The old media is a traditional means of communication and was mostly analog, primarily relied upon print and analog models such as printing press, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, direct mail and most print publications. The new media, on the contrary, is more digital and computerized and predicated upon the use of digital computer, such as the Internet and online publications. A few examples to distinguish new media from the old media:
a) Journalism, which has turned into online blogs. It's inherently a two way communication where the readers have the opportunity to share their views online, whereas printed newspaper had a strict one way communication with its reader. Online blogs have the advantage, over the traditional media, to be able to correct their news in a matter of few hours if they were to make a mistake.
b) For books we have turned to eBooks, hypertext, wiki and amazon's Kindle. The convenience of finding a book online and not having to physically walk into a bookstore definitely saves time. The amazon's Kindle is incredibly light weight as opposed to the printed books and is able to fit into any small space.
c) Direct mails have been replaced by emails. As far as international mails were concerned it was slow, expensive and often not reliable.
d) Online magazines and newspaper are free of cost and the market entry cost is no more than a computer, a modem, and an Internet connection. The manufacturers are able to duck many of the major costs that make traditional newspapers expensive to produce.
These are only a few ways to analyze the old media from the new media. The new media has endless possibilities, as it continues to grow it will hopefully make our lives that much easier in the near future.
What role does the new media play in the scuttle of globalization?
There is definitely an ongoing debate about what the commentators would suggest. Some would say that globalization in the new media allows the flow of ideas in multiple directions, and expands the opportunity to have diverse ideas. It also greatly expands the importance of what information is available in the public sphere, and sharing that information definitely has an impact on the private individual as well as the nation they live in. The result is less homogenization and more diversity within an existing culture.
Yet, others suggest that it creates a series of tension in the concept of "public sphere". Virtual communities are being established, where computers substitute for human relationships and a whole world is created that is only to limited to the computer screen.
As the debate goes on, my research will primarily be based on the two different sides of the new media in globalization. Although, I'm an advocate of the positive sides of the new media, I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at the negative aspect as well.
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