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. 

Peter Shankman

I recently started following Peter Shankman's blog. He is an  "entrepreneur, author, speaker, and worldwide connector, Peter is recognized worldwide for radically new ways of thinking about Social Media, PR, marketing, advertising, creativity, and customer service." http://shankman.com/about/  


I highly recommend checking out his site as well as his blog. 


I just read his blog post "Do you know how your customers like to get their information?"

Check it out:http://bit.ly/fcY5K8  

Here is the comment I made on it:

I'm currently doing research for a paper in my new communications technology class. My paper is on the extinction of print media and I found this article intriguing, because it's about how businesses need to get in-touch with their consumers the way they want to reached. In most cases the way consumers want to reached today is not through print media. Your blog reveals how communication technology, such as phone apps, is the way to do so. Even email is growing old.

Your idea of having an app that senses your need of information is fantastic! Thanks for the post. I'm excited to see if the next new thing in communication technology will involve some type of sensing element.

I also wonder if and when email will be replaced with something better...

An Explosion Prompts Rethinking of Twitter and Facebook

I like the spin Courtney Lowery put on Twitter in this article. She described twitter as opening new possibilities for journalism.

Lowery explained how a building exploded in Montana and the only “reporters” on seen were Twitter users. They tweeted pictures and information about the explosion. There were no other media or news sources covering the event.

            Since that day in Montana, Twitter’s ability—and agility—as a tool to gather and distribute breaking news has been exhibited throughout the world, in Iran and China most notably.

            Lowery’s main point was that Twitter is much more than a simple media tool for pushing stories. Twitter has demonstrated much more potential through events like the one in Montana. 

Don't Fear Twitter

Don't Fear Twitter Article
           Although I am a user of Twitter, I’ve never taken it too seriously. I don’t rely on it as my main source of information. That’s why I found this article so interesting, pointing out that some think twitter users do use it as their main source of information.

            John Dickerson explained how a number of people fear Twitter. They fear that it is changing the world of journalism, turning it into short 140 character stories. He discussed how journalism is already getting smaller. Newspapers, for instance, are shrinking. People want short bits of news. However, that doesn’t mean Twitter threatens traditional journalism, Dickerson stated.

            Tweets usually consist of “moment to moment” observations. Dickerson explained his tweets as,  “snippets that are too off-topic or too inconsequential to work into a story. Sometimes they are the little notions or sideways thoughts that become the lead of a piece or the kicker.”

            When people tweet correctly, their entries should lead readers to finding longer articles that expand on these “moment to moment” observations.

            Overall Dickerson’s main point is that, “no one should try to make Twitter do more than it can and no reader should expect too much from a 140-character entry.”

Chapter 1: It Takes a Village to Find a Phone

5 Important Elements:

1)   The power of group action, given the right tools.

a.     We are so natively good at group effort that we often factor groups out of our thinking about the world

b.     Almost everyone belongs to multiple groups based on family, friends, work, and religious affiliation, on and on

c.      Forming groups has gotten a lot easier

2)   When we change the way we communicate, we change society

a.     The architecture of participation

3)   Without plausible promise, all the technology in the world would be nothing    more than all the technology in the world

4) One-person media outlets, the concept of the former audience

5)  How dramatically we are connected to one-another

Although I do agree with Shirky’s argument, I feel that some of the concepts he discusses are a bit over dramatic. For instance he states…

      “Now that there is competition to traditional institutional forms of getting things done, these institutions will continue to exist, but their purchase on modern life will weaken as novel alternatives for group action arise.”

      “When will the change happen? And what will change? The only two answers we can rule out are never, and nothing. “

      “These changes will transform the world everywhere groups of people come together to accomplish something, which is to say everywhere.”

I do agree with the statements above, but he is making it sound so extreme. Granted the way people communicate and interact with one other has changed dramatically in some ways, it’s hard for me to think about it in such radical terms. Maybe this is, because I’ve been so blind to the fact in how I communicate with others. I’ve been so exposed to this technology and have grown with it myself. It’s hard to step out of my routine of communication and see how it has changed so dramatically. I just keep adapting without thinking about it, I guess. 

Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history

            “Innovation can happen everywhere…”

The line above is the main point I took from Clay Shirky’s talk: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history.

            Shirky discussed how the world is currently going through the largest increase in expressive capability in human history. This is due in part; because of the line I stated earlier, innovation can happen everywhere.

            Shirky touched on how the media landscape is becoming increasingly social, because practically everyone has Internet capabilities. The Internet is the carriage to all media.  Everything gravitates towards the Internet. There is a many to many pattern that Shirky described. Both mobile and stationary Internet users can consume and produce, which is why media is no longer a one-way conversation, it’s increasingly social.

            Shirky gave the example of how recently in China an earthquake was reported as it was happening by citizens. People were uploading pictures to the Internet and Twitter. The BBC even heard the news first via Twitter. China’s government found out about the quake through the citizens as well. This example is quite historic, because it shows how the media is no longer produced by professionals, but by any Internet users. Shirky explained how this event broke through the Great Fire Wall of China, as he calls it. The Chinese Government usually filters all media viewable to its citizens on the Internet, but this time the firewall was facing the wrong way, the citizens were the ones creating the media.