The Effect of New Media on Society

Society today is filled with concepts, ideals, and other aspects of which are affected by New Media. One way I think it has affected us all is the way we look at entrepreneurship. I know all of us have wished we came up with the idea for Google, Myspace, Facebook, or any other website whose concept isn't that far fetched, and are now worth billions of dollars. New Media such as blogs have empowered us all in that anyone can sign up, and share their opinions, thoughts, and writing with the entire internet community. It has affected the laws that we have in our country, beginning with Napster and whether it is legal or illegal to share music and other forms of entertainment over the internet with one another. We have had to create and modernize laws to these new creations don't end up with their creators and users in jail. Society will have to adapt to these new technological institutions that continue to be created and affect us in our everyday lives.

Checking Out Some Social Networking Sites.

Personally, I like to spread my procrastination time between iTunes, Facebook, and my bands Myspace page. When I first signed up for facebook, the layout was very straightforward, and not used for quizzes, games, and all this other application stuff. Now since it has been sold away to become a corporation, ads and the like appear all over the website. I use Facebook as a means to talk with people I usually don't see everyday, joke around with my friends, and goof on funny pictures of them. Facebook has helped me find people (and them in finding me) I haven't seen since elementary school. It is awkward at first, but its nice to see some familiar faces you haven't seen in years.

As a musician myself, Myspace in an invaluable tool that I can use to promote my bands music, post bulletins telling people about our upcoming shows, post videos, and communicate with booking agencies and other companies whose services I can use. The personal page I have set up on Myspace, I find myself not using or logging into quite as often anymore. I find Facebook a lot more enjoyable to waste time on, not having to load everyones gigantic page with a billion pictures and songs playing at once, or deal with fictional display names.

Social Networking and Virtual Worlds

In the past few years, social networking over the internet has boomed to become incredibly popular, not only with the younger generations, but everyone. The two most popular social networking websites currently are Facebook and Myspace. Facebook was created by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and a couple of his friends as a tool for Harvard students to communicate and keep track of each other, but obviously since then, it has grown to worldwide proportions. Not just used for college students to post silly pictures of one another, Facebook can be used by professionals to communicate with one another about their jobs, look for other employment opportunities, etc.

The other social networking monster is Myspace. Myspace can be used by businesses and artists to promote themselves. You can search for people in your area (you can do this on facebook too) and add them as "friends", to show them your page. Myspace doesn't require you to put your full name as the display, so it is harder for you to find someone if they don't have their actual name in the directory.

Theres always a dark side to these new and evolving social networking technologies, as television shows such as "To Catch A Predator" have shown. Many people take advantage of naive young people who use the websites and lure them into bad situations. Hopefully in the future, these problems will be taken care of and prevented from happening, with increased security and watchfulness over the content and what goes on through these websites.

Baruch New Media - Our Class Wiki - So Far

Our class wiki is coming along very well. The section that I am contributing to is New Media in Music. I have written a paragraph on the page about the website www.ilike.com. This is a great website that you can use for finding information about your favorite artists, as well as finding similar artists according to your tastes that you put in once you choose your favorites. The big mother of all music sites seems to be Myspace, which gives artists unlimited publicity for free. Unless you are a huge famous artist who might have to pay for certain aspects of the promotion you get on the website (unfortunately I am not one of them, so I do not know for sure). I will continue to look for new media tools that concern music and make sure that I update the wiki accordingly, so that you all can read about them.

Blogs vs. Wikis

Both blogs and wikis have a huge role in the importance of new media. If you don't know what either is, a blog is sort of an online journal managed and edited by an individual or a select group of people, and the subject matter usually pertains to a certain topic or topics that are related to each other. A wiki is an online encyclopedia. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia. Wikis can be edited by anyone registed with a username on the wikis server. A blog can be used for collaboration by giving certain individuals who specialize in a field or having a common interest/goal access to write and edit the content of the blog.

My New Media Class – So Far

New media is a huge part of todays society. It helps us to connect with people around the world and share information almost instantaneously. To understand what new media is, it would make sense to know what “old media” is first. Old media is things such as the newspaper, television, and the radio. New media is sources of information that are available at your convenience, such as YouTube, Blogs, social networking websites such as Myspace and Facebook.
The internet is vital to new media. It is what contains a good percentage of it, such as all the websites that constitute new media. The internet helps us to connect to those in the world that share the same interests as us. The internet is home to social networking monsters Facebook and Myspace, who have changed the way we look at communication and socializing.
New media is replacing and enhancing old media by making it more available to a bigger audience. If I was in London, I could still read what is going on in New York through newspaper websites and blogs. New media makes old media seem like it has an expiration date once it is past a certain amount of time. Once something viral hits Youtube, it will be famous for a good while, such as the "Numa Numa" lip synch video , or "Diet Coke and Mentos"