Eassy 3 - the future of music

When thinking about the future of music, there are two aspects being considered.

E-music, which can be downloaded for free on the internet, is still existed but more accepted. Nowadays, e-music free of charge is controversial, because it is considered illegal and lowering down the benefit of the record company. ITunes is well-known for its successful legal business model. Consumers buy songs in Itunes store, which charge them 0.9$ per song, much cheaper than buying a CD. Some of my friends used to be a loyal customers of Itunes, but they download music free of charge in some other website and converse the formats to load them on their Apple. And some of them just listen to the songs sang by themselves, which is also edit by themselves. Therefore, I think there might be no charge for the e-music on the internet in the future. More and more amateur singers share their records on the internet. People have more choice of different kind of music. Further more, there might be some new technology come out. With those technologies, we can have one song sang by different people. It is like when we listen to “you raise me up”, we could choose it in the voice of westlife, backstreet boys or Britney Spears. The music on one’s own player becomes more personality.

E-music is free of charge, so the companies get their benefit by concert of the famous singers and their songs used for advertisements and films. I pay no money on any CDs, but I would like to pay for the live show. That is because on the live show, the audience can be involved in the music more, different from the experience as listening to the music player. Music is more like the films. As we know, we can download most of the film on the internet, but there still so many people go the the cinema to watch the movie.

When I think about the music development, I wish there could be an education come out, the music education model, which is because we may easily remember lyrics of a song but never the context in a book. I remember when I was young, I learnt a long poem by heart very fast just because there was a song whose lyrics was the poem. Some of the parents are trying to transfer some basic knowledge, which should be remembered by the children, into Rap to help the children to learn fast. With the help of this method, the children can learn them by heart in a shorter time but also they may have an interest in them.

Essay 3- Hypothecation Tax/Public Service Approach

Many echoes can be heard in political legislative bodies due to continuous rising of so-called music piracy these days. “Big” drummers have a lot to drum against that phenomenon but nothing to present to meet today’s challenges. A major silent revolution is going to be taking place within music industry in coming 15 years instead of 10 as I think.

Peer-to-peer technologies can’t be eliminated totally from net world while we have only few successful business models for digital distribution of music (iTunes etc.). On the other hand, technology geeks can hijack any kind of restrictions or “DRM” proposed by record labels. Illegal music downloaders across the globe can’t be punished unless having a so-called global “big brother” system as matter of fact. Business models presented by record labels till that date are not sufficient enough to address the problem fairly as real artists are given just pennies while record companies still get lion’s share. Except the first world’s citizens, people from second and third world countries would never like to spend as much money as record labels want in their proposed greedy business models. 1 dollar price for a song is nothing for a US citizen but a lot for an Indian citizen where average daily income is less than 2 dollars. Alternatively, not many artists have marketing and distribution experience and knowledge for their creations on the internet and ultimately they have to involve middle men.

Then, what is gonna happen in coming decade?

In that condition, where music piracy is getting space in political agendas of many political groups, legislative bodies would definitely come with some sort of “money distribution and collection model” for music industry (especially for individual artists)in coming years. I can’t predict the exact framework of this model but it would be somewhat like where official authorities would make it possible to impose a certain fee on each and every user of internet according to his or her usage of internet, keeping in mind the average income of that country’s citizens. These funds would be distributed later among all other actors of industry on certain basis. Authorities would make sure that real artists and creators are benefited from these collectives. This model relies on the assumption that access to information is a basic right of every human being. It’s not a statutory licensing model but a future glance in right direction. While many of these kinds of models are already being practiced by many governmental bodies i-e licensing fee for public TV and Radio, entertainment tax etc. unequal distribution of music money would be discouraged because of the presence of new social media technologies as people are getting more conscious about the fact that only some stakeholders in existing business models are getting richer but not the real artists and creators.

Essay 3 – [The future of music]

When we talk about the future of the music, we cannot avoid having a glance at the history of the music development. Initially the main income of the music industry largely depended on the revenue of the tickets of live concerts as well as the record economy. The battle against the piracy to protect the intellectual property has started since then. As the development of the internet technology, more and more people can get access to lots of music by downloading them for free. At this time, many music companies found they experienced a large shrink of the record revenue. Therefore, they attribute the declining of the revenue to the newly developed social media technologies. Music companies thought the consumers downloaded music illegally through the internet for free so that they don’t want to buy the music any more. Unfortunately, as the response to protect the intellectual property, some technologies such as Peer to Peer Technology are banned in some countries including Sweden.

