Blogger

While I am not an avid blogger, I do enjoy occasionally viewing them from time to time. My favorite blogs include those that deal with music and popular celebrities. Music blogs are very useful in order to find out songs before they come out on the radio and to keep me updated on future artists to look out for. Other fans of artists that I am interested in may also blog about future concerts or gossip about them. This can sometimes lead to confusion when different people have conflicting stories or information. Because blogging is so easy and accessible, anyone can do it, and one may not know who to believe. This causes me to not believe every blog that I read because I am not really sure about the authority of the writer, along with the comments on their blog.

While I do not trust all blogs, I feel that blogging is a great form of new new media. It allows people to express how they feel individually or in response to those around them. I feel that it makes everyone feel important and the possibilities are endless when it comes to blogging. You can read one about anything or you can write one about anything. I also do not think that there is any competition between old media and this form of new media. The two seem quite symbiotic in that they both need each other. People blog about what they see on the news or hear on the radio. It allows fans to interact with each other and viewers to give feedback on what they enjoy. It is a great step forward and supplements the world around us today.

On New New Media

At 22 years young, I always find it incredibly disturbing how technology evolves at such a rapid pace. I always catch myself, as well as my friends, complaining about how old we feel and how seemingly out of touch we are becoming with the latest fad online. While we're comfortable with Facebook, it took us a while to get used to Twitter. Heck, I still remember having a MySpace and even a Friendster account from about seven years ago. While seven years doesn't seem like a long time, it seems as if technology lives in dog years as MySpace has struggled to compete with the hipper Facebook, and Friendster is seemingly obsolete.

I've spent most of my college years studying new and social media. It is something I am very fascinated with, and the rapid pace of evolution with this "new new media" guarantees that there is always something new to learn.

Perhaps the most meaningful contribution of new new media is the fundamental shift of roles. Prof. Levinson wrote about this - how anyone can be a producer - not only a viewer. Perhaps this is where most of the debate lies when it comes to new new media, and this is perhaps the main reason why I am so intrigued by the subject.

Has "new new media" brought about a cultural renaissance, or is it destroying our culture as we know it?

On the one hand, one can argue that one of the largest contributions of new new media is user generated content. As mentioned, anyone can be a producer, and anyone with a dream now has a platform to at least have a shot to reach it. Musicians such as David Choi, Alyssa Bernal, and JR Aquino have found success through YouTube. Sean Kingston, Kate Voegle, and Colbie Caillat found their big break through MySpace. On a grander scale, Justin Bieber has gone from viral video to worldwide superstar and Grammy nominee.

Those are only some of the few artists who have gained notoriety through this new new media.

On the other end of the spectrum, though, for every OK Go, there are about a thousand terrible Beatles covers. Is the glorification and opportunity of the amateur hurting culture? Andrew Keen brings forward the monkey-typewriter theory in his book The Cult of the Amateur - How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture. He writes that if you give an infinite amount of monkeys an infinite amount of typewriters, one of them will produce a masterpiece everything else is just garbage that isn't worth our time (8). He asks, "What happens... when egoism meets bad taste, meets mob rule? The monkeys take over" (9). For him, "amateur hour has arrived, and the audience is now running the show" (34).

Perhaps he takes an incredibly pessimistic view on this, but he does raise a legitimate concern. Levinson brought up how Wikipedia has challenged the encyclopedia. It makes me wonder if information like that should fall in the hands of possibly an eighth grader who is good with the internet. Wikipedia may democratize information, but it does raise doubts that it would allow the same eighth grader to be held with the same merit as a tenured college professor.

I guess the reason why the study of new new media is that it involves a lot of unanswered questions. It is constantly advancing and changing at an incredibly rapid pace and we are right in the heart of it. At the same time, we neither have the foresight nor the hindsight to decide whether new new media is good for our culture or not. It raises a lot of debate, which makes it an even more interesting subject to delve into.

Marty Mercado

@nymrtz

New Isn't Always Better

When it comes to new media, new new media, social media, web 2.0, or whatever name strikes your fancy, I don’t think that “new” necessarily means better. New media gives anyone with an Internet connection power that was formerly reserved only to a specific group of people—the power to become a producer of content. With consumers now participating in the media production process, there are countless online outlets through which one may consume information, and satisfy the incessant hunger for instant gratification.

There is no longer a need to wait to read about the latest sport star’s debacle in the newspaper—someone just tweeted it. Don’t wait for local news to cover the story about the old woman who literally drove her car through the Dunkin' Donuts—someone there snapped a picture with their cell phone and uploaded it onto their blog. And because so many sites are linked together, it’s easy to read about each of these developments as they bounce around and spread to your Facebook news feed.

Sounds great. If it’s true.

More than ever before, it is essential that people view all content with a discerning eye. Virtually anyone can post something online without to the harsh scrutiny of an editor or a team of fact checkers. A journalist reporting stories for television, print, or radio news goes out into the world, interacts with people, and comes to a conclusion about something in order to determine what is real and important for people to know. This kind of attention to detail is not currently a part of social media. Blogs contain a lot of fat, and as people learn to view sources of information more carefully, they will see that a healthy diet for consuming information does not leave room for much fat.

Social media are great avenues to hear an introduction to popular stories, or to learn people’s opinions about a topic that is generating a lot of buzz. However, they prove to be inadequate if used as a one-stop shop for all information. The sudden bombshell of becoming an Ophiuchus nearly sent my mother into shock, and the reason for the change was nowhere to be found within Twitter’s 140-character limit. The next morning, though, she was able to read all about it in the newspaper, and realize that there was no cause for alarm.

New media are a great way for friends to keep in touch, but so much of the information is unnecessary. Do we really need to know that “the baby just pooped #turdalert”? Chris’ status informs you that he was on vacation in Cancun for a week, but are you supposed to feign ignorance when he tells you about it? What about the girl you met once 4 years ago, is it necessary to keep tabs on her by perusing through her “pajammie jam” picture album?

A worrying characteristic of the Internet in general is that whatever is there is there for good. Because everyone is linked into multiple social media sites, if you don't want someone to find out about something, the best solution is don't do it. Everything is interconnected, if you "like" a double rainbow video on Youtube, every linked account creates a separate message saying so; ensuring that everyone knows you liked double rainbows all the way. Constant connectivity means there's nowhere to hide, and with apps like “foursquare,” this is literally the case. People see you’re on Gmail, Facebook, Skype, or AIM, and you can’t pretend you didn’t get the message.


One of the most interesting aspects of new media is the ability to interact with and contribute feedback to businesses, television shows, and even celebrities. Many companies have some presence social media—a Facebook fan page or an official Twitter account—which allows those with an interest to offer support, voice concerns, or discuss common interests with others. This type of interaction is sure to gain further momentum, and holds great potential for the future.


The most enticing example is the game "Late Night Hash Tags” on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.” Anyone with a computer, Internet connection, and twitter account can contribute a joke to the show and could have their tweet read on national television. The ability to participate in an NBC television show and potentially gain recognition on the air is a huge incentive, and I can only hope that other programs begin to introduce similar systems soon.

Follow me at @idontgiveaDan