Mia's presentation and mine

My presentation was on reviewing online and the trust we can accord those reviews. The most interesting scholar article dealing with this subject can be found here. Doing my research I understood that there are many things at stake in reviewing online. Motivation behind the review tells you if the review is legitimate or not. Some people want attention, others want to become professional reviewers and some just have a hidden agenda to sell the product.

Mia's presentation on digital art was very effective. Art today is moving towards new media of expression and this transition is at least very ambiguous. Is it still art if it is online, free and easily reproducible. Is art made of code the future of contemporary art?

Memoir of a Wikipedian

Mia and I chose to focus our research on the interaction between new media and visual arts. Our wiki project was not so easy because the line between new technologies, new media and mixed media is very blurred in artistic expression. What I chose to focus on was websites and new media interfaces that provide information about art and artists. Visual arts are slowly turning into entertainment so many websites are created to provide people with iterative ways to remain informed about art.

For me the most appealing aspect of new media is that you can access works of art online (especially video installations and photography) and you can talk with others about them.

Concerning my overall experience of the wiki I am really surprised how much I got into it. When you do research by your own for a paper is a very lonely activity. On the wiki it is actually a collaborative research (like a ongoing brainstorming). Moreover, knowing that other people would read it and use it to gain knowledge on the subject matter, you change your way of writing in order to provide an easily accessible information. I really thing I will start to contribute to the art section of wikipedia.org because I got to love this type of collaborative work (while I really don't appreciate group work for school projects).

My Own Private Internet

How can we know what information about our personal life is out there on the net? Everybody googles themselves, but is it enough to know what is available to others about us. Since the explosion of facebook we tend to share much more private information on the net without really thinking about the malicious individuals or companies who could use it. There are always ways to access what you put online and control you.

Of course new media brought much more freedom for many people by giving access to a wide range of information and resource, nevertheless we have to keep in mind that new media is also about control by gathering more and more information about a person (information more accurate than ever because the person himself is the source of it0.

Spam has been around since old media, but today we face a new kind of spam, a less obvious one, Facebook profiles are hacked and you find strange posts on your profile. Then, you realize that the people who posted them also accessed your information and pictures.

There is no need to become paranoiac and cut yourself from the internet, but prudence is encouraged in order to avoid obvious threats. Try to think twice before putting visuals or contact information about yourself online. A short NYTimes article explains 5 steps to take to make your facebook profile safer.

My biggest concern would be regarding children and young kids. They are not born with an idea of the dangers of the internet and could tend to share much more about their life and their parents lives than they should. I think every kinder garden should have a talk once a year about the dangers of internet. Not to scare the kids but to make them aware of the potential threats they expose themselves to.

Kind Advice to Baruch College

Dear Baruch,

I will tell you few things that have to be improved in communicating with students and providing them with the up-to-date tools for success. New technologies are available that would make my college experience much better.

1. Quit Black Board!! This is the most annoying media tool. You can't keep track of your classmates. BB is an old media because their is no creativity, collaboration, convergence and community to it. It is only a communication tool, you could as well use a blog.
2. Converge all the different technologies at Baruch on one CUNY wide platform. CUNY Academic Commons, Blogs@Baruch and the CUNY portal should be one thing.
3. Once a student creates a Baruch profile he can have access to his class mates, his readings, create a blog, communicate with professors, post information relevant to the class, etc...and most of all share with others his life on the web (links to facebook, twitter, youtube, lastfm and all the places the student has a profile).

We might become the leading university in implementing new technologies on campuses by creating a special web tool for colleges (students and faculty included). The people from the tech department are certainly thinking about it and they should consider than students would definitely support a more technologically connected university.

Warm Regards,

Elvira

Blogs VS wikis

Wikis are "essentially Web pages that anyone — or at least anyone with permission — can create or edit." [source]. Blogs are more specifically webpages organized chronologically and by tags that only the administrators can edit (nevertheless anyone can open their own blog).

Consequently, the user-provider relationship is very different. The readers of blogs may have a blog of their own but are not also the writers of the blog. The only way they can collaborate is by leaving comments. Wikis have users who are both providers and consumers of the same content.

