We live in it

New Media is the new resume. With so much of our lives already on the Internet, it was only a matter of time before we decided to take it to a professional level.  One such site that is used extensively within the creative industry in particular, is linkedin.com.  This is a site that allows you to keep in regular contact (or keep tabs) on people that you have worked with professionally. However, this site does allow you to choose who you link in with.

The media is geographically neutral. It doesnt matter where you are in the world, the online language is the same. The internet is like a new country, where everyone knows the language and customs, reguardless of age, gender or religion. It is the one place where you can be what you want instead of who you want, and that, professionally, can be very dangerous.

This is a Dummy post.  This post is so I have the six posts that are supposed to be there. I didn’t read the readings for this week, and I wont be using this for you to mark. I just don’t want to fail this part of my assessment. Almost 200 words, yeah 10 more words, now less, now it should be pretty fine. Okay so new media, its a drag.

Is this healthy?

As far as I can see, health and mental well being and the internet do not mix. The internet does not have a  good reputation for being a source of reliable health information.  It concerns me that peopele are supplimenting going to the Doctors and seeking proffessional medical advice by posting questions on Yahoo answers, Going on Wikipedia or googling it.

As Wyatt, Harris ad Wathan state in their chapter, this information can also be fragmented and can be easily misconstrued. Many of the sites on which we can rely can be easily manipulated and edited. Without regular monitoring and without proffessional imput, these sites, and self diagnosis could become dangerous. Some of these sites, similar to www.symptomsfind.com/  and www.medical-library.org/mddx_index.htm let you type in your symptoms and they will diagnose possible problems you may have. Needless to say certain symptoms such as headaches and stomach pain, are very common and some readers may become confused when it comes to what they might actually have.

Without going to the Doctors or the GP they could be seriously doing harm to ther body. That being said I do believe that some online research can be allowed. Not all sites are untrustworthy, but I think people should remain vigilant when it comes ot the sites that they look at.  Check the references!

Online Branding of the Psyche

“The potential power of people to shape their lives and identities can be found in the assumption that people produce themselves (and therefore each other) in media” (Deuze, M. 2011).

Henry Jenkins called it Convergence Culture (2006). How people are producing and consuming information in an online medium. Roger Silverstone(2007), Alex de Jong and Marc Schuilenburg (2006), and sam Inkinen (1998) label it a ‘Mediapolis’; a comprehensively mediated public space where media underpin and overarch the experiences andexpressions of everyday life.

I agree with Deuze’s work, and would like to state that I think Social media has become an itegral part of our life. Potential friends, lovers and employees now all go online to find out more about your personality and history than personally asking you.

We now have begun to create content solely for the internet and for shaping our online identity instead of posting content that has not been edited for that specific use.

If I want to impress someone now, I update my status, upload a new profile picture and edit my information panel on my facebook or other social networking profiles. It is too much of an effort to actually talk to person face to face to recieve this infomation when it can be reached with a simple click of the mouse.

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Deuze, M. (2011). Media Life. In Media, Culture & Society, Volume 33, issue 1, pp. 138

Jenkins, H (2006).Convergence Culture: Where old and New Media Collide. New York: new York University Press

Silverstone, R (2007).Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge: Polity.

Politics and New Media

“There are, broadly speaking, two arguments against the idea that social media will make a difference in national politics. The first is that the tools are themselves ineffective, and the second is that they produce as much harm to democratization as good, because repressive governments are becoming better at using these tools to suppress dissent.”

(Shirky, 2011)

New Media has only recently been used to affect politics, with many political candidates now reaching out to online resources to engage and to seek out their audiences. Barack Obama did this in his political campagin, starting a “like” page on facebook, which now has more than 12,000 likes. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Barak-Obama/314261804048?ref=ts&sk=wall But is it really all good? Social media and networking has the ability to share information at a startling rate, and so it was only a matter of time before we started using these techniques to help us in our own political agendas. I believe that it is prominantly a good thing, as with this growing recognisation we are slowly forcing the governement to watch it’s actions online, or the masses will rebel. Which is evident by the recent revolutions in the eastern world, many of the political marches organised via online networking sites. Shirky, C. 2011. The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change Foreign Affairs, 90 (1),

Online Content

What are you listening to? What are you watching? Are you watching it online? No doubt.

Mahdur Singh(2008), in one of the readings this week, talked about the Bollywood industry and how certain companies are trying to stop piracy by putting their content online immeadiately, and I say good on them. We are much more likely to try to source the material online nowadays.  You have to change with the times. Rajeev Masand stated that  this will “mark a change in release strategy, maybe even in the way films are made…” (Sigh, 2008)

As for Steven Levy’s work,( The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture and Coolness), I couldn’t agree more.

“Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.” ~Bill Cosby (Lanford, 2010)

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References:

Levy, S. (2006). The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture and Coolness, New York: Simon & Schuster, pp. 21-41

Singh, M. (2008).  Bollywood’s Viral Video in Time International (Canada Edition), Vol. 171, Issue 14 (http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1713342,00.html) Accessed 21 Marh, 2011

Lanford,J &A (2010) Famous Quotes and Quotations, http://www.famous-quotes-and-quotations.com/music-quote.html Accessed 21 March, 2011

Social Networks

“…Individuals perform their identity is not a radical concept”(Pearson, E. 2009).

People are more likely to hyperbolate their daily activities, or their connections with someone with a higher social status, if they think that it will make them more desirable.

Though I agree with Donath and Boyd(2004), there is a line with how much information should be displayed on these sites. Intimate details and particular personal details should not be shared within social networking sites, in my opinion.

I would also like to acknowledge (since it was such a large part of Pearson’s material) that while identity fraud is definitely made easier by the information displayed on social networking sites, in my experience, young people (by that I mean Generation Y) are not really concerned with this. Quite Frankly, many are ignorant to it. However, it is because of this that I believe that too much personal detail online makes it easier for your identity to be stolen.

These Readings were interesting, but didn’t give me a lot to think about. Social Networks have a lot of intricate details, and a lot of potential for things to go wrong on a social scale, but the young are cocky, and have a sheltered belief that they will never be caught. Because we feel more daring online.

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Public Displays of Connection –Donath, J. and Boyd, D. (2004)

All the World Wide Web’s a stage: the Performance of Identity in Online Social Networks –Pearson, E. (2009).

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