Some of the New Media

As we shift from old media to new media we see a transition of “old stuff” to “new”. We no longer are fond of the old newspaper or hand writing letter but more into blogs and twitter. As old media changes into new media, we see many different creative things come to the surface such as mashups, viral videos, rap parodys, twitter trends etc. New media has helped developed more stronger and impactful ideas. It has inspired people to further their inner creative self. Unlike the old media, New media incorporates the 5cs which are Communication, Collaboration, Community, Creativity, Convergence. Technologies, such as blogs, podcast, wikis, social networking sites, virtual worlds, mobile technology, facebook and other social media forms are a big part of the new media.

Faceboook
Facebook, the world's largest online social network, has changed the social networking industry forever. It was created by Mark Zukerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and two other students in February 2004. "Initially it was restricted to students from Harvard University but it was promptly extended to other Boston universities, the Ivy League and eventually all US universities. It became Facebook.com in August 2005 after the address was purchased for $200,000". US high schools could sign up from September 2005, then it began to spread worldwide, reaching UK universities the following month. According to the article, The Benefits of Facebook “Friends:” Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites, as of 2007, “ Facebook was reported to have more than 21 million registered members generating 1.6 billion page views each day”. It has become the largest online social networking site in the world. While Facebook does promote many different things such as communication, helps in bridging social barriers and creativity it also raises issues such as  cyber bullying, privacy and a distraction.

Twitter
Twitter is an online Social Networking site similar to Facebook, Myspace etc but twitter only enables users to send and read "tweets", which are text messages limited to 140 characters.Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass and by July 2006, the site was launched. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 500 million registered users in 2012, who posted 340 million tweets per day. The service also handled 1.6 billion search queries per day. Twitter is now one of the ten most visited websites, and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet". Twitter has changed the idea of New media because of its character limit and allowing users to think about what they wan to say. Because of the 140 Limit users were creating new jargon and different ways to use the service.Some users started using an @ symbol before their username to identify another user within a Tweet. This user-driven functionality is also true for how retweets we're created. Users wanted a way to re-post a message from a Twitter user while including credit to the user who originally tweeted it.

Blogs


"A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.” Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog. Postings on a blog are almost always arranged in chronological order with the most recent additions featured most prominently."

A blog is also a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web and consisting of discrete entries. The author posts regular updates on his/her blog while other users comment or give there opinion.The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog", was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999.

Podcasting
A podcast is a digital medium consisting of an episodic series of audio, video, PDF, or ePub files subscribed to and downloaded through web syndication or streamed online to a computer or mobile device. The word is a neologism derived from "broadcast" and "pod" from the success of the iPod, as audio podcasts are often listened to on portable media players.

Known as podcasting, the technology is a new take on syndicated content feeds like RSS and Atom. But instead of pushing text from blogs and news sites to various content aggregators like FeedDemon and Bloglines, podcasting sends audio content directly to an iPod or other MP3 player.Podcasting has made things easier for people who cant catch their favorite shows. According to the article, Podcasts New Twist on Net Audio, “podcasting is one of the most exciting innovations to come along in quite awhile. They see it opening up an endlessly varied universe of audio content to anyone who wants it at any time.” With these new technologies one can see an advancement from old to new.

Virtual Worlds
Even though virtual networking websites are really popular these days but virtual worlds are equally getting attention of many people. In virtual worlds people have avatars, which are graphic 2D or 3D representations of themselves. They are customizable to amazing details. These are just codes written by programmers, in binary language which is based on only two characters that is 0 and 1. Some of the popular virtual worlds include Second Life, Minecraft and The Sims online. Virtual worlds foster pure creativity and imagination to infinite lengths. Jacki Morie while talking about Minecraft states: “Minecraft is a virtual world. It’s digital LEGOs if you will, but it’s a space for kids to exercise their imagination and to connect with others to also want to build and create things. And it’s the biggest phenomenon today. “Virtual worlds” may end up needing another name, but Minecraft is a game-changer.” Virtual worlds not only help creativity but also are a platform that can be used for research and experimentation purposes, without the problems and restriction of real life. The article mentions that researchers particularly in the field of social and economic sciences have been wanting to conduct their researches in virtual worlds since almost 10 years, and finally as the virtual society grows to immense numbers they see their dreams coming true. are starting to do researches on virtual worlds and are asking general social scientific questions.