A debate has risen regarding whether we should blame the piracy behavior to some technology or shall we consider the transforming of the revenue model of the music industry. All of these require us to think about what is the most valuable stuff on earth when the consumers purchase the music. Is it the physical music CD disk in the past that they buy in the traditional music stores, or is it the digital code that they buy through the online music stores? The answer is neither of them. What the core stuff they purchase is the intellectual property of the music. Although we should protect the intellectual property, shall we just simply prohibit the related social media technologies such as the P2P technology? Is it fair to the technology engineers who develop such kinds of convenient technologies? The answer is no. A case in point could be the printed industry. Can we just ban the usage of the duplicating machine in order to protect the intellectual property of the book authors? As we know, duplicating is allowed in many libraries, you can duplicate some pages or even some chapters of the book to read; however, you cannot duplicate the entire book. Hence, the root of solving the piracy problem is not to ban some technology. Instead, the contents providers online should be well supervised. In addition, many surveys and investigates show that those people who often download the free tracks illegally are those people who often purchase the music and go to the concert. The reason for the illegal downloading behavior is that they want to make sure whether some songs and albums are worth buying or not.

I believe that no music companies would like to classify their potential consumers to be the people who offend the law. Hence the changing of the revenue model of the music industry is necessary. First of all, the successful reform of the supply chain of the music industry such as the online music library could be kept with the implementation of the long tail theory to satisfy all kinds of niche markets. As we know, in the past under the traditional music economy mode, the music disks CD or tapes should go through three stages before they reach the ultimate consumers, which are the manufactures, distributors and retailers. Under the digital music mode, the music can directly reach the consumers from the content providers.
To solve the illegal downloading problem , the content providers could buy the music from the music companies at a low price to build a music library where the consumers can easily search their required songs and download them for free so that they will be able to listen to them three or four times but with lower quality than the original tracks as well as with advertisement due to the fact that the people who purchase the music and go to the concerts are those who download free material actively since they should have an opportunity to know whether the songs are good or not. Hence, if music content providers offer such a platform, it will make a contribution to the music industry’s revenue, to which online ads can subsequently benefit. It should be stressed here that it is the large consumer base for music that the advertisers want to target, which is the real resource for the online advertisement business.

Finally, there could be another development trend of the future music industry, which is based on the value constellation and open source concept. Consumers are the providers as well. Such as YouTube, you can record your own album and upload them to share with people for free. And the economy compensate could be from the online advertisement also.

Essay 3 - The future of Music

I think that the future of the music industry looks very bright. This is because musicians now have completely new opportunities and possibilities to spread their music. The availability of services like MySpace and Spotify has totally changed the climate and made it possible for anyone to distribute music and reach an audience, anywhere on the planet. The middlemen’s (record companies and brick & mortar music stores) power is being reduced and musicians are able to market themselves in whichever way they’d like. I think that this will develop a more diverse music industry where sub-genres are exploding and ways in which to find music will expand even more. I think that honest musicians will appreciate this climate and by this they gain a chance to tour the whole world without being a Megastar.

The people who don’t like this new climate are the ones who lose money on illegal downloading, mainly extremely rich artists and the record labels. I don’t think people who have grown up downloading music will be ever be willing to buy a full record with approx. 12 songs and call it an album, the traditional way that labels prefer to distribute and earn money on their artists. This will have to change and has also been changing by the existence of iTunes etc.

I am familiar with Spotify and have used it for quite a while, and I believe that streaming services like this is a winning concept that will expand even more as people have internet access everywhere and as it also becomes more common to always be online though the cell phone. Through these services new artists can also promote themselves and have global access to potential listeners. MySpace is also a forum where artists really are able to promote themselves in whichever way they like. Since MySpace have lost many users to Facebook over the last years, I think that MySpace have become even more music dominated. This might make this forum even more valuable to musicians.

