Week 2: Social Media: An Emerging Media

The shift from industrial media to new media, or rather, social media, is becoming increasingly evident in our society today. Generations above us are gradually adapting to new means of communication and information dissemination, through mediums such as the internet, and the younger generation is growing distant and unacquainted to traditional media. Sales of music albums and hardcover (physical) books have been dwindling as more people turn to the web for online resources instead. People make use of text messages, emails, online chat facilities, and especially social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, etc to stay connected. Snail mails are no longer the primary source of communication. These are just examples of the unstoppable force that social media now possess.

Social media primarily makes use of technology and social interaction of people to function at its best. Web-based technologies are key components in enhancing communication, transforming it into interactive dialogue which is accessible for all. There are many kinds of social media, and examples include social networks (which is probably the biggest aspect), blogs, media sharing, social bookmarks, Wikis, and so forth.

As mentioned in my previous blog post, we are heavily operating on Web 2.0 today, where it is mainly a “read-write web”, focusing on social interaction around users worldwide. With the rise of social media (web 2.0), power is being shifted to the citizens who now assume both identities as senders as well as receivers of communication messages. Advancement of technology is inevitable and in fact, needful, for growth and increased welfare for the people in future. Web 3.0 is an exact example where machines are being brought into the picture. With all eyes on social media, it would definitely be interesting to see how these complex ideas unravel as community (technology + social interaction) merges with machines in the near future! Such phenomenon would most probably be termed something along the line of “semantic social web” (combination of web 2.0 and web 3.0).

As Tim Berners-Lee, one of the creators of the Web, said in 2006: "I think we could have both Semantic Web technology supporting online communities, but at the same time online communities can also support Semantic Web data by being the sources of people voluntarily connecting things together."

 Source: http://technologyvoice.com/2011/09/09/what-is-the-social-semantic-web-and-why-do-we-need-it

Coming back to social media, this week’s Com 125 lesson allowed me to gain new insights on how social media has gained incredibly much popularity in recent years. The idea that human beings are curious by nature and thus constantly want to find out more about other people settled well with me and I find myself agreeing to an explanation such as this. We all crave for companionship, attention and affirmation, and these social needs are satisfied by the social media. So as long as we are living, social media is undeniably a part of us.

One kind of social media which captured my curiosity during the week is social bookmarks. I haven’t been acquainted with this term even though I know I might have used certain bookmarking sites unknowingly. As such, I “Google-ed” it and am now equipped with a better understanding of what social bookmarking is exactly.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/08/hands-on-delicious-2-cleans-up-social-bookmarking/

Delicious, a social bookmarking website, has popularized the terms “social bookmarking” and “tagging” when it was first launched in 2003, although similar sites existed way before that. Bookmarking sites mainly provide services which allow one to save, organize and manage links to other sites and resources around the internet, and “tagging” is one of the most basic function that is being used. It helps to link different webpages, and makes it easy for people to search and share information.

Another example of a bookmarking site is StumbleUpon, which I have visited just a couple of hours ago and even created an account for myself on through the iPhone application because I found it to be really useful and convenient!! ^^

"Using search engines to locate relevant content typically means hunting through pages of results. Rather than searching for quality web sites, StumbleUpon members are taken directly to web sites matching their personal interests and preferences.

Stumbleupon is collaborative and personal. The service learns about your interests via your preferences and the friends and sites you rank using the Stumbleupon toolbar. If you see a website or content that you like, you press the thumbs up icon. If you did not like it, you give it a thumbs down. StumbleUpon tracks your preferences and serves up high specific web content targeted to your specific interests."

Source: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/06/stumbleupon_soc.html

Indeed, StumbleUpon’s advantages lie in the fact that it is personalized and specially catered for an individual to surf according to his or her preferences. By making use of social bookmarks, social media successfully appeals to the general public because it goes one step further to bring social content to the person, rather than the other way round.

RSS. As usual, it did not occur to me that I should find out what it is or what it stands for. But after this week’s lesson I fathom there is no excuse for my ignorance! RSS typically stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it is a format that allows collaboration between content providers and those who subscribe to its updates. It has made the lives of many around the world easier by providing much convenience as people no longer have to constantly go online to check for the latest or newest updates. It is all taken care of with a click of the mouse when one subscribes to the RSS feed.  

Another feature of the Web 2.0 is that of podcasts. A podcast is a collection of digital media files which is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers. As such, podcasts and RSS feeds are greatly intertwined and connected.   

Above is a video which talks about Podcast and RSS, which hopefully can help all of you reading this (and still don't quite get it) understand it better because it sure did helped me!

