#yatging

The use of internet has grown dramatically in recent 10 years. People are uploading great amount of data including emails, photos and articles into the public domain, and have formed a huge platform. The internet has become a platform that generating information and data, every minute giant amounts of it are being generated from the internet users. Every minute, YouTube users are uploading 48 hours of video, Facebook users are sharing 684,478 pieces of content, while Tumblr is having 27,778 new posts published (Neil 2012). What an unbelievable amount!

  Data is a vast, endless regiment of recorded facts and figures (Siegel 2013). Every picture, Facebook post, movie recommendation, each successful or failed sales call, each incident, event, and transaction-is encoded as data and stored online. When people want to find some specific information online, they can just type in some keywords on a searching engine, the internet would soon list out thousands of web pages, images or files for users.

  Google is, as you all know, the largest search engine, it is fast and relevant, especially its Google 'images', 'maps' and 'news' features, are really outstanding services. Google’s stated mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (Pingdom 2010). Google has nearly 70% of market share in the world. Its services include YouTube, Gmail, Google Map and Twitter. Google has, perhaps more than any other company, realized that information is power. By collecting huge amount of data, Google can make market decisions, research, refine its products, anything. For example, Google can discover what people are looking for, what people want, and make decisions based on those discoveries. People may not be paying Google with dollars, but we are paying with information.

  Although the internet has been developed around for just 20 years, it is hard to imagine life without it. It has given us instant access to vast amounts of information. Yesterday I was cooking my dinner and wondered how to make chicken curry, so I immediately went to my computer and Googled it. The internet has provided a convenient way to look for information. And I have a question: how did people get answers before internet developed? Before, if people wanted to find news, they would turn on the radio. When people tried to cook chicken curry, they would buy a cookbook. Nowadays, people are more likely to Google all their question. However, there are researches show that when people have access to search engines, they remember fewer facts and less information because they just have to remember who ( internet )knows it (Bejar 2011). For instance drivers do not have to remember the map because the GPS devices can guide us all the way. Undoubtedly, computer can help us a lot, but sometimes it may also bring some negative consequences.

  References list

Bejar, Daniel. 2011. “ How the web affect memory.” Harvard Magazine. Accessed December 11, 2011.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/11/how-the-web-affects-memory

Neil, Spencer. 2012. “How much data is created every minute?” Visual News. Accessed June 19, 2012.

http://www.visualnews.com/2012/06/19/how-much-data-created-every-minute/

Siegel, Eric, (2013). Introduction : The Prediction Effect. In Siegel, Eric, Predictive analytics : the power to predict who will click, buy, lie, or die, (pp.1 - 16). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. 

Pingdom. 2010. “How Google collect data about you and internet”. Royal Pingdom. Accessed January 8, 2010.

New media technologies have introduced new complexities and controversies into law and governance. It has brought new regulations and new ways of uploading and downloading the contents. In fact, contents like movies, music and images online are usually covered by copyright. And in most cases you need permission to use them. Nowadays the Internet is a wide-open for users, many of us believe that copyright laws do not apply to the Internet, and caused people keep copying and sharing media contents.

  Illegal digital copying of music and movies and books is known as piracy. The entertainment industries always claim that they have lost large amounts of money due to the piracy on internet. However the study by the London School of Economics says that claims by industries of damage from piracy are largely exaggerated (Ukraine 2013). For example, book publishers have the loss of print sales, but enjoy the rise in e-book sales. For some creative industries - copyright infringement may actually be helping to advertise and boost revenues. From 2001 to 2010, sales and rentals of DVDs have declined by about 10 percent, but the global revenues have increased by five percent in that same time period (Ukraine 2013). 

  For instance, South-Korean musician Psy’s music video "Gangnam Style" is benefited from thousands of people creating remix and cover versions (Moody, 2012). Those remix video might not connecting directly with his music sells, but it would help build his reputation and attract more people to notice his music. As a result, "Gangnam Style" has become the most-viewed video on YouTube ever, Phy then become a millionaire from YouTube ads and iTunes downloads. File-sharing can in fact boost awareness of a product and boost sales that can often offset the losses in revenue from illegal sharing of content.

