Re-cap from New Communication Technologies

The topics of this course include:

·         Understanding technology and looking at it as a technical component.

·         How new comm. Tech. relates to the users.

o   Organizational, socioeconomic  and social structures

o   How people want to be a part of new comm. Tech.

o   The existence of the hardware is embedded in ourselves.

·         What we associate with the gadget become more than the gadget itself.

·         Sociopolitical and cultural uses for different technology

o   Why people want to use these technologies

·         Social media and how it has become a digital crowd-sourcing platform.

·         New comm. Tech is faced with enabling factors and limiting factors.

·         Motivating factors and how they relate to social media

·         Diffusion of innovation: Risk takers, laggards, etc.

·         Shirky: It takes a village to find a phone

o   Society changes once we change the way we communicate

·         Flatteners of the world

o   Socialism as an ideology and the collapse of that ideology in the Soviet Union

o   Information flow.

o   Netscape and the internet – In-sourcing and outsourcing

§  Bridged gaps in communication

§  Couldn’t be restricted

·         Globalscapes

o   Being able to use the internet to see the world without leaving home.

o   Movement of people without restrictions and unknowingness

·         Digital Diaspora

o   Indians who came and occupied areas of Hispanics.

o   Unprecedented flow of information that was previously impossible

o   Digital marginality, empowerment, displacement

o   Exclusion embedded design

·         Users of the world unite

o   Challenges and opportunities of social media

·         Media ethics

o   Washington Post reporter tweeting about Ben Rothlesburger

o   How do you identify ethics?

o   What is ethical is not always legal

§  Establish the fact involved

§  Determine stakeholders

§  Establish values

§  What are the competing variables

·         Challenges and opportunities of covering a crisis

o   Ushahidi-Hati

o   Mapping and how it can help people

·         Citizen Journalism

o   Cell phone videos

·         Drugs, cellular telephones and privacy in Canada

·         Blogosphere in India

·         Twitter and its fan base

Conducting research and conceptualizing the idea

Gathering data and reviewing it

Placing ones ideas with what others have written

Difference between data and literature review

Communicating what the content means

Form in which you disseminate the information

Infographic: Facebook vs. Twitter Demographics

This article is absolutely stunning. Looking at the facts and figures of how many people actually use social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter makes you wonder why anyone would ever oppose using social media. The current number of people who use Twitter is 106 MILLION. That, to me, is incredible. But when you read on and you see that Facebook currently has 500 MILLION users, that blows Twitter out of the water. Looking at the graphs, the fact that 41% of all Facebook users log in to Facebook EVERY DAY and the majority are 18-34. This is a no-brainer for marketers who are targeting this demographic. People keep saying that social media is killing journalism and that it is a giant waste of time... but in reality, social media is becoming the new journalism... it is becoming an amazing outlet for marketers to utilize.

Haiti Relief Effort Marks a Tipping Point for Mobile Charity

"Today is a huge day for mobile giving".- Says one Tony Aiello, CEO of mGive in this article on USNews. Mobile giving is set up through this company. It means that someone can send a text message or post a Facebook status about a certain cause and this company teams up with other companies, such as Facebook and Twitter, to make sure that once people do post these things to their site, that a monetary donation is made to a cause. This has been called a hoax by critics about Facebook and Twitter but the text message giving is very easy to calculate and watch. Twitter and Facebook are easily used to spread the word about these mGive movements but the real money is coming from people texting a certain word to a phone number and the money that they choose to give is being charged to their cell phone bills. This is a great way to raise awareness and help foreign countries and it only takes a second.  In one week, this company, mGive, had raised over $2 million for the Red Cross efforts in Hati. This would not be possible if it weren't for Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, text messaging and new communication technologies. I think that this effort is great and the fact that all of these social media outlets have been used to benefit such a great cause, that many other institutions should look into something like this to help raise money for their own causes and relief efforts.

Covering Disaster

"Information flows must be two-way to be effective—from the external world to the affected community, but
also from those affected to the agencies seeking to help them in useful ways."
In this article, this is one part that stuck out to me. A lot of times, people dont see information as a two-way flow between parties. Many times, people see their message as a one way street. That they only want to get the information that they want to get out there and then they expect nothing in return. People also dont understand that oftentimes, their messages are much more widespread than they think. When people use the world wide web, they oftentimes do not understand the reach that they have. In regards to the introduction of this article, in Iran, protesters are looking for information from websites that Iranian officials are also posting false information on. This is very interesting. People look for information on trusted websites, as the executive summary had mentioned. Another part that I found interesting was in the introduction, they mentioned that new technologies are used for people to help prepare for, respond and recover from major disasters. This is very popular now with social media. Twitter, Facebook, email, and Youtube are all used to help raise awareness and also raise funds for countries experiencing major disasters.
New communication technologies are also used for early warning systems. Technology of detecting these disasters has become much more advanced and so has communication technologies. People are able to know much sooner that something is going to happen or has just happened because of cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This technology could help with so many different issues in relaying messages because so many people are tuned into them that the message can be reached by a giant audience in a very short period of time.
I think that communication technologies is an amazing concept and I'm very glad that we have it today.

From Innovation to Revolution

THIS article goes right off of the other article.
The question it poses is "Do Social Media Make Protests Possible" and this is exactly what I mentioned in the previous post.
Organized protests are hard to get together but recently, it has been come increasingly easier for people.
Innovations in communication technology have solved the problem of trying (and failing) to organize protests on a large scale. As Shirky said "Digital networks have acted as a massive positive supply shock to the cost and spread of information, to the ease and range of public speech by citizens and to the speed and scale of group coordination."
This quote shows exactly what I mean about how social media has made it easier for people to organize, express their opinions and to make everything go on such a large scale.

The Political Power of Social Media

The first thing that stuck out to me while reading this article was the photo of the Statue of Liberty. In one hand she carries her torch and the other, a cell phone. This conveyed so much information and put a lot of things into perspective at the same time.
Very interesting to see it portrayed in such a manner.
"The public's ability to coordinate such a massive and rapid response -- close to seven million text messages were sent that week -- " This is very impressive especially because it was back in 2001. The numbers have only increased since then. 
We're seen this happen more and more often since new communication technologies are becoming more and more prevalent in the world of politics.
This article shows how much technology has changed the face of organized politics.
Theres no way to touch on this subject and not bring up the fact about organized protests in Madison, WI against Gov. Scott Walker. SO many people have organized groups on Facebook and Tweets on Twitter about the action at the capitol dominate the Twitter Tweet Stream.
This just shows how much these social media outlets have influenced politics.

Courntey Lowery has brought up many different ideas about Twitter in this article called An Explosion Prompts Rethinking of Twitter and Facebook. The biggest thing that I found that she points out is that Twitter opens many new possibilities for journalists. She talks about how the building explosion in Montana and how reporters used Twitter to convey messages quickly and efficiently. They even used the photo capabilities of Twitter to help explain what they were trying to say about the explosion. This was the only means of communication covering the explosion in Montana and for Twitter to be used so effectively shows how much new communication technologies are taking over the world of journalism. 

This isn't the only time we've heard about Twitter being used to report the news and I'm sure this isnt going to be the last time.