These channels are something that record labels have not considered or were late to recognize and take advantage of. Now, laws like IPRED are being considered and I don’t think it is the right way to go, if record labels had introduced high-quality legal online services instead of putting effort into criminalizing illegal downloader’s they could have gone winning out of this battle. Now, these actors are not coming out trustworthy or good-natured in many young customers’ minds. Instead I think that owners (Record labels etc.) should take advantage of the possibilities of novel technology and create value for customers instead of threatening potential customers. This could be done by creating more services that add customer value, like the iTunes, and customers will run to the service. Record labels (and maybe also musicians) should be able to add some value through considering the customer value of the physical product (a record) and turn it into a digital value, maybe by adding special features or online libraries, concerts etc. I think that the music industry should stop acting defensive and instead invite the consumer to new possibilities and I think that Spotify have succeeded in adding customer value in a legal way.

Essay3-Continuing the digitization

Nowadays, while the physical discs market of music industry declines, more and more trends indicate that the music industry is replaced by digital commerce. Most of people, including me at first, assert the decline is due to the large file sharing on Internet initially. But after reading the research done by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Stephen J. Dubner about the relationship between file sharing and decline of records sales[1], I sort of changing my mind. According to the assumption that if file sharing hurts record sales, then albums that are more heavily downloaded should experience lower sales than comparable albums that are less downloaded. But, after controlling for the role of popularity, they found that downloads had little effect on album sales. The reduction is leaded by many other causes. For example, the industry has failed to find genres that capture the interests of consumers and it has had trouble competing against other products that vie for consumers’ entertainment spending, such as cell phones and video games. Based on this founding, it reveals that digital commerce is not a fatal threat to current music industry but the future of it.

Firstly, the digital commerce brings much convenience to the consumers. Take MP3 for instance, it can provide high-quality sound while requiring dramatically smaller file sizes than any previous formats. And the portable device enables users download music and listen music anywhere and anytime.

Secondly, it changes the traditional value curve and the way to deliver the music. (See Graph01&02) There are not distributers and retailers between musician and listeners which shorten the time as well as the cost of logistics. Instead, the record companies only need to build an accessible platform online to sale the music to customers. I think Apple is the model of future form of music industry. It builds a strong relationship with record companies through its software iTunes and sets a price standard on the market, which is 99 cents for any track. More importantly, music purchased from iTunes could only be played on the iPod and users can copy the song to share with friends for only 5 times. In this way, Apple prohibits pirates efficiently in the physical discs market and protects record companies’ licenses, which means no more free-download music on Internet.

Last but not least, it creates a new market space. By saying new market space, I mean the niche market. Comparing to the traditional music formats, such as tape cassettes or CD, they much depend on producing “HIT” to sell the products and after 1 or 2 years, they stop producing the physical dics so that the music lying on it stops as well. But in the future, the cycle of one song may last decades. We may employ the “Long tail” theory to explain the advantages (see Graph03). The revenue of several local songs may be the same or even higher than one “HIT”.

[1] http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/whats-the-future-of-the-music-industry-a-freakonomics-quorum/

Reliability of Social Media

Emerging technologies in new globalized moments have subsequently called into question of shaping and presenting information in transparent way on grassroots’ level. Different media folks have dealt with this problem with a variety of ways and perspectives like meta-moderation, Karma etc. The most aware and conscious public of human history is shifting in numerous ways on its social note. On the critical issue of how people acquire and perceive news and contemporary information on social media, we still haven’t any sound proves to judge the real essence of problem.

New generation is adopting more interactive and near-to-hand outlets in order to get information. Consequently, desire for digging up quality news on both traditional and modern social media has aroused. Traditional media has time-honored already a great sense of transparent and quality media channel during last many decades. On the other side, social media channels are still struggling with the issue because of the vary reason of anonymity and information tracking incapability of these so-called social media.

A large number of users have begun to look for news sources that assure the source of information being propagated to them either by integrity of media outlet or interactivity. This trend, in particular, confronts nothing less but the basic structure and methodology of news and information gathering and broadcasting. These technological and attitudinal swings have shaped the social media backdrop intensely complex, particularly for the folks behind these media. Intellectuals and knowledgeable spectators have long noted that swift, consistent shift of consumer’s conceptions of that news are vital to the continued existence of a free and self-governing society. Incapability of the current social media to address and brace associations with users/audiences and their emerging needs could result a destructive upshot on the future of social media technologies.

