My Experience in New Communication Technology Class

            Prior to taking New Communication Technology, I was naive to the connectivity of the world. It blows my mind how we are all so united in certain ways. The reasoning behind this has to do with the flatteners of the world, which were discussed in class.  Flatteners consist of events from the 21^st centaury that caused the world to become more integrated, more in unison. Some of the major flatteners are the Collapse of the Berlin Wall, Netscape going public, outsourcing, and the steroids. Steroids are a concept that refers to technology, such as mobile phones.

            Mobile phones were also discussed in Clay Shirky’s article “It Takes a Village to Find a Phone.” This article dealt mainly with the following concepts:

• ·      The power of group action, given the right tools
• ·      When we change the way we communicate, we change society
• ·      How dramatically we are connected to one-another

“Users of the World Unite” was another article we read in class by Andreas Kaplan and Michael Heinlein, which taught me how social media is a revolutionary trend. The piece went on to explain how social media should be of interest to companies operating in online space or any space. There were five points shared about using social media that I won’t forget:

1.     Be active

2.     Be unprofessional (this point I found most interesting)

3.     Be honest

4.     Be humble

5.     Be interesting

When talking about social media in class, we also touched on the ethics of media in general. How to do identify what is ethical, how to identify what is legal , and the 4 steps using the Potter Box to determine if a situation is ethical were all things we went over.

One of the last topics we went over in class was the challenges and opportunities of covering a crisis. We specifically talked about a crowd-sourcing site called Ushahidi, which is a non-profit tech company that develops open source software for information collection. For example, they provide interactive mapping to pin point where help is needed during a crisis. They are able to do so by people submitting information, crowd-sourcing.

The class ended off with us doing a research paper that had to do with a concept from class. I chose to research the question of weather the Internet and civilian journalism would replace print media? Doing this research paper taught me how to conduct my own research, extract meaning from my research, and then communicate it well.

Overall taking New Communication Technology this semester has taught me how the world is so connected, the reasoning behind that, how social media is revolutionizing the world, the ethics of media, crowd sourcing, and how to conduct research. Clearly, I learned a lot. This class broadened my concept of the world and understanding how it functions. 

My Twitter Handle

Follow me on Twitter! I mostly tweet about public relations, technology, and other communication news. My Twitter handle is bennettrv21 or just click the link below.

http://twitter.com/bennettrv21 

Thanks and hope you follow me :)

Hey, All You Communication Majors!!

I'm doing research for my New Communication Technology class. I'm writing a paper on how the Internet affects print media. It would be awesome if you could complete the survey below, just click on the link below:)

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/F7WRHJK 

Won't take more than a couple minutes :)

Thanks so much!

9 MISTAKES THAT CRUSH A COLLEGE JOURNALIST’S CAREER

My new communication technology teacher, Dr. Wachanga, assigned my class to read an article discussing mistakes that college journalists make. I found the article to have helpful advice that everyone should know, but rarely gets informed of. The mistakes were common ones that many make and don't realize. College journalists make generalizations about things, and this article corrects that. I would recommend all journalism major or minors read it.

http://journoterrorist.com/2011/04/06/9-mistakes-that-crush-a-college-journalists-career/

Jim Disrude’s Presentation

            Jim Disrude came into my new communication technology class last week and discussed how to conduct research well. He used his own research work as an example.

            Disrude did a research paper on the effects of Teacher Self-disclosure via Social Networks on Teacher Competence. For this topic he created two Facebooks displaying two different versions of the same professor. One version displayed the professor as an outgoing, fun guy, with a fun profile picture. The other version displayed the professor as a very professional and mature kind of guy, with a profile picture of him in a suite.

            Once Disrude finished creating the Facebooks he showed them to undergraduate students of both sexes and made them decide which professor they would want to have.

Results showed that the majority of students would prefer to have the fun looking professor over the other one, even though both professor were technically the same person with the same credentials listed on Facebook.

Disrude’s expample of his own research is a great display of well-put together work, because he chose a great topic that is relevant and important to him. Disrude, himself is a professor. The way he went about conducting his own research is impressive. His Facebook professor test/survey was perfect for his topic. The audience he targeted for his research results was both specific and fitting.

           Overall after hearing Disrude speak, I now feel more prepared to conduct my research well. He gave great advice and a great example with his own work. 

From Innovation to Revolution

In Malcolm Gladwell’s article, From Innovation to Revolution, he undermines Shirky’s article, The Political Power of Social Media. In Shirky’s article, he highlights how due to the increase of those in the networked population, people have much greater access to information, more opportunities to engage in public speech, and an enhanced ability to undertake collective action. Shirky shows the example of how texting supposedly gathered massive amounts of people in the Philippines to protest against a government decision.  Gladwell does not support Shirky’s main point, on how social media has revolutionized public organization.

 Gladwell thinks that just because innovations in communication technology happen does not mean that they matter; or, to put it another way, in order for an innovation to make a real difference, it has to solve a problem that was actually a problem in the first place.

            What evidence is there that social revolutions in the pre-Internet era suffered from a lack of cutting-edge communications and organizational tools?

            Did social media solve a problem that actually needed solving? Gladwell sure doesn’t think so.

The Political Power of Social Media

            Clay Shirky’s article, The Political Power of Social Media, discusses how social media tools, like texting, have made the world’s communication landscape much denser. Since the rise of the Internet in the early 1990s, the world's networked population has grown from the low millions to the low billions.

 Due to the increase of those in the networked population, people have much greater access to information, more opportunities to engage in public speech, and an enhanced ability to undertake collective action. Shirky shows this reality through the impeachment trial of Philippine President, Joseph Estrada.

            Thousands of Philippine citizens, angry at their corrupt president, converged on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, a major crossroads in Manila. They protested because, loyalists in the Philippine Congress voted to set aside key evidence against Estrada. The protest was arranged, in part, by forwarded text messages reading, "Go 2 EDSA. Wear blk." The crowd quickly swelled, and in the next few days, over a million people arrived, choking traffic in downtown Manila. 

            Due to the public’s ability to coordinate a massive group of people, they got what they wanted; the evidence against Estrada was presented to the public.

            It’s crazy how social media has become such a powerful tool to not only network with others, but also to create social change. Because of this fact Governments need to beware of how their actions can be challenged and they need to know how to handle such situations.

            Shirky raises the question: How does the ubiquity of social media affect U.S. interests, and how should U.S. policy respond to it?

            U.S. policy needs to embrace social media and take into account the power it does have.