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.