For a scientific and logical solution of any said problem, I can’t trust on the information posted by an anonymous user whose credibility can be challenged at any forum. On the other side, at given time X, not any researcher can rely on the information posted by any user till it is not verified or ‘’re-verified’’ by any meta-moderation or semantic web systems. Even after a solid verification by present tools used by social websites, most of the times, user can’t be assured about the real source of information. Hence this information can’t be referred at any logical forum.

As a result, we come to the burning question—what kind of new models can be adapted to deal with these above mentioned challenges? I hope to find some serious suggestions during the seminar discussion.

Essay 2 - The Quality Issue in Social Media

I think that the issue of quality is very interesting now when everybody is allowed to publish their work for free. These days, problems of accreditation and relevance are being dealt with in numerous of ways. I think that Wikipedia have accomplished to manage accreditation in a good way and I also believe that eBay is a good example of a site that manages to guide the user (shopper) in a relevant way. As I haven’t used Amazon to any large extent I do not have much to say about that site, but in the way that Benkler present Amazon’s ability to guide its users I think that eBay have succeeded in the same way. Now a day I almost get annoyed if a site I use doesn’t recommend me where to go if I have read a text about something and I want to learn more. I am so used to things, like:

1) On eBay they always guide me by telling what other people have bought except for the object I am looking at (and they also match their suggestions to my personal shopping history). When entering the site I get my personal view and tips on stuff to buy, this is truly relevant to me.

2) Wikipedia is always guiding me although I can get a bit lost when following too many links in one text, however, I will always appreciate the wiki links. And in the case of Wikipedia I totally agree with what Benkler is saying when he states that many subjective views of a subject makes the encyclopedia trustworthy. In many subjects where traditional encyclopedias will fail to distribute a multilateral view of reality Wikipedia has succeeded. I think that this is possible only through peer production and that the number of people who contribute with their views assures the credibility and quality of texts. Of course vandalism and such have been an issue, but it isn’t anymore, which I believe is proof that social media is also able to be reliable and valid.

In the blog area I however believe that credibility and relevance is lowered, but this also something that we are aware of when using and reading this media. Of course blogs published on traditional mass media publishers’ sites (ex. on nytimes.com) are considered to be of quality as traditional media here still acts as a gatekeeper. But blogs are read to a larger extend on all sorts of sites. Here quality and anonymity might still be an issue, however, people read what appear relevant to them. I think this could also be a generation issue. When watching an SVT show last week, Debatt, they were discussing the issue of how nasty people should be allowed to be when publishing texts on the internet. As it turned out in this show people under the age of 30 had a totally different view from older people who were less used to using interactive media. These older people had another view on blogs and took every published word much more serious and literally than younger people used to the social medium.

So what I get from this is that reliability and relevance are slowly becoming hygiene factors in some area of social media. Of course anonymity may affect how people express themselves, this could be an issue concerning blogs and also comments in traditional media’s online published articles. I however believe, unlike many people in the older generation , that we should be able to comment on texts that are professionally produced. Here publishers acts as traditional gatekeepers but in the social internet media I think we should be able to comment on any text (some irrational comments should be deleted), otherwise traditional media misses out on the interaction part of social media – making it non-social, not interesting to all people that are used to be able to publish and express their thoughts. I think that quality is lacking in some areas and I happy to be able to read professionally published texts online as well as less professional, and I think that I am able to interpret and judge them by which media its is published in.

Essay 2 - the quality aspect in the content of Social media and Traditional media

Blogs are my favourite. As we all know, traditional media, as newspapers or TV programme, has more strict limitation on the content as well as the language. In my opinion, the news in the traditional media is of less novelty and comfortable, but social media is different. Some specifically blogs have the same good quality. They may not be written as the way of news, short and exact, but they can cover the truth and bring in some related news as well. I always read the blogs in Sina.com. The blogs there are listed by the visit amounts. And all the blogs there are classified in different filed, such as business, sports and gossip, etc. The blogs on the top place are always popular and credible. Further more, the comments below are interesting as well, though they are not as quality as the comments on Slashdot. Social media attracts me more is because of the communication among the author, the reader and me, which I can not do when reading the newspaper.

Benkler talked about the page rank in google and the peer production of relevance and accreditation in Slashdot. Those two tools make sure the two sites provide more qualified contents.

Google describes PageRank:[1]
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".

