Creativity and New Media

I created an avatar in second life. I made my avatar a plane so I could freely fly around the virtual world.  I did this because I though it would be interesting to see everything that is made available through this virtual world. I have come to find out that there is much more to than I could see in one sitting but what i found was interesting.

Creativity

In the article put out by The New Yorker, called The New Math Mashups we see an example of new media fostering creativity. With new software, people have been able to take apart songs piece by piece and rearrange them piece by piece with other songs. So they are able to take the lyrics from two artists link them up and then take instrumentals from another artist or two and put it all together so it sounds as if it is the way the music was originally intended to be heard. This is a new and creative way for people with minimal equipment  with no studio, to make music and make music they thought was OK to start with, that much better.

Modeling Reality With Virtual Worlds

There are many different ways in which virtual worlds can be used, from enabling users to escape their own reality's and live out their fantasy's, to taking the place of impersonal conference calls for big organizations. The virtual world Second Life is used by IBM for the later, creating a more social and more personal place where people in different parts of the world can conduct business and hold meetings.  There are both positive and negative affects of virtual worlds. On one hand they allow users to bring to life things from the past, as seen in the New York Times article "In Room 100, It's Sid and Nancy All Over Again," back to life which creates enjoyment for people. Another positive is disabled people are able to go into these virtual worlds and live as person who is fully capable. The article on how people are using Second Life in order to bring autistic people together and their families in order to gain a better understanding of the issues that they face also seemed like a great use. The down side I see to this is that although it may provide some the sensation of doing things that they never could before, the reality is that they are still sitting in front of a computer screen, so to me it is creating sort of false senses of happiness. Virtual worlds foster creativity because they allow users to basically design and create the world they want to live in, whatever that may be. I think the future of virtual worlds will look like what ever people can imagine.

Blog About Twitter

From what I can tell, being new to Blackboard and Twitter, there are some similarities when having a discussion. Both allow for naming topics and writing about them as well as responding to other peoples posts. However twitter seems to do this more interactively. As far as these being compared to in-class discussion, to me there is no comparison. Despite the fact that these interfaces allow for discussion they loose all of the personal interaction which means there is no body language to help convey ideas, you can't hear someones tone of voice which can also alter the meaning of a sentence. To me there is just nothing that can replace actually interacting with people.       

Social Networking Sites

Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and Instigram are all social  networking site however they all have their own unique characteristics and capabilities. Facebook for example allows users to send messages and pictures both privately to their friends or put just put them out for anybody to see. Where twitter allows people to make comments on specific topics and is not as orientated towards your own friends. Myspace allows for its users to basically design their own webpage with all the things that interest them and share it with the world. Then there is Instigram which just allows users to share photos.