Group Discussion Questions

1. Although it is true that today many TV shows and advertisements are made to look amateurish or "homegrown" I do not believe professional production values are dropping, or will ever drop. Although it appears that production has become amateur, the actual thought and ideas behind the production are only improving with the use of amateur looking shows or advertisements. Producers want to create something viewers can relate to. Viewers most relate to what they see and experience everyday on the internet. Therefore, professional production values are actually improving by creating media that is most relatable to viewers. Also, user-generated content will only get better in the future as it becomes more common. Users will constantly push each other to make the best media possible. In some ways, because creating a video and showing it to the world is much easier than many years ago, every person has a chance to show their abilities. Rather than just a few select producers creating shows or commercials, every person has the opportunity to show what they can do.

2. New York Times news article - "U.S. Hockey Team Starts to Believe Again"
Possible tags: Hockey, Olympics, Victory, United States
Tags from delicious.com: Sports, United States, Olympics, News, Education

After viewing the actual tags for this category, I realize that many of them are also what I would personally tag the article as. I noticed that the tags were quite vague (ie: sports, news) which surprised me. Also, I did not understand the relevance of the tag "education". However, despite these differences, I believe the tags are meant to symbolize the most main ideas of an article or website.

3. Transparency is such an important aspect in the Social Media world because Social Media really does not exist without openness and communication. Transparency allows for information to be shown to anyone by eliminating forms of privacy. For example, the website/application Twitter revolves completely around people revealing what they are doing or thinking at a specific point in time for everyone to see. Facebook is meant to allow social networking, but also allows for individuals to post pictures, comments, links, etc. Removing transparency in these situations would be removing the ability to post a comment or an image. Therefore, these sites would offer nothing. People actually want and need transparency in the Social Media. In contrast, transparency is not necessary or as important in the offline world. Personally, I believe that whatever a person may want people to know they will put on some sort of social networking site. Anything they wish to keep private will remain in the offline world, away from a computer. It is much more difficult for people to know things about another person in this setting. So, transparency appears to be something very few people desire in the "real world".

Digital Nation Conclusion

My last blog was in response to what I learned so far in this video and what I wanted to learn more about when finishing this video. The video didn't talk much more about how technology affects your brain in a bad way, but it talked more about how technology has evolved as a communication tool to make life easier and more satisfying.
Almost everyone uses some type of technology in their life to help deal with everyday issues. This video focused on people playing a game like World of Warcraft to break away from reality. These people can meet other players online from all over the world. Some of these players make friends with other players, and in some cases have even married other players. Other people use Second Life as a way to socialize with other people they wouldn't talk to in real life using avatars in a fantasy setting, or to have online work related meetings with people from all over the world. The army even uses war video games and simulation to get young kids interested in war. This is a way to get them interested in war so maybe in the future they will join the army.
All of these types of technology have impacted their users in some way. Some people have had their lives changed for the better and some for the worse, but technology will always be their as a simple tool to help create an easier world to live in.

Digital Nation Part 1

In this video we get a feel of how multi-tasking while using technology distracts people and their way of thinking clearly and rationally. NASA does testing on people who think they are good at multi-tasking, but in all actuality they are not, according to the research. I think this is very interesting topic to discuss because I truly believe that using all this technology hurts our ways of thinking over the long run.
So what does digital media do to your brain? Doing something like reading on the internet over reading a book shows larger clusters in brain activity (according to UCLA MRI scans). When looking at these brain scans, smaller is better. I found this all quite interesting and hope they talk more about how technology like cellphones, computers and video games, are all rotting our brains. We are living in a world where we are all immersed in technology, and it's quite interesting how it will affect our brains through the use of all these technologies.

Collage

This is the evolution from old technology to new
technology. The iPhone gives you everything you
need all in one unit. The new wave of technology is
right at your fingertips.

Web 2.0 Review Definitions

- User-generated content, also known as consumer generated media (CGM) or user-created content (UCC), refers to various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by endusers.
- The Long Tail or long tail is a retailing concept describing the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities, and it's usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities.
- In metacomunicating, WebOS and Web Operating System are terms that describe network services for internet scale distributed commuting.
- A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboration and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging.
- Web syndication is a form of syndication in which website material is made available to multiple other sites. Most commonly, web syndication refers to making web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary of the website's recently added content (for example, the latest news or forum posts). The term can also be used to describe other kinds of licensing website content so that other websites can use it.
- Mass collaboration is a form of collective action that occurs when large numbers of people work independently on a single project, often modular in its nature. Such projects typically take place on the internet using social software and computer-supported collaboration tools such as wiki technologies, which provide a potentially infinite hypertextual substrate within which the collaboration may be situated.
- Computer-supported collaboration (CSC) research focuses on technology that affects groups, organizations, communities and societies, e.g., voicemail and textchat.
- A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting web that allows individuals and organizations to make their own website accessible via the world wide web.
- In software engineering, a web application is an application that is accessed via a web browser over a network such as the internet. The term may also mean a computer software application that is hosted in a browser-controlled environment (e.g. a Java Applet) or coded in a browser-supported language and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable.
- Social software encompasses a range of software systems that allow users to interact and share data. This computer-mediated communication has become very popular with social sites like Myspace and Facebook, media sites like Flickr and YouTube as well as commercial sites like Amazon.com and eBay. Many of these applications share characteristics like open APIs, service-oriented design and the ability to upload data and media. The terms Web 2.0 and (for large-business applications) Enterprise 2.0 are also used to describe this style of software.
- Video sharing is when one person shares a video clip with another or many other people. This is usually done over the internet. There are many websites that offer video sharing. Many people use theses sites to share videos they have made with their family and friends. But, sharing videos which are copyrighted, like television programs, without permission from those who own them might be illegal.
- A wiki is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used to create collaborative websites, to power community websites, for personal note taking, in corporate intranets, and in knowledge management systems.
- A blog is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.
- A Mashup is a web application that combines data and/or functionality from more than one source.