Blogs for New Media

Creativity comes in many different shapes and sizes. New media can be a positive outlet for nurturing creativity due to the mass amounts of people that can contribute and be inspired by different ideas. One example of this are video mashups. Mashups are when you edit different clips from cartoon or movies and have a different audio playing in the background. The reason behind is to take well known scenes and create creative and comedic value out of it. Even Nickelodeon sees the comedic value and sees mashups as a fair use of its copy righted content (Barnes, 2007). One of the best examples of new media fostering creativity is the use of online games. Specifically, Minecraft is an online who's sole purpose is to be an outlet for creativity. Multiple people can come together and build projects or explore the vast world together. New Media to creativity is like an enzyme, it speeds up the process of the reaction. The reaction being a burst of creativity.

Initially when I think about creativity and new media, I think of Minecraft. Minecraft is an online game where you can build many different things using the large types of blocks available to you. However, I decided to check out Second Life. Second life is a virtual game where you can interact with others and you can pretty much do anything. If you wanna play games and be an adventurer, you can travel to an area where those relevant to that topic exist. When I loaded into the game, I had the option to pick and choose a character from a long list of options. There is the possibility of also customizing your avatar to whatever you wish to change it to. I visited different areas, but I stuck around the music arena the longest. In this world, you can even play music as the DJ and have an audience of people. Included below is a snapshot of my avatar playing music on a stage while strobe lights are flashing everywhere. This virtual world has many creative opportunities where curious people c...

Virtual worlds can be used for many different applications. It can be used positively by using games like Minecraft to help expand the creative side to growing children (Mehta, 2013). Using Minecraft in a 3D world where children can explore will have a bigger impact in letting kids exercise their imagination. Another positive application for virtual worlds is helping deal with autism. Autism often allows for real life interactions to be stress inducing for both sides of the party. Virtual worlds can create real life peaceful environments and help ease patients with autism into be more social by interacting with people online (Saidi, 2008). Since virtual worlds are controlled, there won't be any surprised factors like in the real world that can inhibit or backtrack any progress of people with autism. A negative aspect to virtual worlds can be addiction. Some people might crave to be in a virtual world and not in the real world. This can be theoretically worse than normal game addict...

A twitter discussion is definitely much shorter than a BlackBoard discussion. It's arguably harder to have a discussion on Twitter because there is a shorter word cap. I think you might get better discussions out of Twitter since when you're preparing your response, you need to keep it short and straight to the point. I would say an in-class discussion is more the same as to a BlackBoard discussion than a Twitter discussion since they have no word cap. Preparing a shorter and more efficient response can be harder and may take longer time.

I visited Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and SnapChat just to see different apps for social networking. Facebook looks to be the basic level of social networking and what we can expect. From posting pictures or comments or tagging others in memes, it really encompasses all of what you'd expect in social media. Instagram is Facebook, but with more emphasis on posting pictures and comments. It has a very artistic feel to it and makes scrolling through various pictures easy. SnapChat is more of the messenger version of Instagram since you send a picture with a message attached. Twitter is the fast-food version of social networking since you are posting quick messages. Personally, I prefer using Facebook since its the social networking platform I have used the longest.

     There are many ways to use blog social networking to your advantage. One of these ways is to use the platform to further deepen your portfolio for a job. Especially in fields like marketing, having the ability to maintain a social networking platform will be very beneficial. One unique benefit to using blog social networking is being updated in real time of any situation. For a a skin repair surgery, the staff updated the surgery status hourly for the parents (Parker-Pope, 2009). The parents didn't have to wait to hear about the status of the surgery till the end. This eliminates a lot of the burden of worrying since the parents were constantly updated in real time. These technologies definitely have a 'dark side' due to the fact that people can post about anything. This can result in some negative reactions or comments. An example can be seen in this when a politician disregarded President Obama's speech as boring and that he would rather watch sports (Stanley, 20...