As the definition and the figure showed above, Google use pagerank to know which site is of more importance without manual intervention or controls. That makes the information in Google credible and impartial.

I think Slashdot is an interesting example of managing the issue of quality in good way. They adopt a manual way to filter the comments. Slashdot implements an automated system to select moderators from the pool of users.[2] And then those moderators mark the comments. One comment is decided of importance or not by the grade it gets both from the moderators and the system. We can say that this rule is useful but not common, as it can be applied in the site with large visit amounts but not the one with small visit amount.

Quality is important but when we come to an piece of interesting news, we eager to know more. With social media, more and more social problems come out and be solved. That is because the government can easily control the traditional media but not social media. For example, if there is an parade going on somewhere, the news can be spread as quickly as possible by means of social media and be reported truly. This news can be a blog or a video putting on the internet. It is a hard work for the government to get all the news under control. There must be both good quality and bad quality news, so we have to distinguish the good one from the bad one with our common sense. I prefer social media is because it provides me with the choice of the news, but with traditional media, I can only read what they print or broadcast under the strict limitations.


[1] http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html
[2] The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler, Yale University Press

(Essay 2)Mirror of social media: Google and Wikipedia

I think Google as well as Wikipedia are both interesting examples of managing the issue of quality in a good way, because they employ peer-production and self-regulation to run their platforms online. I think these two creative functions make the obvious distinction between social media and mass media. Generally speaking, mass media is the final result of a group of people working together and usually it has commercial purpose; Currently, Social media more and more becomes the efforts of thousands of individuals despite the geographic differences which consummate the object through interacted modification and completeness.

When analyzing the success of Google, we have to admite that the crucial innovation of Google is its Pagerank, which introduces peer-based judgments of relevance and allow the users to access the most related websites through text typing. Unlike other search engine, Google is improved by many other interactive applications which have practical usage in real life. Being a frequent user, I like Google maps best. It not only shows the detail map and how long it takes by car between A and B but also including many photos which created by other users. In this way, the stark map immediately becomes vivid and attractive to those want to travel there. I think Google provides various of platforms to gather the power of individuals in order to service individuals rather than aiming at mass audiences. Besides Google maps and Youtube, Google also provide some platforms who may have commercial usage for users and that’s Google Ads and words. It allows users to earn money from relevant ads on their websites based on per click.

When analyzing the success of Wikipedia, we’d better take a look at its peer production. Like the Open Directory Project talking in Benkler’s book, the volunteers who create the content as well as modify it are not affiliated with Wikipedia and receive no compensation. I remember I ever read a related material which is about the survey on why people contribute on social media, such as Wikipedia, and the answer is simple, because they are interested. The self-motivated action feels good because they can share what they know and learn from others. Everyone accesses to the information at the same level and the web enables the same authority to edit the content.

From my perspective, social media is the updating version of mass media but during the process of producing and modifying the content, more individuals tend to participate!

Essay2-Social media versus traditional media in terms of content quality

When the content quality of the media products is discussed, whether the content could satisfy the consumers’ tastes should first and foremost be considered as a critical criterion since no media can survive and flourish without the audiences’ support. In other words, the high content quality means large amount of audience base. Therefore, how to enlarge the customer base with high qualified contents becomes the kernel in the media industry.

Customer-oriented perspective and concept plays a very important role in the media-related economy. How to make the audience be interested in and attracted by the products you offered? The answer is that you must know about them. However, you are not necessarily to be a superior psychologist. No one can know better about you than yourself. Hence, why not involve the audience into the value creation process.

The development mode of the traditional media industry is typically that the producers produce the contents, and the customers consume them. It could be called the typical value chain in which the customers lie at the end of to behave the consumption function. However, in the new social media industry, the audience are not the purely consumers any more, they become the co-producers and the co-creators in terms of participating in the value creation process. And the whole media economy system turned into a new era which can be called the value constellation era.

With the value constellation concept, the audiences do not only consume value but also create the value for themselves. Just like Youtube and Wikipedia the consumers are the producers. What have to be mentioned here is that with the development of the consumer-produced products, the phenomenon which is called the free economy mode appears. Consumers favored the free information and service online. Free is awesome! Besides, with the new social media technology, the contents and the offerings could achieve the high customization level which means the consumers could have a more effective and efficient communication with the producers. A case in point could be the comparison between the Youtube and the traditional mass TV media contents. On Youtube you can search the topic which you favored with the key words searching in terms of aggressively inquiring rather than passively accepting. And the rating system as well as the related comments can offer the reference to help you to know whether the content is worth watching. The quality of the content is guaranteed in this way. What is more, the range of the contents is also much lager than that offered by traditional TV channel. For the traditional TV program, the contents are designed and produced by the procurers; the audience could only passively accept those limited offerings without interactive communication.

