Ehthesham Ahmed

New media gives users the freedom to express their opinions and art however they see fit, as long as they are not infringing on the rights of others. In the New York Times article "Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But Why?" it states, "The postings (called mash-ups), are made by editing together snippets of animated movies and TV shows.", which is referring to the edits that users make on popular shows to mimic popular songs. For example, mashing up Disney characters to make it look like they are singing the popular Soulja Boy song "Crank that (Soulja Boy). Instead of going after the makers of the video, Disney allowed the video to be publicly shared and generate views because of the mass popularity behind the videos. This approach allows other users to be as creative as they please when editing other works of art.

Virtual Worlds opens a whole new arena to create, build, and live another life. Minecraft is a great example of how creativity can be taken to a whole new level and where you can build a new world. The gaming industry is constantly getting bigger and fighting to incorporate the latest tech into the games to keep users satisfied. It states in the Forbes article "After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get a Reboot?" that, "it’s a space for kids to exercise their imagination and to connect with others to also want to build and create things." Vitrual world is a great tool to encourage kids to think outside the box. It is even being incorporated into businesses due to its convenience. It can be used to gather employees for meetings from virtually anywhere. According to the CNN article "Going to the virtual office in Second Life", it explained how a company is adopting virtual world as a way to hold a meeting between leaders who are in Europe and Asia. Although

I believe twitter discussions are much faster and requires you to be more concise. Due to the limit number of characters that you can use, it forces users to tweet just enough to get your message out and block out excessive details. However, Blackboard discussions give us the ability to go more in detail about various topics. It also helps us to thoroughly read our classmates input and reply to their posts more accurately. Discussions in class allows us to rapidly respond to other classmates which can make the conversations more significant and interesting. It can also make some students more uncomfortable because they would rather be behind a screen than to openly share their opinion in a room full of eyes staring at you. I believe it is beneficial to use all these platforms as a way to facilitate conversations because it can give us different perspective about the same topic.

I browsed through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram and I have found some components of them that are very similar. One thing that automatically caught my eyes was the use of the color blue. With the exception of Instagram, all the other three social media sites used blue as their default website color. I found out that blue is used because it is a more appealing and relaxing color. I changed my Twitter page to green because I found that to be a more appealing to me. Then I started to think about the notion that blue is a welcoming color and thought about the major banks in the US that use that color as well. Banks such as JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, and US Bankcorp also use blue as their primary color and it all made sense. Another interesting thing I noticed about these four social media sites is how often it reminds me to refresh the site for new uploaded content. This is an interesting way to keep people addicted to the site because they understand that viewers only want to