Week 1- Introduction to the Internet

While many today are aware of the cause and effects of the Internet- how it was invented and what kind of promising or disastrous results it has brought to mankind and the world, it is perhaps safe to say an equally astounding number of people have no idea exactly how influential the Internet has become, so much so that its existence is imperative for the society to be fully functioning and completely effective today.

Personally, it only dawned upon me when I was hit with the facts through some statistics presented in class this week, of how invasive the Internet actually is in our lives today. For instance, in simply one day, 172 and 40 million people visit Facebook and Twitter respectively. It reminded me of an article I read which claimed that if Facebook were to be a country, it would be the 3^rd largest in the world!!!!!!

Source: http://www.scribd.com/doc/108976195/Untitled-1#fullscreen

Simply put, the advancement of technology, or more specifically, the Internet, has connected billions of people worldwide to create an integrated and cohesive community online, also giving rise to the term “Netizens” (citizens which unite online).  Facebook, one of the countless social networking sites that exist on the Internet, is just an example.

The Internet was inspired by the Cold War, and has most certainly came a long way thereon, from its very humble beginnings in 1957 when it was meant to facilitate communication over long distances. The launch of Sputnik1 resulted in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s good foresight to come up with the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), which was eventually shut down before the Internet started becoming more popular in the 1980s to 1990s. Source: http://library.thinkquest.org/27887/gather/history/internet.shtml

It was fascinating to learn a little something about the history of the Internet, especially since I have been using it for as long as I can remember, and yet knew nothing about its origins before my first Com 125 lesson this week. Knowing about its motivations from past to present indeed gave me a better perception as I view the evolving of the Internet with a deeper appreciation. Moreover, being a history student who studied about the Cold War made it even more of an eye opener for me seeing how it is linked to the creation of the Internet and reconcile both concepts together!

The “Internet” is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide, while the “Web” or the “Worldwide Web” (WWW) is a system of interlinked hypertexts documents contained on the internet. After staring at both definitions on my notes, and given that (I admit) I am a computer (or rather, technology) dummy, I still cannot precisely pin point the difference between the two. As such, I took the liberty to look it up on the Internet! 

Source: http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/networking/19/314

The Internet links computers around the world together and forms a massive network infrastructure allowing users to communicate as long as they stay connected, while the Web through a selected browser (such as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, etc) uses HTTP protocol, allowing people to transmit data and access information online, i.e. viewing webpages and navigate between them by using hyperlinks. Source: http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2002/Web_vs_Internet.asp

My biggest takeaway from the first week of Com 125 is probably learning of the different types of Web progressing over the past years, mainly Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0.  Web 1.0 is also known as the internet of documents, where the content is primarily read-only files that are not meant to be altered or edited by just any user. People are given the passive role of receiving information without the opportunity of giving feedback or contributing on the other hand. Now that we think about it, it may seem impossible that people were actually once restricted from and unable to speak their minds and do what they want to online during the period when only Web 1.0 existed. This is attributed to the fact that we now live in a society in which everyone is opinionated, so much so that free speech is highly valued, thus explaining the Web 2.0 that we are familiar with today.

Web 2.0 is a “read-write web” which focuses on the interaction among users and where interconnection of people is emphasized. Increasingly more avenues of social connection and media are open up to users worldwide and they are given the option of changing and uploading content as well. Examples include Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Blogger, and so on. The many advantages of Web 2.0 significantly prevails over that of Web 1.0, but a part of my acknowledges some of the benefits of Web 1.0 provides as well, such as the prevention of flaming and hate messages that are so rampant today. 

Web 3.0 combines the previous two categories of Web and has shown great advancement by utilizing machine-to-machine interaction. It is a semantic web which incorporates machine generated content (MGC), where things are active participants of the web. To paint a clearer picture, I have attached a YouTube video summarizing the three categories of Web and hopefully it will grant all of you a better understanding as it has done for me!

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsNcjya56v8

Source: http://empowered-teacher.com/about/drupal-environment

Unlike the Internet, the Intranet is able to successfully block off outsiders to create a secure network within an organization, i.e. in school or at work. Basically, content found in the Intranet (internal web) can either be shared with the public or made private.

IP ADDRESSES!! Seriously, it sounded so technical to me I never bothered to find out what it stands for exactly. Now I know, and I will be sure to remember it from here on! IP address stands for Internet Protocol address, and it is a host number to identify itself to other hosts. In any case, every computer has its own unique IP address which is necessary for identification and communication purpose. The general idea (or rather my own understanding) is that it is the “number version” of a domain name, which only the computer with a complex mind of its own understands. This is honestly much more interesting than I actually expected, and being in Cse 111 helped me understand the whole concept of 1 byte= 8 bits so much better! :-)