  Censorship is the suppression of speech caused by a government, media outlet or other controlling body. It happens for a many reasons including national security, protecting children or other vulnerable groups, to promote or restrict political or religious views, and to prevent slander and libel. However, the one which makes me objectionable is political censorship.

  Political censorship exists when a government attempts to conceal and distort information on media. According to a Harvard study, at least 18,000 websites including Facebook and YouTube are blocked in mainland China. China is a communist country that trying to control its people from the truth about anything but messages what the Government tells them (Peeva 2013). It is easy for people to share information and communicate via social media thus the Chinese government is afraid that citizens may take their cues from social media and start a riot themselves.

Freedom of the press is giving the person the right to speak about anything they feel is unjust. In my opinion, everyone has the right to seek, receive and share information and ideas without fear or interference.

  References list:

Peeva,Boyana. 2013. “The Ten Most Popular Blocked Websites in China.” Accessed Feb 25, 2013.http://www.websitepulse.com/blog/the-10-most-popular-blocked-websites-in-china

  Ukraine Timeline. “Despite lobbyist claims, piracy not killing media industry, study shows”. Accessed Oct 4, 2013. http://rt.com/news/piracy-damage-study-uk-726/

New technologies such as internet have dramatically changed peoples’ communicating ways. The online communication has combined different kinds of communication we are already familiar with, such as mail, messaging and telephone all in a single device. At the same it also improves the communicating quality with allowing users to share photos, sounds and video. Mediated communication has also created many interesting affect like text messaging abbreviation and emoticons.

  Making connection worldwide is the heart of the social media and explains why it has grown so successfully. It has dramatically enhanced the quality and frequency of communication. One of the biggest advantages is that users can break the boundaries between countries and distance (Murdock 2012). People can make connection with others from all over the world through internet. Long-distance friends, family and romantic partners can talk to one another regularly, helping maintain a close connection. Emails, photos or documents can be sent just by a quick click, business organizations can contact and collaborate with others by using new technology devices. Users can make communication with large groups of people, to several or even hundreds at the same time, for the whole group to read and discuss.

  Meanwhile, the mediated communication has caused some problems to the users. Firstly it has made the communication less formal and less carefully structured. Like instant messages and blogging, could lead to problems like poor writing skills, poor grammar, misspellings, and inappropriate use of abbreviations (Fenell 2013). Secondly, people tend to use emoticons to express their face emotion and feeling in messaging. However face to face nonverbal communication cues such as body languages, eye contact and speaking style are much more important to reinforce the message you are communicating. These reinforcements are lost in mediated communication, thus leaving your message more vulnerable to being misunderstood. Finally, people would easily be dependent on mediated communication. Many people are self-conscious about their skin color or out looking. When communicating through electronic devices, people are less self-conscious about physical characteristics. However when they return to real life, they would easily become shy again and find that they cannot communicate in an appropriate way without a computer. It is because new technologies cannot your attractiveness and speaking skills.

  We live in a technological world that we are always communicating. But there’s no question that a Facebook or Twitter chat can’t substitute for a face-to-face conversation. No matter how many Facebook friends like your status, none of them can substitute for a real friend’s talk . It is impossible for a person to get connection with thousands of friends. It’s like a young girl sitting alone in her room enjoy messaging instead of going out to meet her friends in the “real” world (Ingram 2012). In my opinion, mediated communication is not a worse or better way of doing communication, but just a way to enhance how messages are conveyed.

    References list:

Fenell,Zachary. 2013. “Disadvantage For Communication In Computer Technology”. E How. Accessed April 29, 2013.http://www.ehow.com/facts_5784382_disadvantage-communication-computer-technology.html

  Ingram, Mathew. 2012. “Is The Internet Making Us More Lonely Or Less Lonely?”. Accessed April 23, 2012. http://gigaom.com/2012/04/23/is-the-internet-making-us-more-lonely-or-less-lonely-yes/

The media has brought a new online growth area to media enterprises. For example: online shopping, which allows people buy goods or products on the internet. Online shopping has been popular because of its convenience, it is available 24 hours a day, and people would just need internet access to do it. Due to the advancement of technology, now there are apps that let customers compare prices in the store with other retailers. Or in the future there will be Google Glass that can identify the product you are looking at with just a picture. Social media is now playing a huge part in boosting online shopping. New research from eBay suggests the value of social media for retail will more than double to more than $3 billion annually in the next two years (Tatty 2013). By using new media, customers can easily compare prices between two websites, they can do research before making purchases. They can search multiple websites in order to compare prices or even get online coupon.

