New Media of Mass Communication Dr. Anthony Curtis – UNCP Mass Communcation – 910.521.6616 – acurtis@uncp.edu
Global Resources
Discover more about the new media of mass communication from these resources on virtual worlds, social networks, Web 2.0 tools, blogs, digital storytelling, grassroots video, online sharing, bookmarking, wikis, data mashups, and other 21st century media tools:
Some contemporary new media communication technologies that are a mix of mass communication and interpersonal communication.
Virtual Reality Worlds: The best known 3-D virtual-reality environment created by the San Francisco company Linden Lab is Second Life. SL's more than 12 million residents create avatars representing themselves and build and create objects and clothing, and interact with each other in the setting of a user-created virtual world complete with its own economy in which they may own land. SL is not a game. It has no game rules, no scoring, no winners, no losers. Instead, it is a social networking environment widely used for recreation, commerce and education. Learn more about SECOND LIFE and virtual worlds »
Lesser-known virtual world hangouts where users have social avatars with profiles and connections to people with whom they share interests include There and Kaneva and Whyville and LinkedIn and IMVU and Moove.
For teenagers there are Teen Second Life for persons 13-17 and Zwinky or Zwinktopia for persons 13 and up.
There also are actual games online such as World of Warcraft in which players do combat with hundreds of others. Another online game is Weblo.
There's a list of virtual worlds by category, which shows 128 virtual-world websites in 11 "best for" categories: kids, teens, 20-30s, 40+, techies, newbies, artists, dial-up, broadband, free access, and Mac access.
Another important virtual reality tool is Google Earth, which creates a mashup of satellite imagery, maps, terrain and 3D buildings. In addition to the surface of Earth, you can explore the sky with Google Earth. Google SketchUp and Google 3D Warehouse complement Google Earth.
Blogs: Blog is short for weblog, a form of online journal. Best known services are WordPress and Blogger and Typepad and LiveJournal and Squarespace. A blog can have a single author or several. Most blogs allow readers to post comments in response to an article or post, but some do not. Bloglines is an RSS reader, which is a service that collects updates from your favorite blogs so you can read them in one place.
Photo Sharing: The best known online photo sharing site is Flickr. Users upload digital still photos. Public photos may be viewed and commented on by others. Other photo sharing sites are Photobucket and Buzznet and Picturetrail and Dotphoto and Fotki and Faces and Ringo. There are sites that let you embed slideshows in your web page such as Slide and OneTrueMedia.
Digital Storytelling: Digital storytelling is mediated mass communication combining traditional techniques from television, video production radio, newspapers and magazines with contemporary multimedia tools to deliver informative and entertaining short productions with text, still and motion images, sound, music, and voice. They are script-driven and all about the articulation of a coherent verbal expression – the voice of the narrator.
More about digital storytelling with examples video sampler machinima »
Machinima: The art of making a real movie in a virtual world is called machinima from the term "machine cinema." A machinima is a video production shot in a 3D virtual reality world, such as Second Life, and produced with real life tools and techniques.
More about machinima »
video sampler »
digital storytelling »
Social Networks: A social networking site where users can set up a profile of themselves, create formal connections to people they know, communicate, and share preferences and interests is Facebook. Once restricted to college students, Facebook's fastest-growing demographic is users over 25. MySpace is another social networking site where users can set up profiles, create formal connections to people they know, communicate, and share preferences and interests.
Social Bookmarks: The social-bookmarking site del.icio.us let's you add, categorize and manage social bookmarks for storing, sharing, and discovering web pages. Another bookmarking system is Furl.
Tag Clouds: A cloud of tags is a visual list of weighted keywords on a Web page – usually hyperlinked single words listed alphabetically with their importance shown in font size or color. They can be created at TagCrowd and Tag Cloud Generator and TagCloud Generator and TagCloud.
Content Sharing: An online content sharing site is Digg. It surfaces the best stuff on the Web from news to videos to images to Podcasts as voted on by its users. There are no editors. Users collectively determine the value of content. Once something is submitted, other people see it and vote by going to it.
Wiki: The best known of this informative type of website is Wikipedia. It is a research resource like an encyclopedia or database that is broad and general in coverage of topics. The English-language Wikipedia has the largest user base among all wikis and ranks in the top twenty among all websites in terms of traffic. Many wiki's are narrow and focused on a defined range of topics. A wiki is an online resource which allows users to add and edit content collectively. Through the use of hypertext, a wiki's collection of web pages can be navigated and edited by anyone. The fact that anyone can edit, delete, or modify its content makes a wiki the collaborative work of many different authors. Wikis can be set up for free from providers such as Wetpaint and Wikidot. There is a list of the largest wiki's. The words wiki wiki mean "rapidly" in the Hawaiian language.
Messaging: A cross between instant messaging and blogging, Twitter allows a user to send a short, 140-character informational updates. Users also can follow the updates of selected friends.
iTunes: The best-known online music store is iTunes, where you can buy music, TV shows, audiobooks and iPod games, buy and rent movies, and download podcasts. Other places to buy music online include Amazon and eBay and Napster and Rhapsody and Wal-Mart, and many others.
Internet Calling: An Internet calling service, Skype is reminiscent of the telephone. It enables two-party audio and video chat and multi-party audioconferencing. Skype can make computer-to-computer calls as well as computer-to-land or mobile phone calls. Yahoo! Voice is an Internet calling service that has the ability to assign a phone number to your computer so that it can be called from land-line and mobile phones; computer-to-computer calls from within Yahoo! Messenger; and computer-to-phone calls.
Conversion Tools: There are many useful new conversion and building tools appearing on the Web. For instance, the free Online PDF Converter and Document Creator. Another is VIXY, which offers a free service to convert YouTube videos to QuickTime-playable MP4 files. And Videobox, that converts Flash from most video sites to Quicktime. More free Web Tools including webmaster tools, and tlbox, and W3C HTML Tools.
Writing Communities: Writing has been around since, maybe, the 4th millennium BC and printing dates back a thousand years, so they definitely are not 21st century natives. However, new technologies are allowing individuals to publish readily, rapidly and repeatedly, thereby creating communities of writers. One of the best known is Lulu. These low-cost, on-demand publishers make it easy to disseminate ideas with the support and feedback of a large online writing community.
Poulet Shack: UNCP Journalism students work as extras with Forsythe Whitfield singin' the blues at Fishbelly's Juke Joint in the virtual world Second Life.
Twitter
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Wikipedia
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