The Blog vs The Wiki

Blogs and wikis: two forms of communication born and used under the same realm, yet so different in how they are utilized. A blog is usually defined as an online journal, a virtual spot for an individual to share their experiences via the Internet. These experiences range from the minutia of details of someone's day or a expert opinion, review, or criticism on a particular subject or item. Blogs are seen as personal, individual, unique to the person who creates and maintains it. Wikis, on the other hand, are created specifically to inform the reader about a particular subject in an encyclopedic fashion. Individual wikis may have many authors, most of them anonymous, some that are registered users, and even fewer who have expert or significantly plausible knowledge about the subject at hand. This put the entire wiki site's content at risk for being false or vandalized. Wikipedia is the pinnacle of this type of utilization, garnering its international popularity and success by providing access to detailed information on an accessible platform. However, despite Wikipedia's success there has been much controversy to the veracity of Wikipedia, particularly because of the open-edit system.

Old Media vs. New Media

Technology growth is one of the many active facets of human society. As technology changes so does our language, which changes according to our new definitions used to identify and distinguish the technology of yesterday and today. Enter "old media" and "new media". New Media is a relatively new phrase that denotes the ways our society currently accesses information and current events in. Most media formats belonging to the category of "New Media" is mostly accessed through the Internet via electrical-based, graphic-user interfaces with Internet access (e.g. PC, Smartphone, Workstation). "Old Media" denotes the formats that were or are being vastly replaced with New Media formats. Books, TV, radio, and the newspaper are a few examples of old media. They all share one thing in common: each medium is physically tangible and can only broadcast information through their own set of proprietary protocols. Physical tangibility is easily seen with books, newspapers, magazines. Television and radio, on the other hand, are broadcast via EM waves on a physical set and the information cannot be "held". However, visuals can't be broadcast on a radio set (as opposed to radio waves) and even radio stations outputting through television must be converted into frequencies used for television before broadcasting. New media, which includes but does not limit: wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds, and streaming television, are all broadcast through one perpetually accessible source: the Internet.

The internet is a global network of a myriad of local computer networks that are used to exchange data between different parts of the world. The Internet is the primary nexus for every new medium that has been invented and implemented into today's society since the invention and application of the silicone chip. From Wikipedia to Skype to CNN to Google to World of Warcraft, the Internet has become the absolute standard to broadcast information to any magnitude of an audience. Without the Internet, the category of "New Media" would have no relevance to our society whatsoever. An old medium exports the information via its own source whether it be text, still photos, videos, or radio waves and does not rely on anything else other than its own individual source.

However, new media are still a new implementation in today's society. Many people, especially those who are older and grew up with the prominent industries of newspapers and television back in the day, are prone to be inept or even resistant to the new ways of learning about our world. I was born in a time where the Internet had only become a ubiquitous data exchange and the world was completely brand new. I remember my times with dial-up and AOL, frustrated at how long it took to load a web page or download a song. But since I grew up learning how to use a computer through experience and little formal training (if you count typing class in elementary school), I'm more adept at using the computer and accessing as a young adult just as anyone older than me who still remembers how to use 8-tracks and vinyls when they grew up with it. This comical Youtube video shows how the technology barrier is prominent and that most people are naturally resistant to change.

The fact is success in our society is achieved by, among other things, being dependent on integrating with new technology. In this Forbes article, Anthony Savikas writes about how the initial reaction to new technology parallels that of the natural fear and resistance to change. Fear is most prone to those in powerful positions based on the social dynamics that allowed them to create and maintain those positions. The most prominent positions are top government and military officials and the wealthy merchants. It is not rocket science to understand that many of them do not want to compromise anything they have worked to gained over their lives and will pull whatever strings in their power to make sure the status quo is maintained in their favor. Anyone who wishes to change these dynamics, deliberately or inadvertently, will incur the wrath of those already powerful and little support from those who would benefit from the change. However, Savikas quotes "how common big changes are in our cultural history (and that we nearly always end up better off in the end)".

In the end, society changes regardless as we discover new ways to make our lives longer and more convenient. The medium is only useful to the masses who use it. If we're still listening to commercial radio stations in the next 50 years because of its appeal as a privately-funded, genre-specific playlist, so be it. Eventually, all that we are using now will somehow be obsolete in the new technological generations to come. I just hope when I get old that I embrace the new tech coming out instead of sitting there and frustratingly reading a manual on how to work this newfangled contraption.

Wikipedia - The Most Trusted Research Database Authored By The Average User

Hello all,

This is my approved proposal for my final project. It's under the working title "Wikipedia - The Most Trusted Research Database Authored By The Average User". The project will focus mostly about how WIkipedia has changed the way we search for specific information about a particular subject. The function of schools and libraries have changed drastically thanks to a system that is not only accessible to anyone with internet access but can be edited by anyone with various degrees of expertise on that subject, including none. Does that mean that only certain people with a specific, significant amount of expertise should be able to edit a wiki or should the general public have an equal say? Where is the line drawn? How do students access and learn information? How do schools adapt to this technology? Do they resist instead? How do local library branches cope with being an expensive brick-and-mortar version of a free technology? Should people have to pay to access this information? All these questions have been answered in one way or another by those who are familiar to the technology. However, the use of wikis is still relatively new to the developed world, which means traditional institutions (i.e. schools, libraries, even our own government agencies) have not yet fully adapted. My project focus on a brief history of wikis and the impact it has on the macroeconomic status of our current global economy.

The Start of a New Blog...

Well, this'll be my first post on my new blog. This is really just the test post. More to come...