Fast News

Unfortunately Dr. Habashi fell on campus and broke her leg on Wednesday. This was an amazing example of how fast new media is. There was a post on facebook right after it happened and it seemed like everyone knew within a couple of hours. This was amazing to me how fast the news spread.

CMC - Text messaging

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/122530875/HTMLSTART

I read an article that discussed texting behaviors among teen and preteen children in the UK and the US. In 2007 the number of text messages sent and received surpassed the number of phone calls made and received. I found it very interesting that in Britain in August of 2007 nearly 4000 text messages were sent a second, and 5 billion were sent during the entire month. The article continued to discuss academics compared to text message rates. They talked about the phonetics that are used to create "text speak" and how children shorted words to be able to put everything they want to say in 160 characters. It is found that children who are using more textisms were those with higher scores on the verbal reasoning tasks on standardized tests. I found this very interesting because I know when I was in high school teachers always complained about text language because they said they were tired of it showing up in papers and reports that they graded.

Old media vs. New media

After reading a few articles on ojr.org I realized that old media and new media really are not that different. They both report on the same stories and have the same type of content. It is still just pictures and words, but how we access it is completely different. New media is much faster than old media and in many situations is even cheaper than old media. When I lived at home with my parents I used to read the paper everyday, that is when I did to start the day. Now that I live on my own I have a tighter budget. I have looked into subscriptions to different newspapers and in the end I always decide that it is more cost effective to just go online and read it. I do prefer to actually be holding what I am reading, but is it really worth the cost when you are just going to throw it out later.

One bad thing about New media is that most of the time the writer of the article is not given credit for their work. How many times have you looked up a story and found hundreds of the exact same story? When things were printed the author was more likely to be give credit than they are now. Now it is just so easy to copy and paste the article, why would you take extra time to make sure the right person got credit for it.

Although I think that Old media still has its place I think that it is eventually going to become obsolete, just like buying Cd's. I think eventually everything will switch to New media just because of the convenience.

So Far Behind

I didn't realize how far behind I had fallen when it comes to technology and communication. I finally got igoogle set up after a few days of trying to figure it out. It took me forever to figure out how to make a new tab and then how to get blogs to show up on the new tab I made. I hope I do not find the rest of the class this frustrating once I learn how to operate everything.

igoogle page

Response to the article: We Have the Information You Want, But Getting It Will Cost You: Being Held Hostage by Information Overload, By Mark Nelson

After reading this article I would have to agree with the idea that there is far to much information out there for us to process effectively. I know that I have had this problem several times while looking for research to write a paper. I spend more time researching the topic than actually understanding and writing on the topic. Although some of this article was a little difficult for me to understand. I do think that we need a better way to search so that we can get more relevant information faster and we can then be more effective.