The Next New Thing

The next big new media craze will have to do with fingerprint authentication in order to create, make any modifications or deletion of accounts on social media sites. This will cut back on the fraud cases that have been rampant in the social media world. This will also serve a purpose for the usage on making payment over the internet to secure sites that have your digital fingerprint in their database. By curbing the ability of hackers to remotely make changes, the next step to authenticate physically will cut the hacker business for a lot of businesses and users of social sites. Payment for things such as electronics even at specific consumer stores would help get people in and out faster. The savings from cutting the cost of cash registers, employees would be substantial.

Making payments at the gas station can also be a benefit. Paying with your card and then as a second check, you scan your thumb as the confirmation measure. This form of new media is being used for computers in terms of authenticating who you are in order to login to the computer, but not to confirm who you are on the net.

Our Class Wiki - So Far

I was planning on adding content, in regards to the wiki, that deal with the different ways businesses monitor their employees on a daily basis. By doing this we realize how much privacy continues to disappear more and more as the progression of new media in the business world chugs along. I'll be showing different ways that social media allows sites such as Facebook, to fork over our information to authority figures in the event they want to investigate for any reason.

Making sure that we understand what privacy policies that these sites offer to us and understanding what we are giving up by agreeing to view these site is important. I'm looking to also provide ways for employees to avoid giving up their privacy at work that could potentially cause them to lose their job or reprimanded for their words on any public social site. I'll be adding more information in regards to cases that have been affected by these issues in the last 3-4 years as well.

P2P File Sharing

File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents, or electronic books. P2P file sharing is the usage of software to upload and download data from other users of the file sharing software. Software like Bearshare, Kazaa, Limewire and BitTorrent are just a few examples of software that allow you to share data with your peers. The use of software such as Bittorrent could be beneficial for those in need of vital information. In the article titled The BitTorrent Effect, by Clive Thompson, file sharing has both its ups and downs. With this software you can download movies at the speed of lightning allowing you to download music that you can't find in the stores. Now you can have it directly from a fellow member. The downside is that by the usage of BitTorrent, companies are not making as much money as they are use to do to the ever popularity of these programs.

Privacy and Confidentiality

With the advent of social media, the growing loss of privacy and confidentiality seems to be ballooning out of control. The way these sites handle your privacy is through not protecting you, the user, at all. Some sites privacy policy pages admit that by signing up with their site you will not be protected by the company. If at anytime they want to sell your email address or send your name to the government for an investigation into your past, they reserve that right to do so simply by you agreeing to join a their social media site.

Confidentiality is lost by transmission of information through one of these sites that can potentially be tapped into by someone looking to do something wrong to you or gain access to vital information. Even the controllers of the site could misuse your information for their own gain so you really need to understand what you are agreeing to before you use these sites.

Advice

I would start first with the recruitment process here at Baruch. I would allow potential High School graduates to attend a digital tour of the Baruch Campus through social media sign-up on say, a Facebook like Page. We would send out a message to those students who like the page, stating that a Digital tour of the campus is available now as your initial campus visit. This would open up a whole new way for people around the world to attend a viewing of Baruch College without having to leave their homes leading to new streams of revenue for Baruch. The tours would be live via Face-time usage.

I would also start a customer service chat page where students from Baruch can actually log in as themselves, open a chat session with a person who works in Bursar. The students would get answers to questions quickly online first through a search functionality of FAQ's based on their question. If the student is unable to get the answer from the FAQ page, they can then get the answer through an online chat session from a Bursar worker designated for the day to field these calls from students. This suggestion alone would free up much wasted time for students and for the Bursar.

Creativity and New Media

So I was able to gain access to new media today but wasn't sure what route I would take. I decided to take the Second Life path. The reason for this was to see just how the virtual world works and just how many people are in this world. I was able to create an account for my self and realized this world is much more developed than I imagined. First I has to pick an avatar:

Then I entered the 3D world and saw that there were many ways to flow through this world:

I hope to learn more with this new media by trying to interact with people in this world, listen to music, fly a plane, bungee jump and even drive a race car of my liking.

Creativity

Creativity is something that is generated in parallel with new media as we learn when reading all of the articles related to user generated ideas. With Twitter as a prime example, users are the ones who generate what gets applied for usage in new media. When you look at Twitter itself, it was a user generated site that evolved strictly from user demand. As depicted in the article "Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers by CLAIRE CAIN MILLER" the creation of the @ symbol when referring to another user in their tweets. It also allowed other users to view the profile of the person who has been mentioned in a specific Tweet.

Creativity is highly embraced when dealing with new media in that companies are allowing users to be the innovators for their sites progression. The # tag symbol was another user demanded advent on Twitter. Although management did not like the idea and figured it would not catch on, users showed that they were wrong an indeed this feature was a must have for the sites existence.

Disney also experienced creativity through new media when their characters were used in a style of new media called a mashup. In the article, Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But Why? The New York Times, September 24, 2007; available at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/business/media/24crank.html,some famous rappers made a song/video that was on Youtube that was named "Crank That". They essentially remade the character movements into a clipped together in a reworked order that mimicked the songs and videos flow. Disney did embrace this change and never thought twice about this being an issue because it was a creative way of utilizing their product.