In today’s world when people hear New Media, two of the first things that come to mind are Blog and Wikis. I’m pretty sure everybody who has ever used the internet has some point ended up on Wikipedia to search something. It seems as if there is an infinite amount information on that site, and personally ive only encountered valid information from that site. As for Blogs most people these days either has their own blog or has read some other persons blog. For example there was an entire movie devoted to the Food blog in the Movie of Julie and Julia, where the main character cooked her way through Julia Childs cook book and blogged about it. In addition, blogs are great ways for people to be creative and write about their lives/opinions.
As for some similarities and differences between the two. Some of the similarities are that they are used by people to contribute to society through online postings. Another similarity is that both focus on a specific topic, for example a wiki is usually focused on one thing, where as a blog also usually has a specific topic such as a person or an industry.
As for the differences, a blog is very biased on a persons perspective. It is edited by only one person so they could say whatever they please and have nobody be able to change it. However, a wiki is created by a person who is usually somewhat knowledgable about a subject and can be edited by the public , thus being much more informative. Another difference is that Blogs are usually updated on some regular basis, usually whenever the author of the blog has a new idea or just wanted to post a new blog. While the wiki is usually created once with all the relevant information for that particular topic, and only updated if something has changed regarded that topic.
The convergence in todays networked world is very important because everybody today is so busy. Everybody is running from work to the gym or to their yoga classes, to their kids events. There is no time to meet with real people as much as before. so the networked world helps people to keep in touch and still have relationships with one another. As discussed in “the New MEdia Technologies: overview and reasearch Framework” by Friedman, Linda Weiser and Friedman, Hershey H, they talk about how even companies are starting to converge in the new media. Some printer companies are going into cameras, long distance telephones companies are going into internet connections. This all causes everything to get intertwined, with TV, tivo, the internet. everything is becoming available at the touch of the finger. This is making our lives that much easier, thus the convergence of the new media is helping to make out lives easier.
As for a new use for a wiki, I really cannot think of anything at the moment.
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