New media is a great outlet for creativity. Social
networking sites, wikis, blogs, YouTube, and many other new media forms thrive
from and encourage creativity. Wiki-ing is creating your own site. Blogging is
creating your own breaking news or stories. YouTube is creating your own videos
to share, and watching others created by strangers. Social networking sites
inspire creative discussion, and in some cases feed off of that discussion to
improve the sites, such as Twitter did with “retweets” and lists discussed in Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers.
New media takes the increased interaction caused by the Internet and uses it
for starting social hubs all about creativity. Even if creating things isn’t
the focus of the site, there is some form of creativity on it. Expressing
yourself on Facebook, writing an article for Wikipedia, blogging about studying
abroad: all of these are creativity at its finest. New media may very well be
the greatest creative tool since the pencil.
What I think is most interesting about New Media is how its features turn into a currency of sorts. For Myspace, picture comments for picture comments (PC 4 PC) would promise that you would get a picture comment in return for commenting on another's pictures.
ReplyDeleteWith Facebook, "likes" are a sort of currency that proves how popular or well-liked your comments are. The more people "like" your status, the higher on the newsfeed you appear.
Finally, with Twitter, retweeting is a sort of online currency in the way that people can validate a statement. I've seen people desperately try to get the attention of celebrities on Twitter, asking for a retweet, so that person's followers can see their statement validated by a person of higher stature. It's crazy!