Author: Vitaly

My spring break vacation was not exciting or very significant. I spent most of my time hanging out with friends, trying to catch up on stuff, having fun, doing research, learning programming languages, making 3D models, and last but not least collaborating with a few of my programmer friends on some interesting ideas in terms of new features and functionality…

I also spent significant time brainstorming on a few different web systems that I’m working on, conceptual system design stage — use cases, UI sketches, interactivity, functionality, etc…
Spent a bit of time talking with a few professors from the Baruch Environmental Group about a couple of projects that they are planning to start doing over the summer and what kind of equipment they need for field experiments.

I also caught up on “beauty sleep.” One day i slept for 24 hour…. Awesome, but then my body hurt for half a day and then i stayed up for 36 hours straight… Working on different stuff, watching Tech seminars online, etc.

I also was working on a game structure and design which is a sort of a hybrid between a classic strategy game, economic mastery, and, of course, scientific know-how. I was looking at different ways to make a “lite” version of this game as my semester project for C++ class… Turns out it is very difficult to water it down and now I’m faced with the reality of doing something else…really don’t want to do another financial application dealing with stocks and stuff…it’s been done over and over again and it is the same thing…

So, now i have to figure out what it is i will do for my semester project…

The internet bubble bust in 2000 had nothing to do with free content on the internet or advertising… It was more related to speculation on the market and overpaying for companies, because the people making investments did not understand the business model and were basing their estimates on the “old, non-internet” businesses models.

MacArthur seems very dissatisfied with the new reality that Internet presents, especially the fact that a lot of news and other written content is available for free and subsidized by advertisement. He seems too steeped in the “old” ways and completely unwilling to change… Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” theory suggests that everyone has to either adapt or become extinct. Well, i believe the same is true in regards to publication online, albeit not all of them. Publications have to either adapt or wither away. As such, most publications have “removed” barriers to their content by making it free. MacArthur is unhappy with the fact that work of writers, their written reports, are being distributed for free based on the idea of “free content, paid by advertising.” Certain aspects of this idea are vague and truly are make believe and kind of unrealistic, but not everything.
The argument that he makes regarding the lack of spreading of knowledge is completely false. He basically over generalizes the idea of content distribution as he sees it from his point of view and related directly to the industry he works in. News reporting and journalism aside…the internet has greatly improved the lives of most people by creating new industries, new jobs, raising the bar for qualifications and skills people need to have in order to succeed.
I don’t really care about his opinions on the internet…my opinions are completely different from his and i don’t want to get into the long-winded rant about why, because i already mentioned it briefly above… His opinions in regard to Journalism are eye-opening, i did not know that writers were being compensated so poorly… As such, compensation of writers is not the responsibility of readers…the company employing and distributing their content is responsible for fair compensation.

The shift from people being simply observers/consumers of content, to becoming producers can be seen all around… Take for example the simple act of writing a blog post…the one i am making right now. Back in the day this was unheard of. Today, anyone can be their own little mass media outlet, completely run from a laptop…now that is a complete sea-change in terms of content production and distribution. I would not call it a “revolution” simply because it has not had as widespread effect on the population at large as Radio or TV had… Most people still consume media in the form that they are most familiar and comfortable with – TV, radio, and printed news…but that is changing. As technology, in general, becomes more and more easy to use and acquisition costs decreases on a daily basis, the future most likely will favor distributed media model, such as micro blogging for live updates and reporting, blogging for rich media articles, podcasts for live or recorded discussions, and many others. Every day more and more people of all ages switch to digital tech for the reason of consuming multimedia content. Things like eReaders, tablets, and other mobile devices capable of viewing digital multimedia are being adopted throughout society, in businesses, schools, and for personal recreation purposes. As time goes on, we will see more and more of these devices on the market and more and more people using them. It is very likely that the future of mass media will be in the form of distributed model, meaning you will still have large mass media companies, but they will license most content from private entities, bloggers and such, who they deem to have good content and relevancy. Lets wait and see.

In my “community” there was little change simply because of, at least in my point of view, cultural reasons. However, my peers, have embraced the trend because we are younger, much more tech-savvy then our parents and older generations, and we see potential in this technology. It does not mean that we want to become our own news companies or mass media companies. We just simply have the means to contribute our opinions and thoughts on issues we want to discuss. Some see an opportunity for commercial reasons, other just want to be heard. Whatever the reason, the point is that we have the ability to be heard by millions of people, and that’s basically it.

PS: I wrote this entire post in MS Word and then copied it to WordPress… There is something about WordPress that throws my thinking off when i write a paper/article type of post, such as this one. Blogging is a very different experience then writing a paper.