Advice

If I were hired by the Baruch College to use new media to improve the College, I would suggest Baruch to replace its means of communication between professors and students from BlackBoard and Baruchmail to G-mail and Hangouts. Although BlackBoard has been doing a relatively satisfying jobs over the years, many students have been complaining about its less user-friendly interface compared to other newer tools.With G-mail, students can send and forward emails to others without having to worry about doing so would mess with the configuration of the email setting.The new app called Hangouts is an interesting and interactive way of communication that has truly revolutionized the traditional way of communications between professor and students. It has the powerful function that allows students to participate in online sessions by simply clicking on the link provided by the professor. In doing this, the difference between a actual class and online class has tremendously minimized, since students are allowed to voice their opinions in a timely manner.

Privacy & Confidentiality

New media has many benefits to society in so many great ways but has also greatly challenged peoples’ privacy. Privacy and confidentiality are the biggest concerns regarding the use of new media. With the increasing popularity of social networks, much more user information will be at the hands of different organizations. Before signing up as a member, these website usually require user to provide their names, phone number, address, and so on. With these information available, any organization can track down a user with ease, which can put users at risk for privacy loss and danger. Confidentiality becomes an issue because just by using a credit card at a store someone can hack into the system database and steal a customer’s personal information. Today people have to be cautious to what they post online because if something goes viral, virtually the whole world can view it. This can be detrimental to someone’s reputation.

Creativity and New Media

I created an avatar in Second Life. In this virtual world, I am able to communicate with and meet other peoples. Aside from that I am able to experience exciting things like travel in numerous places and fly over beautiful scenes. Users can also shine themselves by dressing up.This game allows users to have a second life where users can accomplish so much more than they already have in real life, which I think can in turn encourage them to try new things and go as many places as possible while they still can.

Creativity

New media fosters creativity by allowing users to share ideas with one another in a timely manner. Its role in fostering creativity manifests in encouraging new ideas and collect as many as collective efforts from participants in order to perfect old ideas. In turn, companies can collect ideas to improve their products and services.

In his article “ Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers”, Miller explains how technology companies have been the most active in relying on others to innovate for them. People’s ideas are the source of innovation for such companies. By collecting ideas on the internet, companies can benefit from it and deliver more user-friendly products/services to the general public who gives feedback to developers. And unless we keep the process of giving feedback and improvement going, there is no new media at all.

Source
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/technology/internet/26twitter.html