Another quality related issue which I want to mention is the democracy construction under the social media mode. The relevance and accreditation mechanism for the Slashdot’s model of moderation, karma and meta-moderations could be a good example to illustrate the democracy construction in the social media world. Slashdot selects the moderators from all the users randomly by the automated system according to several criteria to review and rate comments of the other users. Similarly, the peer-review accreditation for the moderators themselves is used to supervise the moderators. There reviewers are also randomly chosen from the users according to related criteria. In this way, the moderators’ power is balanced to facilitate the democracy construction.

The quality of social media content can be also achieved by the activities with the open source concepts. The development of Linux system could be a good example. Besides,the goodwill and reputation mechanisms are well implemented by the social media to guarantee the quality of the content through offering high traceability to the available contents.

Finally, I’d like to mention that the authority is based on the high quality and good reputation. When you get the high quality, then the authority comes.

Essay 1 – My social media interaction experience

When I first started using different social media technology tools my motive was primary to have fun, although msn – one of the first tools I ever used – were also used in purpose of getting in contact with study friends in order to make school assignment processes easier and faster.

I believe that social media technologies had not been a genuinely relevant part of my life until I joined social network sites such as MySpace and later Facebook. Two years ago I decided to join Facebook and today, watching and updating me and my friends’ daily statuses, have become a routine. So, connecting with friends and family is the main motive for my usage and my increased loyal behavior towards social media technology. When I think of it, it is only a few single people I know that do not have a Facebook account. As of a few weeks ago, also my parents and a lot of friends’ parents have also joined.

One thing that I find astonishing is the power an online network has on many peoples everyday life. I am actually starting to notice that people who do not have a Facebook account are often being overlooked when people send invitations to real life activities. In fact, my mum joined Facebook only after my brother had forgot to invite her to his birthday party, due to the fact that he had only invited people using Facebook, neglecting (or at least, not taking into account people who did not have an account). Hence, not being active on major online networks is affecting peoples everyday offline lives.

Right before I joined Facebook I had become a loyal Wikipedia user, whenever I was doing research for any important subject I used this site and was amazed by its applicability. Consequently, this tool is mainly used for study purposes. I have also noticed that the number of my visits on the Wikipedia site is less than the number of times that I visit Facebook and other more direct-networking sites. Although I actually may find Wikipedia’s services more valuable than Facebook’s, I might act more habitually loyal towards social leisure sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Also as Marco Turpeinen mentioned, I have only once contributed and written a text on a subject on Wikipedia, and this was only done because I was handed the exercise in a KTH-course. On Facebook, on the other hand, I contribute and update my profile on, sort of a, daily basis.

Accordingly, the main social technologies I use – Facebook and Wikipedia –are used in support of different motives and my usage behavior is also very different between the two sites. This also proves that just a fraction of readers actually have to be active contributors in order to create a value-added site, like in the case of Wikipedia.

Essay 1 – [Me and social media – my relationship to social media technologies]

Social media are primarily Internet-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings.[1] Social media have different functions, such as communication, collaboration and entertainment etc..

I always use MySpace and Skype to keep in touch with my family and my friends in China. Usually I update my blogs in MySpace once a week. They can know about my daily life by reading my blogs and watching my photos in my space. After that they will also comment on them. As I see the comments, I will also give my feedback on those comments. It is not an instantaneous communication. To communicate instantaneously, i always use Skype to give a phone call to my family. Skype is a sofware for users to make phone calls on the internet. It is cheaper to call my family in China using Skype than using my phone. And the phone calls on the internet also have good quality as on the cellphones.

In my study, I always use wiki, YouTube and google doc as assistant tools. When come up to an unknown concept, I always check it in wiki. I think the explanations in wiki are authoritative. YouTube is a good place to learn about new technologies and new products. We can find many experiments done by other people with the technologies which we are interested in. And it is also a good video resource. When we do our experiments, YouTube is always an important video resource to assist our ideas. At the end, a final report is always required. We always use google docs to finish the report together. Google docs is a on-line word processor, which allows users to edit the same documents while collaborating in real-time with other users.