  Alibaba, Amazon and E Bay are the largest online shopping organizations. On the other hand, new media allows people to start their own online shopping organization. The connectivity and convenience of social media can easily drive customer engagement. People can start with uploading content for friends online, and those friends can share it with more and more people. As a result, a few hundreds followers can quickly turn to millions of people getting in touch.

  New media is also changing the way to run an organization. For example, Wikipedia, a free internet encyclopaedia, allows anyone who can access the site to edit the articles, and this is called Distributed Knowledge. As a result, volunteers worldwide collaboratively have written Wikipedia's 30 million articles, with nearly 500 million unique visitors a month.

  New media has brought us connectivity, but at the same time, it may lead to some inconvenient situation. There are shops that are using armbands to keep trackof how quickly and competently employees unload and scan goods in the warehouse (Suddath 2013). The same technology is going to be used in telework, by using applications or software, employers can track the production of their employees via internet. In my 5 minutes review last week, many of the students are concerning about the privacy issue of telework that these kind of technologies may make people feel embarrassing. In my opinion, technology is making our life more efficient, but it may also bring some disadvantages.

  Organizations are now doing everything to cut their investment costs and labour costs, therefore the new media would probably be extremely exploited. More companies are using computers to manage business. Computers can use for creating and processing documents. For a small company, a single computer with a few software programs can provide sufficient computing power, thus the business can focus more on sales. However as a result, jobs are destroyed, making people more difficult to get a job.

References list

Fuchs, Christian. 2014. “The Power and Political Economy of Social Media.” In Social Media: An Introduction, 97 – 125. London: Sage Publications.

http://www.clickworker.com/en/crowdsourcing-glossar/cloud-labour/

Suddath, Claire. 2013. “Tesco monitors employees with Motorola armbands.” Bloomberg Business Week, March 13. Accessed March 19, 2014.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-13/tesco-monitors-employees-with-motorola-arm-bands

Tutty, Jacinda. 2013. "Social Media driving online fashion sales in Brisbane as savvy shoppers tag a bargain" The courier mail. June 15, 2013.

When you are sharing news on Facebook, Twitter, or uploading videos on YouTube, have you ever think of you actually have a power in your hand? Think of the passengers on a ship who got a boat of their own. The formerly atomized listeners can now connect with each other and gain the means to speak to the world. You were once readers of the news, choosing The Australian or the MX, now we can edit the news, and our choices send items to our own front pages (Rosen 2006). Thus we got power in our hands now, which is come from new media.

  Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, has a term for people who have this new power: The Active Audience, who does not want to just sit back and watch. We now can create and share our own videos, and even share our feelings through social media. We can interact with each other through sharing pictures or videos. YouTube makes it easier to share media contents on social media, it allows us to watch not just funny videos but also news content, news analyses or sports highlight. The communicating format has shifted from the old style (one-way, top-down media consumption) to the new media convergence format, from printing press to blog, TV to YouTube, radio to podcast. 

  In the traditional media format, audiences were on the receiving end, listened to the big media firms in isolation from one another. But today we are not at the situation like that. As the social media developed, it empowered audiences to get involved. “Audiences play an active role in ‘spreading’ content: their choices, their investments and their actions determine what gets valued.” (Green and Jenkins 2011, 116). The spreadability of internet allows users to interact and collaborate, to spread our own ideas with others. We can create and share news content through mobile devices at any time. We can also attract awareness with more people sharing your content or giving comments. It is free and easy for people to pass along their favorite songs, videos to friends, or to the larger social network. Powerful new production tools and distribution channels are enabling the mute to speak and the invisible to be seen, the passive audiences to become active.

