"New Media" and you! (Well me really...)

Today's internet world is quickly changing. Even for someone like me a "digital native" it is difficult to get accustomed to all the new ways to use the internet. In class today, guest speaker Bruce from KQED public radio talked about the evolution of journalism from the start where many newspapers competed to today's world where newspapers are struggling to stay afloat.

Seeing all this technology evolve today, I can't imagine how difficult it might be for an old fashion journalist to adopt to today's new ways of communicating and getting news.

Here is Valeria's take on different new media sites.

Facebook
My favorite networking site. I started with Myspace and moved on to Facebook when I got to college. This site was quickly expanded to high school and now to anyone who wants to join. The original purpose being for students to connect to fellow classmates and help each other with school, now it has moved on to people not having to actually talk to each other about their favorite music just simply look someone up and read their information. Many changes have happed that have upset its faithful users and still are more to come, but none of that has dettered used from the site.

Twitter
At first I hated the idea of Twitter and did not understand the purpose. I saw it as simply constant Facebook status updates. Though I still see it as a just telling people what you are doing, I appreciate being able to direclty tell something to someone. Where in Facebook you would write on someone's wall, here you just 'tweet' at them and they can respond. The real reason I started using Twitter is when I saw that some of my favorite celebrities use it and actually respond to fans. I still have not had the guts to try and tweet at any, for now I shall just read the tweets.

Blogs
There are many different sites to blog on, LiveJournal, WordPress, and Blogger. These are web logs where people can start a blog about basically anything from cats to climbing. I love blogs. I started using them in high school where I had one of my own where I would just write about my life and it was open just to friends. Now I have moved away from that and have this blog (yay!) and use blogs for music, television, and sports. What I love the most about blogs is the communities they create. Even though you might not get to know other users, you get to recognize the user name and create a virtual friendship.

Try some of these out!