Social Media and the Web 2.0 Questions

1. I think in the future, amateur user-generated content will improve because technology will become more and more easy to use and amateurs will easily be able to edit and create content. It is also becoming cheaper to make higher quality content. It seems like almost as soon as the newest piece of technology comes out, it is outdone by the "next best thing." I think professional content will improve instead of declining to meet amateur content because technology is advancing more and more everyday. In the past few years, America has gone from color television to HD to now 3D is coming out, mostly in the movies but in television as well.
2. The Social Media Sites I use the most are probably Facebook and YouTube. I think Facebook has been more successful than MySpace because it is easier to use, has the feature of the News Feed, and has better privacy settings. Myspace was difficult to use because in order to edit a profile, you needed a lot of different codes. Facebook's profile is much more simple. The News Feed on Facebook also makes it really popular because you can see what everyone else is doing right on your home page. You can customize your home page to see just a few people you are close with or leave it as everyone you are friends with. You can also easily comment on other peoples' activity right from your home page. Facebook's options for privacy also make it more popular than MySpace. On MySpace, you could hide your profile from strangers but that was it. Any means of hiding your profile was easily maneuvered around with the use of Firefox. Facebook allows you to customize your privacy, down to specific portions of your profile and specific people who are allowed or not allowed to see it. I think Facebook will last a while, but it is hard to predict whether something better or more popular than Facebook will be invented.
3.Transparency is an important issue in social media. Companies do not realize the reaction that people will have to some tactics. Many companies have been accused of astroturfing in the past few years. They have used fake grassroots methods to push advertising. This is basically done by either pretending to be normal people and supporting the company or taking something like a letter that supports the company and making it look like a lot of people were saying that instead of one. Politicians use astroturfing too. The goal is to increase support for the politician or company by making it look like a lot of other people are supporting the company or politician. People find this to be misleading and get very aggravated when they find out about these things. I think it is important offline but it is more important online because everyone uses the internet as their connection to the world and it is very easy for corporations or politicians to use the internet for deception. One example of astroturfing is Comcast v. Big Ten, where Comcast pretended to be normal people, talking negatively about Big Ten Networks. People trust other normal people, so they will listen to them, but when they find out that a company was posing as a normal person to deceive customers, they will not be happy.

McLuhan Project

I chose Skype as my medium for this project. I decided to show people using Skype as a new way of talking to each other. This shows that the content of Skype is streaming digital video and text. This image shows my idea of the message. Skype's message is that people can now easily talk to each other from anywhere in the world, instantly, which the globe portrays. Skype is a central point of communication for people who are far away from each other now, so I put the Skype logo in the center of the image. Skype also helps people of different countries connect a lot easier and cheaper than they used to be able to, so I decided to make the background text, saying "hello" in every different languages. It helps show the worldly connection that Skype now provides us with.

New Mediums

Medium: Skype

Content: text (Skype IM), digital audio, digital streaming video

Message: people who are far away from each other use it a lot, it replaces phone calls, especially long distance, quickly talk face to face with people who are in a different part of the country/world, talk on computer or television

Medium: Facebook

Content: text, digital photographs, digital audio, digital video, games, html links

Message: it’s becoming a necessity, people put a lot of pictures up, some people become addicted to facebook, peoples’ lives end up becoming public because of pictures, wall posts and status updates, everyone has more “friends” than real life friends and some of the people they talk to on facebook they may not talk to as much as or at all in real life, people find out things very quickly, people can get it on their phones.

Medium: StumbleUpon

Content: text, digital photographs, html links, digital audio, digital video

Message: when people are bored and want to search for random things to entertain them, StumbleUpon does the searching for them, people can find new interesting things easily, people can end up spending to much time “stumbling” and not doing productive things

Winter X Games Snowboard Superpipe

The Winter X Games just took place over the weekend in Aspen, Colorado. Not everyone watches the X Games, but I really love them, and the Men's Snowboard Superpipe is my favorite event. It's where snowboarders go down a huge halfpipe throwing the most advanced tricks they can. This year Shaun White took home Gold in this event. As a fan of Shaun White, I was really happy with this win. Before and during this year's X Games, there was a lot of gossip surrounding Shaun White; that he might not do well this year. He was eliminated from Slopestyle, which is a downhill terrain park event. In the first of the three final runs in Superpipe, Shaun White was in second. It seemed like the gossip might become fact, but his second run of the Superpipe Finals was a success. He scored a 97.33 out of 100, which ties his own record for the highest score on the event. Some of the judges say that was the best run of his life, and of course it gave him a lock in for first place. This was the fourth year in a row that Shaun White took home Gold for Superpipe in the X Games, a very impressive record to have. During the X Games, ESPN3 had live online video streaming of the X Games, but for anyone who missed it, ESPN posted the video of Shaun White's winnning run.