Category Archives: Assignments

Creativity and generosity are two words thrown around a lot without sometimes a real definition of what they really mean. A point i would like to talk about today that Shirky mentioned is about the difference between a professional and a amateur in editing and producing on the internet. Shirky is not arguing whether or not the amateur should be aloud to do it but whether the credibility is there for him or her to do it. Any website ending with “edu” we can proclaim to be legit because we know our source and have respect for it. When you see the “edu” you automatically think of a college or school in general and the professionalism they must show and obey by in terms of internet posting and editing. Our mind immediately tells us this is a reliable source and has validity. Now there also are many websites where sometimes you have to question whether the information is right and if the source who wrote it has credibility to actually write it. For instance, there is a reason many professors tell us not to use wikipedia as a source. It is OK to use it to gather information but to actually cite it might not be. You might not even know who your citing. Wikipedia is made up of multiple users editing so due to that the credibility is lost and it becomes “amateur”.

Shirky says people post things for the public because of two types of motivations, intrinsic and extrinsic. I believe that most people post or do things for intrinsic reasons more so than extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is when you want to do something. Extrinsic motivation is when somebody else tries to make you do something. Most people do not have extrinsic motivation. To be honest, people may consider this blogging assignment extrinsic because we are being told to do it. But for most cases, intrinsic motivation is usually the case. We post about different things because we want people to read it or people to have there view on it. If we really didn’t want to do it and didn’t want people to view it, we would not use the internet.

As time proceeds, one begins to see what the seeming constants are in the internet media world as much as anywhere else. It looks like the web will stay around. It looks as if the form of blogging will stick about for the next decade. It looks like advertising will fund written media. It looks like the mobile internet will mirror all of these assumptions, even as internet use switches from the PC to the mobile and tablet device.

In chapter 6 of Here Comes Everybody, Shirky talked about hoe the reason behind the catholic church had to address the problem sooner and better because people where organizing faster in ways they couldn’t before. But thanks to new media such as emails, and weblogs, people are able to gather much easier and voice there opinions better. This brings me to the point of not just the internet but new media in general removes old barriers and speeds everything up and “spreads the word” faster.

A month ago, I would have never known what KONY 2012 was. Do to new media such as social networks, I could not ignore the vast amount of attention this topic was getting and the amount of people talking about it. Back in the good old times, word use to spread from mouth to mouth. You would tell someone who would tell someone and so on. Now, all i have to do is upload a video or a status and 10 minutes later could have hundreds and maybe even thousands view my opinion.

Now the development of new media and the results its brought form organizing people in a faster and quicker way is not always positive. For instance we all know what happened at Rutgers University when the kid committed suicide due to his roommates actions. Due to the growing technology in new media word can spread in a negative manner as well.

Chapter 5 talked about the concept of collaboration. Nobody is really managing the collaboration and how things can be done faster and on a much larger scale then before. If you wanted to watch an old movie and did not want to rent out a DVD it would be extremely easy to go online and open up a website for free. Everyone does it. Acts such as stop online privacy act(SOPA) are trying to get passed to stop this and manage this issue but who how long will that take? Until there is quality management, collaborations will only get larger and grow even faster then they are know.

Remember the time we wrote our numbers down on a piece of paper if someone would ask for it ? Or what about the time it took us 35min just for our desktop to start ? To be quiet honest those times seem like ancient history. Cell phones without cameras and web browsers feel awkward and “old school”. In today’s society, technology has taken over and has really become a man’s best friend.It really doesn’t hit you until you realize your 6 year old nephew knows more about the iPhone then you do.

In the book Here Comes Everybody by Shirky, the author talks about how technology is vastly changing day by day and how we as people have become media outlets. Media technologies have created a new era in which we live in. It has impacted our lives far greater then anything else. We all know that feeling when we leave our cellphone at home and have to spent the entire day without it. Shirky talked about how change in technology has changed the way we do things. For instance, having an high resolution camera on my phone allows me to be ok if I leave my camera home while going on a trip.

Another thing Shirky talked about is how we are becoming outlets for information to be passed around. Shirky talked about groups and organizing people and how the internet and technology make that easier for us. For instance, lets look at ratemyprofessors.com. Including myself, we all are guilty of using that website to look for classes and professors we want. Somebody makes a post regarding that class and the professor they had and there opinions about him/her. When it comes to picking our classes we go on that website and read what others wrote before we make our decision on to pick that professor or not. Whether we notie it or not it plays a big impact on the class we pick. Ratemyprofessor can be classified as a group/organized website where numerous amount of people share there ideas and thoughts. Other examples of how we have become outlets is eBay and Facebook. We use these websites to interact with other people and share our ideas or in the case of eBay our stuff. The hours spent on Facebook in one day is mind boggling and really shows how technology has taken over our friends as well.

After doing my own research and reading “Here Comes Everybody”, I can say with confidence that a man’s best friend is the technological device in his pocket.