Social Media - Week 2

2011.... we are now living in a world fuelled by all the social media.

maybe we have already long forgotten, that a long long time ago (or maybe not that long), that we used to be solely dependent on the traditional media, eg newspaper, radio, television. Those were the days then... and thinking back, news took a little longer to reach us as compared to today, especially news that seemed a little further from us geographically.

Today, i dare say that we can learn of any event that happened around the world within 10 mins, and that's is all thanks to the thing called social media, like youtube, blogs, podcasts, facebook and twitter. And with the help of mobile phones like iPhones and HTC which allows u to access the internet to update anything you want, maybe it doesn't even have to take 10 minutes anymore. And if the content uploaded is anything phenomenon, it can generate millions of hits within a short frame of time too, meaning millions of people from all over the world have seen what you have just uploaded onto the world wide web, and so yes, that's how power the social media is now.

Social media is an efficient way to learn about the world's happenings and also help create and foster a new generation of liberal and independent people, who do not have to depend on the traditional means of media to get their news or insights. There are able to exercise their own critical thinking ability and can also express their opinions more interactively. Traditional forms of media usually go through some forms of censorship by the government or authority and many of the things or information people learned from it may be "fine tuned", hiding some kinds of truth from them. But social media is a little different, it is a participatory online media where news, photos, videos and podcast are made public via social media websites through voluntary submissions by people in the community and around the world. Unless it is anything overly serious, they will not face censorship or be taken off the web, and even by the time they are taken off the web, many people are online long and often enough to have already seen it.

In the past, people used to turn to tv or radio immediately whenever they hear of some major news. But these days, people are offered this other alternatives, which provides a broader option for them to learn about things. Social media offers a wider range of insights into things, and most importantly have more and faster updates on the various trending issues. These days, the consumers grow irritably impatient when traditional media do not provide us enough information at a fast enough speed, and increasingly there are more people just resorting to social media to feed their hunger. It is undeniable that many of us today are overly reliant on the social media today.

Internet - Week 1

The birth of the internet was related and linked to the US and USSR 's space race. While the USSR was focussed and succeeded in developing and launching technologies into space, the US not wanting to lose out and feel inferior focussed on computer science and eventually developed the internet.

Developed by the Advance Research Project Agency (ARPA), they focussed mainly on computer science and information processing. It was their goal in the 1960s to connect mainframe computers at different universities around the country so they would be able to communicate using a common language and a common protocol. In 1969, the world's first multiple-site computer network was finally launched, and that eventually developed into the internet that we use today.

Together with the internet, a browser used to surf the net was also developed. In the earlier days, we had netscape, and then slowly, we had internet explorer and suddenly, we had a "population boom" on the internet. Within a short time frame, user suddenly had many choices to choose from, such a Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera and what have you.

The internet together with browsers and perhaps also search engine formed a formidable combo. Young people these days probably no longer know what is encyclopedia, and if they are clueless about anything in the world, they no longer worry. All they have to do is simply have an internet connection, then double click on the mouse, log onto www.google.com or www.yahoo.com (in fact any search engines that exists today), type in their questions, and wala! Your answers are out there. Who cares about those bulky and space consuming encyclopedia books these days when you have google scholar and wikipedias.

But the internet hadn't always been that accessible and so interactive. When it first began, it worked on an interface/platform known as the web 1.0. Web 1.0 only allowed "read-only" websites or web documents, meaning only the creator/authors could edit or post things online. No picture postings were allowed too. Later, when web 2.0 was developed in the millennium (fall of 2001 to be exact), users saw the great change of the web. Web 2.0 had allowed more interactivity and flexibility among web surfers, as it allowed almost all surfers to "read-write" or create and generate their own contents and publish it online. In layman terms, everyone could have and create their "own space" in the cyber world. Later into the years, this sparked off an "upload/download" phenomenon and outraged various copyright infringements.

True enough, the internet has sparked off much controversies, in fact there's so much that it seems almost uncountable. Some people had called the internet the devil of millennium, but there are others, like me who beg to differ. Without internet, i doubt finding informations or doing researches would be such a breeze. Staying in touch with close ones who are miles away is gonna be such a pain and would perhaps also burn holes in pockets. And most importantly, where are we gonna get all the entertainment that we are getting these days? ;)