  According to the statistics of Bramwell 2013, Australians are spending the majority of their time online, 3.6 hours a day on social media. While they spent an average of no more than 2 hours a day watching TV (News Mail, 2013). Undoubtedly, many audiences are shifting from traditional media to social media, does it means that we don’t need the television anymore? Social media has the advantage of broad reach and instant broadcast, people can see the news on Facebook even before news organizations have a chance to report it. However, a fast and efficient way does not mean that information it delivers is 100% accurate, many people do not trust the news that social media delivered. In my opinion, the world will always need traditional journalists to provide the public with trusted news. Social media is not replacing traditional media but improving the traditional media, giving a new way to develop.

      Reference list:

Bramwell, Kathryn. 2012. "13 million Australians spend 18 Hours a day online". Accessed July 12,2012.

https://www.pria.com.au/industrynews/13-million-australians-spend-18-hours-a-day-online

Green, Joshua and Henry Jenkins. 2011. “Spreadable Media. How Audiences Create Value and Meaning in a Networked Economy.” In The Handbook of Media Audiences edited by Virginia Nightingale, 109-127. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

NewsMail. 2013. "Shocking statistics show how much time we spend watching TV". Accessed July 23, 2013.

http://www.news-mail.com.au/news/month-a-year-just-watching-tv-shows/1954849/

Rosen, Jay. 2006. “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.” PressThink: Ghost of Democracy in the Media Machine, June 27. Accessed February 4, 2014.  

We are living in a techno-social hybrid world. Electronic devices such as mobile phones and tablets are everywhere around us, even a three years old boy can own a smart phone. There is a video on YouTube that showing a baby swiping her little fingers on the magazine pages, she thought that the magazine pages would work as a touch screen. This has raised a lot of debates about technology, parenting and how information travels these days. In my opinion, this does not actually reflect the bad affection of new technologies, but it represents the frequency and proportion of technologies that they are replacing the traditional media.

  According to the Bonier Media map, 90% of world current data was generated in last two years (Sara 2013). The use of new media and internet has grown suddenly and substantially in this period. How did this happen? Why are people fond of mew media?

  Firstly we have to know what new media is. New media is stand for new devices, new platform and new communicating culture.  Facebook and smartphones are representing new media. They are good examples of media convergence, coming together of different communicating platforms, media devices and contents. Customers can enjoy the function of newspaper, internet, email and phone call in one single latest smartphone. Through different apps like WhatsApp or WeChat, people can reach others no matter where they are and when it is. 

  Do you know how long time are people spending on Facebook? 10.5 billion! This is the minutes that people spending on Facebook globally each day. Unbelievable, isn’t it? “Facebook is a comprehensively mediated public platform for users to reveal their experiences and expressions of everyday life.” (Deuze, 2011: 137) The shareability and scalability of Facebook have led to a new managing way of privacy. People are more willing to share their daily life and feeling through social media, they are sharing their privacy as a default. Using Facebook is just like sleeping in a glass bedroom, showing off your private life and characteristics to the public.

  As a result, Facebook has become the platform to form understandings of and relations to ourselves and others. People are shaping their personalities, promoting themselves by uploading beautiful photos and typing some interesting status. Facebook is working just like a personal PR campaign, and has given users to become a mini-celebrity (Turnbull 2013). Users are encouraged to compete with others to see who is more famous and who can get more “likes”. People are doing self-promotion to gratify their vanity. Many users are addictive to Facebook, because the “likes” and comments make them feel good and satisfied.

  It is difficult to define new media is good or bad. It helps making connection between people conveniently, but at the same time would make users addictive and wasting so much time. Facebook is connecting users with friends on the internet, while it makes us ignore our friends in real life.

      Reference list

  Deuze, Mark. 2011 “Media Life.” Media, Culture & Society 33 (1): 137 – 148

  Sara Ohrvall, Megan Miller, Andrea Mazzy.  2013. Media Map 2013. Bonnier R&D. Accessed Jan 2013.

Retrieved from:

http://www.bonnier.com/Global/RD%20blog/MM-2013-webversion_lo-res.pdf

  Turnbull, Joe. 2013. Is Facebook sharing making us more vain? The Guardian. Accessed 26 September 2013.