Contemplating New Media

We often hear of stories in the news that a local pizza shop has an option for people to "Pay it Forward" by putting sticky notes on the wall with the amount they gave for homeless people to eat with. Even the MTA allows people to swipe others in with their unlimited cards. If we could take these acts of kindness and combine them with an electronic money transfer system like Venmo or QuickPay, people could give larger amount of money at a time. For example, if I go to pay for my milk at my local farmers market, that store could have a collaboration with the Venmo or QuickPay that allows me to transfer an amount for the homeless and those in need. While I only see this working on a smaller scale, it will encourage people to give more money to pay forward than they usually do. It is already apparent with the quantity of people who choose to take part in these things that having that option available will encourage people to donate. With that fact and the ease of not having

So far I have scrolled through the Sports wiki. I am unsure of how to contribute (not in my understanding of how it works) to the wiki because it seems like a ton of random information on a site with a seemingly organized outline of  the specific topic. In regards to making my own wiki, I'm not sure I can follow the same style that the sports and YouTube one have so far. In terms of research, once I have ascertained which topic I will choose, (they all seem very vague so I'm going to choose subtopics in two or three different subject matters) I'm going to go back and try to see what topics each section has not mentioned yet and try to add more original aspects to each. Besides that, I will also revise some portions that I feel do not have adequate information.

File sharing, in terms of torrents, is the uploading of "metadata" that is being streamed to through a network. Sites like The Pirate Bay and Pass the Popcorn are torrent websites that allow users all over the world to download content (in the case of pirated content this is illegal). The peer to peer aspect of these sites is in the file sharing of multiple users. For example, on The Pirate Bay, a the more people who "seed" a download, the faster it is for other users to download the same content because they are getting different bits of the file from that many more people. If a file needs to be downloaded and only one person is seeding it, they are taking the the whole file (the metadata that Google refers to) and this will take much longer. As mentioned in the Wired article by Clive Thompson, "Cohen realized that chopping up a file and handing out the pieces to several uploaders would really speed things up." This is the entire concept of peer to peer f

Considering the fact that most social media sites sell our data and private information, it does not come as a shock that privacy is becoming a growing concern. While we may ask questions like, "what information is being traded?", "what information do companies retain?", and "How is it being used?", what its really comes down to is what we we put on the internet ourselves. While sites track our age, pages, interests, contacts, gender, shopping styles and so much more, we accept the personalization aspect that these algorithms using the information bring. We do not, on the other hand, get a say in who gets to use it. As we sign our rights away when we click the Terms & Agreements button, we need to consider that while we know our information is being sold, whether we actually have a choice in the matter with Web 2.0 taking over the corporate world. Having networks and means of communication is vital in the work place and in school now. So much so t

If I were hired by Baruch College to use  new media  to improve the College one main suggestion I would make is to organize it's YouTube page. The playlists on the channel are an odd assortment of recruitment videos, commencement videos from the past two years, a random video on Baruch and Social Media (ironically) and then a good majority of ECON 1001 review session videos. There is no system behind this set up at all and I think it would be best if Baruch made a second channel where review sessions can be uploaded appropriately. First of all, the page as made in 2009 and if one scrolls all the way down, they will find that the page was mostly used to upload videos of conferences and panels, then a trend emerged of videos on how to get a job. The trend then moves on to computer tutorial videos about 7 years ago when computers used to be big and bulky. They probably still weren't used as commonly in the educational respect as they are now - which is amazing because tha