How I use Creativity and New Media

One of the subtle ways that I used creativity to make my friends laugh and showcase my personality is my Facebook profile picture. For the longest time, I had it set to a fairly boring picture of myself. It wasn't a bad picture my any means, but it was typical.

To switch gears for a moment, I love Legos. I grew up with them and spent countless hours building and playing with them as a kid. I don't play with them as much as I used to of course, but I still collect some of the larger, more complex sets with thousands of pieces.

So I decided to update my profile picture to something a little bit more fitting....

The Original

The LEGO Daniel

The Halloween Special

I am not responsible for the actions of LEGO/Zombie Daniel.

Creativity

The surge of new media in the last few years has given rise to internet based creative content. New Media provides a fantastic outlet for the artistically inclined as it provides a blank canvas for the mind to run free.

One of the things that draws people to new media is the anonymity of the internet. You can choose to tell people who you are - or you can keep that to yourself. If you really wanted to, you could be someone that you aren't and no one would be able to tell the difference. It's this facelessness that lets people be free and open about what they write, draw, and create.

Something else that draws people to new media is the easy accessibility - all you need is an internet connection and you can start contributing. This means it's easy to add your content to the internet and get it out to all your friends, followers, etc.

Lastly, the internet is sort of like an unlimited canvas. You can add as much content as you want and (depending on the site you use) post it as many times as you want.

Modeling Reality With Virtual Worlds

Virtual reality has been alive for some time in the form of MMRPGs, which go all the way back to the late 90s and early 2000. As a child, I played Runscape, a medieval role playing game with hundred of thousands of other players. It was new and fun, and never ending: there was always places to explore and new people to meet. It's been a few years since I last played that, but the virtual reality genre has certainly not stopped growing.

People use MMRPGs/Virtual Reality for a multitude of things. Some want to experience something different, some want to be someone different entirely. Others want a second shot at 'life' - a chance to do the things you might not be able to do in the real world. They might do it to escape their normal lives, meet new people, or just pass the time. But virtual reality is just that: virtual - not real. A set of 1's and 0's, a file folder, an arrangement of pixels on a screen. There are some who get so entrenched into the game that they forget this and will spend thousands on virtual and intangible items. Because of their popularity, VR is "fueling a robust economy driven mostly by avatar-to-avatar transactions estimated at between $1 billion and $2 billion a year in real dollars" (NYT). With numbers like that, it's hard to ignore the pull of VR.

But there are uses for VR that are new and ground breaking in their own right. Duke University researchers have been experimenting with VR and paralyzed patients. They've found that by putting people who are unable to walk into a exoskeleton like suit and equipping them with a VR headset 'tricks' their brains into thinking they are walking. "The device used is called Brain-Machine Interface, a computer system that records brain signals from human thoughts. The computer translates the recordings into commands to output devices. Patients had to imagine themselves making lower limb movements and then electrical signals from the brain were translated to the computer and moved each patients' avatar on the virtual reality screen." Everything was simulated, all the way down to the 'thud' of taking a footstep, which was simulated as an electrical pulse to the patients upper body. Over time, the patients reported gaining feeling and being able able to move certain parts of their body!

(Note: The article about VR helping peopel regain feeling and movement was not on the reading list, but was instead discovered during my own initial research. It can be found here.)

Blog About Twitter

Twitter differs heavily from Blackboard in a few regards. First off, Blackboard is a great for more lengthy discussions that would be hampered by Twitter's 140 char limit. But it's more cumbersome to use - it's hard to beat the simplicity of logging onto Twitter and start typing away. With Blackboard, you have to login, navigate to the class page, and then to the topic you wish to reply too, and only then can you contribute. It's part of the reason I can't stand blackboard.

However, blackboard is a little bit neater when it comes to content. Topics are clearly laid out and you can easily find what you want to read/post on. It also gives you more options when posting, like formatting and picture options. The same can not be said for Twitter.

I think I'd prefer if we all joined a Facebook Group dedicated to this class and just posted there. It allows for plenty of discussions without the hassle of Blackboard and the obvious limitations of Twitter.

Social Networking Sites

The four sites I chose for this assignment are: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Snapchat. All four of these sites serve very different purposes and you can see it just by logging in and taking a peek around.

Facebook and Twitter are probably the most straightforward sites. You are greeted with the posts of people that you're friends with/who you follow and you are immediately given the option of posting something yourself. Facebook provides the most information about a person: meaning that you can have access to a person's pictures, friends list, location, other life details, and all of their content. It's very centric and does a good job of presenting all of this information to its users. When I think of Facebook, I feel that it's the jack of all trades.

Twitter is a little bit different in that it focuses more on getting information out there as fast as possible with it's 140 char limit. Someone can tweet a live event, limited only by the number of characters and how fast they can type. It's not as content oriented as Facebook is however.

LinkedIn is more of a "professional facebook" to me. You wouldn't post pictures of you going out to a bar with friends there, but maybe you would post some articles that interest you career wise. Users can still post, like, and comment on things, but LinkedIn is meant for those who wish to keep track of their connections and perhaps look for new ones or new jobs.  This is demonstrated by the first screen after logging in...which prompts you to send invitations to anyone you might know. Only after passing that screen do you get to the feed of people you're connected with.

Snapchat is much different than the previous three sites. First off, there is only an mobile app for snapchat - no desktop website you can access. Upon opening the app, you are greeted with an open camera that immediately allows you to start taking snaps. The recipients of the snap can reply via text or pictures. The twist here is that snaps (including text) are deleted after they've been viewed, and will not reside on any servers or user devices (so long as they aren't screenshotted). I am personally not a huge fan of Snapchat as there are privacy concerns (whether your snaps are really deleted or not is debatable) and it eats my phone battery like no other.

Social Net'g

Corporations and businesses have been using new media for several unique and interesting ways over the years. For example, in India, the police set up a Facebook page for people to post pictures and videos of drivers who routinely break traffic laws so that they could go after them (Timmons). This is an example of a crowd sourced effort that helps the police stem the law-breaking drivers of India. Other uses for social media include recruiting for companies by simply looking at Facebook or LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a very powerful tool for recruitment as demonstrated by rectuier Maureen Crawford: "Typing keywords into a search engine, Crawford can scrape the entire network to dig out high-quality candidates that she can't find elsewhere" (Langfitt). It's an important tool for recruitment just as much as it is for those seeking a job.

New media does indeed have a darkside though, perhaps the most serious being that privacy is often a concern. An ever increasing amount of personal information is available online or is being asked of us by different companies. Just to sign up for a new platform, you might be asked for your email, phone number, first and last name, and birthday. When we stop and think about it, there is very little about us that isn't out there - and it's all in the hands of very large corporations or even the government.