Privacy and Confidentiality

With the use of new media what do we sacrifice? We sacrifice privacy and confidentiality not only to the public, but your boss, and even your friends. With sites like facebook, there is information we submit that is stored. Hackers can possibly be studying your habits and steal your facebook account. Even application companies on facebook are taking advantage of your information. Recently Zynga and other companies sold off facebook information from subscribers outside sources. Another incident recently is where a school teacher blogged about being a prostitute before getting a job as a teacher and being suspended by the school she was working at. There has been an increase of cyber bullying and it leads to many issues at home.

Advice to Baruch College

 There are many things that can be done to improve the college experience and the addition of new media is a good idea. For starters, Baruch College has facebook pages for various things such as bursars which questions can be answered without being there. One thing I dislike about the school is the lack of connectivity to internet when I borrow the laptops from the library. When I do get a connection it is slow. Often times I would go to my classroom only to find out it was canceled without any email or prior notice and it frustrates me so I would suggest professors to use maybe twitter or something the moment they cannot make a class. Many of the textbooks we get have ebooks but not all, it would be nice if all books could provide an ebook which would help greatly with the use of new technologies such as the e-readers. They could possible do a test run for a class which could be done through the internet with video conferencing.

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

There are a couple ways the virtual world can be used. In the article I read "Going t the virtual office in Second Life" it was used for virtual conferences to connect international members, working in group projects, and even file sharing. I would even guess people create their alter egos and create a life they wished they had inside the virtual worlds.

Pros - I think that some pros to virtual worlds is convenience. It saves money for companies that need to talk to people across country and even overseas. The file sharing was a great pro when involved in a project. On a personal level, some might feel more comfortable being able to talk in virtual worlds better than face to face.

Cons- I think that the alter egos might be a little awkward to see sometimes, especially if someone knows you. The fact that it is hosted online means possible hacking opportunities as well as impersonations. Files could be stolen and important company project info might be at risk.

The fact that you can create an avatar that doesn't look like you is creative in itself. But it also stated in the article that even though some companies have used it, they started to create their own versions. The use of virtual world promotes creativity towards technological innovations.

The future of virtual worlds is a coin toss. It can lead to both good and bad things. It will probably end up being more and more realistic as time goes on.

My first twitter discussion

My first tweet was an interesting experience. I never realized just how short 140 characters really were. It was hard to condense what I wanted to say in that limited space.

I think that a twitter discussion might be easier since you can easily see what multiple people say at once compared to a BB discussion where you must slowly scroll through every response. Twitter seems a lot more fast paced and convenient.

I do not think twitter can ever replace a a real class discussion since its not as detailed and in order for someone to get their point out might be required to do so in multiple tweets.

Check Out Social Networking Sites

Facebook
Facebook is the one I am most familiar with. The interface is simple and clean so there isn't much confusion to how to get anything done. This originally started as a website mainly to connect college students. They have decent privacy settings to prevent people you don't know from contacting you and disturbing your privacy. There is also a messaging box on the bottom right to talk to anyone that is currently on that you want to. The increasing number of facebook apps make it enjoyable to stay on, longer than you would expect.

Myspace
Myspace is similar to facebook, but it is more about customization and your own personality more so than functions. The amount of customization is alot greater than facebook. It doesn't have the amount of apps that Facbook has. The security options don't seem as secure as Facebook. There are many video/movie clips on myspace to be viewed now.

Friendster
I do not like that before you even get to browse the site that they force you to create an account or login. That is very frustrating to not know what a site has to offer before joining it. So when I created an account, i tried looking for friends and there were none that even used it. It is definitely not as mainstream as facebook or myspace. The search is very inefficient and doesn't make much sense.

LinkedIn 
My previous religion teacher invited me to LinkedIn and from what i got from it, it is a purely professional networking site. The interface takes some time to get used to. This provides educational/occupational information of different individuals. I even used the search function to find a professor that went to a different College and it was able to find him. There is a good chance that LinkedIn can be used to recruit/hire/interview talented individuals to work for various companies. There is an "upgrade" that you can pay for that makes you more accessible.