For example Diplopedia (the private Wikipedia used by American diplomats) can only be a wiki because you need to find accurate information and access it efficiently. In general, for businesses purposes wikis are more valuable than blogs because they can carry loads of information easily accessible and enable collaboration on a same piece of information.

The only way blogs are collaborative is by bringing together specialists of a same field that share their findings on a same web place (from science to fashion).

Further, the most obvious difference between blogs and wikis is the type of information they provide and the ethics related to them. We expect from wikis to be intellectually sincere and truthful. We don't expect a certain code of behavior from blogs, anyone can post anything on a blog, from news to trash gossip (like Perez). In a nutshell, wikis are about knowledge whereas blogs are about opinion.

Blogs are much more about community than wikis. People get to know each other trough comments and discussions on blogs. For example a Brooklyn based blog helped the authorities to identify a drug house [article] in a specific neighborhood. Wikis don't built a sense of community.

The birth of blogs as a tool of information sharing had dramatically changed the media sphere. Wikis only changed the information management sphere. News making companies have changed strategy because of blogs. An AC article retraces the history of blogs and their influence on the entertainment media, and argues that blogs are take over the share of old media because: "There are no editors and for many people, this is one of the best things about blogs." Once something is posted on a blog it can't be modified by whoever doesn't agree with it.

Regarding the impact of blogs versus the impact of wikis, the answer is clear. Blogs definitely have more influence in every sphere of life like studied in a research at the University of Washington. Whereas wikis can only provide information but not shape opinion.

Concerning the future of collaboration, it is important to remember what Jimmy Wasles asked in a NYTimes article: “Is it more important to get to 10 million articles in English, or 10,000 in Wolof?” Put in other words, who do you want to collaborate with and what is the scope of the collaboration. If only alike people collaborate on a wiki, the information provided will certainly be biased.

New Media Class

New media is about communicating in a more transparent way. It enables people to share pure information (images, articles, music etc...) and edited information (opinions, mashups, comments etc...) in a public space. It could be compared with what the ancient Greeks called "agora": an open place of assembly where people debate the topics of the day. Nevertheless, the topics now can range from the best way to make cookies to the Palestinian conflict. New media brought with it the phenomenon of intellectual globalization. The internet web focuses attention on certain topics and people from all around the world can now discuss a topic that was before only dealt with locally very local.

New media depends very much on technology like the internet which enable information to reach very fast any corner of the world. To display this information, portable devices like the i-Phone seem also indispensable. However the only really inseparable technology from new media is an outlet that enables this information to reach people and in the same time enables them to modify it. We could imagine a future where people would have a chip on their brain that would deliever information directly to our perceptive fields and would enable us to add and modify content to this information. So new media is not dependent on the internet per say but on a tool that would provide a modifiable and uncensored flow of information.

The more you use new media the more you realize how much it depends on its community. The community that shaped the new media technologies is also the community which keeps it alive. If people won't feel like using Twitter anymore, maybe because it will become "uncool", Twitter would disappear. It doesn't matter if the technology exists, if their no community to use it it won't survive long on the internet.

We want to be in virtual contact people with more and more people - more friends on facebook, more comments on our blogs, more followers and more contributers to our projects. Holdyn said in class that he became addicted to Twitter and it made me realize that new media has an addictive aspect to it. Users will want always more from what new technologies provide, and I am sure more would come.

Neo-new Media

New media got people used with deciding and providing content. Moreover we are used to consume media wherever we are through portable devices. To get a step further, I think new media will soon merge with companies to provide new commodities that incorporate media. Imagine a hybrid object that each person using it could change its structure, its way of working or its design. Imagine further, an object that looks like what you want it to look at that moment. Choice would be paramount in the years to come regarding consumption and this is why companies will use new media technologies to decide what people really want. CUSTUMIZATION could be seen as the 6^th C in defining what new media is (along with communication, collaboration, community, creativity and convergence.

The video above shows a possible future for new media technologies. Although, the future could look very different, it is certain that in the years to come new media will change dramatically. Maybe we will have only one device that would integrate all the technologies we need or maybe we will use many different devices everywhere we go as predicted by Microsoft. No one knows for now.