Week 6 - Response to Lecture

The topic for this week is Media, more specifically New Media and Social Media.

For New media we discussed virtual communities and individual identity. While also learning about the internet like the invention of interactive web 2.0.

We learned the definition of technology is the scientific study of mechanical arts and their applications in the world. We also learned the definition of media which is when technology is used for social and cultural communication, that technology becomes a medium of communication.

We defined virtual community, which is a way to explain a group of people who communicate via the internet, and Individual Identity, which is a way to explain how people express who they are via the internet.

The early internet helped people who were isolated in different geographic areas to meet people with similar interests. However we learned that focus has moved away from groups of people with common interests to networks where the individual is the common thread.

Web 2.0 was a bi-product of the dot.com crash of 2000. Tim O'Reilly and his friends wanted to motivate the tech community into feeling good about itself again so they came up with the idea of a read-write web where average people can contribute unlike the old read only web.

This new 2.0 web created a few new key terms such as:

Folksonomy: Using tags on posts or items, and describes users defining the category rather than some authority figure imposing the structure.
User-generated content: People create photos, images, texts and put it on the internet.
Open API: Means sharing data openly between services on the internet.

This new 2.0 web was the cause of social media, with Web blogs like twitter, Social Network services such as Facebook, and a content sharing community such as you-tube.