Gurvir's Blog

This past Winter break I went to Los Angeles. I had posted numerous "boomerangs" on my Instagram story depicting my experience. Boomerangs are just like 3 second gifs you can create. Recently, I discovered that Instagram lets you take your 3 second gifs and combine them all if you want to tell a cool little story. So, I took all my old snippets and tried to be as chronological as possible in highlighting my trip on a day to day basis. The new media I used here is Instagram and I guess I got creative by using a bunch of little stories I had from a long time ago to create kind of a scrapbook in a sense. Hope you enjoy it!

Create a new post on your blog with the above title. In your post, cite at least one of the assigned readings and discuss how new media fosters creativity. New media such as the internet and various social media platforms like Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and etc. foster all kinds of creativity. Whether it be memes on Instagram/Twitter or Disney mashups of famous songs on Youtube, new media allows people to really get creative. The article on the NYT titled, "Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But Why?" states that, "The finished products look like music videos in which the cartoon characters do the singing." This article was very important in my understanding of new media and creativity because it shows how people are literally using stuff they find on websites like YouTube, making their own original content with it, and garnering millions of views. I think this is possible because social media is kind of like a free roaming world. Users have unlimite...

I believe that virtual worlds can be used in a number of different ways. People use virtual worlds for video games, meditating, health, educational seminars and other reasons which result in real life like experiences. Some pros of of virtual worlds are that they foster creativity and allow for users to experience events that they may otherwise be unable to. In some instances, people can be healed in health through a virtual world when they had to way to do so in the real world. Playing video games builds eye-hand coordination and also helps users relieve stress, socialize and better their communication skills. Meditating is the same in both the real world and the virtual world but sometimes you can create a different environment for yourself through a virtual world. Educational seminars are constantly growing and growing throughout the world and these are important because they connect classrooms, interns, workers, and just people in general from all over the world. In the article i...

A Twitter discussion varies from a BlackBoard Discussion in a number of ways. First off, based on today's assignment, the discussion was open to all the students in our class but I don't see why no one else could join in on the conversation. All our tweets were public so pretty much anyone who follows us or was tracking the hashtag could see our posts and further debate with us on our thoughts. Also, Twitter is a lot less restricted in titles, content and etc. It only has a character count so one would have to really think about what they wanna say in the most concise way possible. On a discussion board, I could hypothetically type essays if I wanted to. Now in comparison to a in-class discussion, everything is totally different. On Twitter, every user is protected from one another through their screens. In the real world, we would all be face to face and we could see each other's body expressions, change of tone and etc. It would give us a better understanding of what a pe...

The 4 social networking sites I visited were Facebook, Twitter, Reddit & LinkedIn. Personally, I only really use Facebook, Reddit & LinkedIn. On first glance, I can immediately tell the difference between all the websites. Facebook is more of a place to tell a story, share your thoughts and share memories/updates with your friends. The very blue background makes the user want to stay on the website and browse through the many different things the website has to offer. Maybe this is why I constantly find myself aimlessly digging through photos, videos, old status updates from my friends. Twitter seems almost like a blogging website to me. Although there is a word limit, I constantly find my friends and other people sharing their most deepest thoughts or interesting parts of their days on Twitter. You don't really see that on Facebook or anything else so to me, Twitter is a social networking site for someone who constantly may want to express him/herself. Reddit on the other-...

          Social networking can be used in a number of different ways for corporations, ordinary people and even people of power. Corporations use social networking these days to market their products or services and they are always willing to pay a lump sum of money to get their ads out on social media. Every one lives on their phones these days so it makes sense why corporations target people on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. On the flip side, ordinary people use social media to let their friends know what is going on in their lives, a cool trip they might have gone on, a big event in their life, a celebration, or maybe even what they had for dinner the previous night. We live in a time where the conversations we have with one another can last longer online than in person and it just goes to show that social networks are becoming stronger and stronger. Powerful people like our president can also use social networks to influence people within s...