Favorite Reading

The concept of technomedia and the article we read from Sam Han's book on Navigating Technomedia was one of my favorite concepts we learned in this class. To refresh everyone's memory, Han was discussing how of all the media technologies are working together and how the "new media" is really just layers of media that have formed and evolved through the years. I really enjoyed reading about this because we are currently in a time where the Internet has become such a huge part of the media and many people who are unfamiliar with these concepts we have learned in class think that the current state of the media is something completely new rather than something that evolved over time. I really enjoyed learning the history of how the media came to be, and I chose this concept because it is something I will continue to research and learn about in the near future.

Learning and Favorites

2). What have you learned throughout this class?  What was your favorite thing about this class?  What was your least favorite thing about the class?  How can this class be improved?

I have learned many new concepts that pertain to the media and communications. Before taking this class I was just another person who was using media to communicate yet I never thought to analyze it the way this class has challenged me to do. I learned that through all these different forms of technology lie the messages that are all around us. Text messaging, email, and online social networks are a common form of technology that many people are comfortable using on a daily basis. Radio, television, and newspapers are still a source for information, but the Internet has advanced into a medium that can contain all of this media in one. I also learned that the "medium is the message" which I agree with and really enjoyed reading about. My favorite thing about this class was the way that it was structured. I really appreciated the fact that we had until Saturday night to complete our work because I have a job and have other classes I take as well. We were still required to engage and post on different days, but I really liked the fact that we had enough time to manage all of our work. My least favorite part of the class was vlogging, but I completely understand the relevance behind it all. I had to put that out there simply because I hate watching myself on videos and I don't like the thought of others seeing me either, but I guess it wasn't too awful. :)

Interesting Concepts

New Media Article

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/how-to-treat-facebook-and-twitter-like-your-kids/48027?tag=content;search-results-rivers In this article writer Jason Hiner makes an analogy between social media and parental favoritism amongst siblings. I thought this was an interesting article because it is explaining his reasons for deactivating the cross-posting that Twitter and Facebook allow. Many of you are probably aware at this point that a person can connect the two sites so that one is producing a live feed onto the other. I think that this convergence of all social media being used may work for some people who are trying to get out a certain amount of information at a faster speed. An example of this is someone who has a certain audience following them on Twitter, meanwhile they keep their Facebook for close friends and family. There still may be information that they want both audiences to know about. The problem of not wanting specific information transferring from one network to the other could possibly be solved with an option for each post on whether the person wants it to show up on more than one site. I don't have a Twitter account so this may already be possible. I thought it was also interesting that this article mentions to keep in mind the strengths and weaknesses of the social networks you are using in effort to use them in a way that works best for you. At the moment I only have a Facebook account, but I have often that for businesses and entrepreneurs Twitter would be a great way to get a lot of information out several times as opposed to Facebook which I see more for personal use.

World Wide Web

So there was a lot of technical information to this article about the World Wide Web and it's origins and I have to admit it gave me a headache because I forgot to print it out from work this week so I had to read it from the computer, but it was still INTERESTING to me. This was in 1994 yet it is still is how we know the technical side of the Internet to be today. In regard to HTTP and URLs I was familiar with them but not in terms of hypertext transfer protocol or the way servers work. It was also interesting reading about MIME as well as how HTML become the common language for the interchange of hypertext. This article was interesting to read now because it was meant to help people understand w3. It seems that many of goals that were defined at that time have been met through the development that followed. In terms of my own experience with this article is that the Internet has evolved and met several goals that were first set for it, meanwhile the many users still have no idea what they are using. I have to admit that I am not very educated in this field of knowledge so I enjoyed reading this article.

A Virtual Death-Jordan

"One of the most touted beliefs about Internet communication is that the medium
strips away users' offline identities and leaves them free to reconstruct a tetherless online persona" (Jordan,2005). I really enjoyed reading this article, and this statement in particular stood out to me because this ties in with what we have been studying all semester. In the article Jordan discusses a particular case of an online hoax involving a woman who was blogging as a 19 year old girl who was dying of leukemia. When the community discovered that Kaycee did not really exist and that the woman who was blogging they were upset and released a lot of statements from all over the world in regard to how they felt. This article brought up some very interesting points about the Internet serving as medium that allows people to deceive others based on the ability to hide certain information as well as portray themselves in a certain light. As we have learned throughout this semester many people are comfortable using the Internet to paint a picture of themselves ( not just literally, but in terms of how they want others to see them based on the pictures, videos, text, etc that they choose to put on their online social networks, blog cites, etc.) The story of Kaycee was not surprising to me because as the article often brings up, people have already been doing this type of deception for as long as we can recall and the Internet is now just another form of media that someone can use in this way. I liked how the article brought up the point that specific images (example "the bodybuilder") cannot conclude what a person is or is not (Jordan, 2005). We see this often with the Internet because there is an uncertainty on what we are looking at and our imagination is left to decide. I have questioned the authenticity of pictures of people before and whether or not they were really the person who was writing something on the Internet, but that is not to say I was right or wrong on whether or not the picture was really the person. The whole point is how would I really know? There is truly no way to know for sure unless I know the person in face-to-face contact. This is why I agree with the article that we should stay skeptical to a certain degree because if not we would likely be suckered in to everything we read online. It is unfortunate that other people who are staying truthful online had to receive backlash from the Debbie Swenson incident, but the truth is we don't know that these people are being authentic either. I think we can only trust and distrust as we have reason to and as we come across each new experience.

Smartphones

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