Baruch Blog

Hey everyone,

So basically we finished filming our project. We are in the final stages of editing and publishing it for all to see on this blog. The idea that we used wasn’t as bad or painful as we thought it would be. We basically realized that if we each bring an idea to the table, we can combine it and make a successful project. Considering it was dealing with social networks, the possibilities were endless in terms of what kind of message, we were to convey. We decided to do a mocking/parody of the social networks. This would sort of show what people really think about social networks besides all the positivies it brings to the table. Then again anything can be bad, if not used in moderation. So we hope to have it up soon for all to see.

So basically Me, Peter, Foujia, and Ana have decided to come up with a short parody clip dealing with social networks.  Since we had the opportunity to research various networks and see how they function, we can show why they are so popular. We would like to analyze them in our own way in a comedic form.  We will most likely shoot for the top 3-5 social networks and talk about how they function and why people are using them/why they should be using them. If anyone has ever seen the AT&T/ Apple’s MAC vs Windows’ PC commercials, then you will understand the style we will be using to film the clip and our tone.  We will most likely be using either a standard video camera or we might just film it on an iphone if possible since the new one has 1080p full HD video recording, it will be of the same quality as a video camera.

My spring break was spent working at my current job in a real estate management company doing accounting work. I didn’t really do much until the last weekend of spring break. I found some interesting things when researching for my social network group presentation on social networks.  I was really intrigued by the social network Tumblr. This program is literally as good as Twitter but more content based.  I found it amazing, that you can post videos and pictures with comments instantly for the world to see, with a link to your work.  I see this program overtaking Twitter because of the fact that this form of micro blogging is more interactive.

In Clay Shirky’s “Cognitive Surplus”, Clay goes on to speak about the meaningful ways of sharing content through social media outlets such as Wikipedia or just webpages alone intended on relaying information to the outside world.  He uses an example of how people decided to share Kenyan war outbreaks and civil unrest virally through internet posts and video clips on a particular website called Ushahidi.com.   He also went on to discuss that there are websites that post information and video clips out of mere nonsense such as ICanHasCheezburger.com and he views this as social media garbage.

In my experience with this type of social media sharing, I believe that its just another form of entertainment, however it can unite people together.  One very new community page that was just started not too long ago on Facebook just happens to deal with Baruch.  It is called Baruch Memes, and while this group does post images with funny captions such as “Takes Intro to Business….Starts Giving Financial Advice”, it not only provides a sort of parody on Baruch’s everyday life, but it gives students a sort of unity.  I don’t believe this is a waste of time, because if something happened in the school such as another student protest (as Baruch had previously last year), then people would instantly know about the next event through social media community pages.  I don’t think that every social media page dealing with a serious matter is instantly deemed the only kind of information relay.  Any kind of social media community can benefit from its users, as everyone can share their opinion and any useful information, if ever needed.

This tutorial will be a brief but sweet way for protecting your computer from harmful attacks especially if you have multiple computers sharing a network router which is very open to attack without proper computer protection.

Step 1: Make sure to have a firewall running active.

The firewall is very essential to blocking out potential hackers/spammers from getting in your network and unleashing a potential virus that can do something as bad as wipe your hard drive completely (has happened to me before) or just try to corrupt files from being used.  Windows now has their own firewall protection as well as a monitoring system called Windows Defender, however it still may be more effective to use a standalone firewall protection company such as Norton Firewall 0r McAfee.  These firewall software instantly detect any potential harmful activity that is surrounding your network and can even remove a potential attack from taking place if captured within time.

Step 2: Have an anti-virus software client ready

This is also a very crucial protector against viruses, spam and any kind of harm in the form of a file or fake installation program.  Anti-viruses also can detect potential harm to the computer and can instantly remove it from your system if detected in time.  Some companies that can do the job for this type of protection would be Kaspersky Anti-Virus and Norton.

Step 3: Use a Spyware/Malware protector.

Many people don’t realize is that potential harm to the computer doesn’t have to be in the form of a malicious attack on the network or a virus.  It can be cookies stored on the computer that contain malware or spyware (which is also bad for the computer). These files try to install themselves onto your computer and can instantly corrupt your system.  I personally have seen from my friends computers (of which i inspected), and their machines would be 50x slower than a normal pc.  Loading time for an application as simple as the internet would be drastically slow. Once infected by spyware/malware, unless a good program is used such as Ad-Aware or Malwarebytes. Most of the time the computer can’t be fixed to operate at faster speeds unless completely cleaned (most likely installing a new copy of the operating system would fix this solution, but it can be costly and timely as an installation can take anywhere from 1 hour to hours of the day because of all the programs and drives (audio,sound, video) have to be reinstalled and if an operating system disc is not available, then it must be purchases and that can cost anywhere from 199.99-399.99 for the disc.

When we see today’s media such as video clips or photographs with special information,  we don’t realize that a lot of the content that is put together, is actually a combination of invidual items.  According to Manovich,  “Media elements…are represented as collections of discrete samples.  These elements are assembled into larger-scale objects but continue to maintain their separate identities”  I personally agree that can be considered an example of New Media, because when you look at how content was displayed such as the news, there was never as much online content as there is now.  People can watch breaking news live from a website with extra content added onto the page. Manovich describes how you can post videos on Word documents and the video will not affect the text itself. This is very crucial in todays technology and  the good thing is that these videos never conflict with the actual text editing that is done.  One big example of this would be how Facebook allows users to post Youtube links on peoples news feeds.  These links refer to webpages creately separately and they do not jeopardize the coding on Facebooks site.  It is a mere addon to the page and doesnt conflict with Facebooks running.  The fact that Youtube is a digitial video streaming service which has its own coding done on the page and can spread that coding to other websites without destroying the original content is amazing.  I am curious as to what people can think of next?