The good thing is that social media make my daily life easier, because it is convenient to communicate with my family and friends on-line. The bad thing is that it makes the time that I talk to them face to face shorter. On-line Communication is definitely different from the face-to-face communication. when we talk to our friends face-to-face, we can feel whether our word is property or not. Our feelings can also affect the other’s emotion. This kind of communication is much more deeper than the communication on-line. When we communicate on-line, we face to our computer. While talking to others, we can watch a movie, play games or even do our assignments. As what I feel about, the more we communicate online, the colder the relations are.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media

Essay 1-[Me and social media-my relationship to social media technologies]

When seriously thinking about my relationship to social media technologies, I am so surprised to find that all kinds of social media technologies have dived into my daily life quietly and unconsciously. From work to study, from leisure to entertainment, I become social media technology-dependent and sometimes get hooked on them. Let’s have a look at how my daily life is “dominated” by the social technologies. Three aspects related experience in terms of learning, leisure and entertainment would be elaborated as below.

As the study aspect is concerned, more and more internet-based learning tools are brought into our eyeshot. I remember last semester a new kind of online study software called Simplelearn was introduced for the terminologies learning in media production fields. In my point of view, such software can help you to develop a good learning habit. When starting the learning, the system will automatically send you a message via E-mail to remind you the time to study. When finishing terminologies’ learning each time, you would be asked whether the terminologies are remembered or not. And for those terminologies which you do not remember very well, they will be repeated frequently in your next study time. The study schedules are set strictly, which means that you can neither study later than the required time nor ahead of time. Only in this way can you get the best effect. The software can be used through both computer and mobile phone so long as they can get access to the internet. Hence, you can study anywhere connected to the internet. What is more, some basic tools like searching engine and encyclopedia play a rather important role in the learning aspect. When you are in face of something you don’t know, just Google it! Just Wikipedia it!

When it comes to leisure aspect, the MSN (messenger) and QQ (one software offered by Tencent Company which is China's largest and most used Internet service portal) have to be first discussed. Every time when I turn on my computer, undoubtedly the QQ and MSN would be given the priority to be run. QQ is the main tool for me to contact my family and Chinese friends in terms of having a video, audio conversation and common chatting. You can also use it to transfer the documents and pictures. Besides there is also a Blogger called QQspace connected to each account for posting whatever you like. You can decorate your personal space with the virtual money and earn the virtual money through the advertisement clicking rate displayed on your space. And for each account, you have also three auxiliary accounts which are the QQgame QQpet and QQmusic. With QQgame, one can play simple socialized game online such as poker. With QQpet, one can raise your own electronic pets, which are favored by many children. With QQmusic, one can get free music stream online. Well, my messenger is mainly used to contact the international friends. However, I registered the Facebook last year to experience a new social network tool.

For the entertainment part, the digital online games such as the strategy game Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne is my favorite because it is not time consuming compared with the online social game World of Warcraft. In Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, the player can play either alone (choosing computer to be the opponent) or with somebody else or with many players together to play the RPG game. Besides, watching the WCG (World Cyber Games) tournament is a popular worldwide competition in the electronic game field.

Finally, I’d like to mention one point which is internet is the carrier for all social media technologies so that the development of related social media technologies is dependent on the development of the internet technology itself.

Essay 1 – [Me and social media – my relationship to social media technologies]

As my memory recalls, the social media technologies develop with the boom of Internet. During 90’s, friends usually talk through telecommunication networks and sellers always communicate with their consumers by mass media, such as printed newspaper and commercials. These kinds of communication are either covering limited rang of people or lack of interaction as well as feedbacks. Thus, when the first social media technological tool appeared after the invention of Internet, everyone just rushed to get it. For me, the first social media tool is ICQ,which is an instant messaging computer program and was first developed by the Israeli companyMirabilis.[1] It’s kind of like MSN in nowadays but at that time, the function of ICQ was quite simple and that’s chat with friends online. It’s also another way for me to practice written English because the version of ICQ at that time was only in English and most of users of it were English-speakers. Later, if I remembered right, the huge wave came from QQ, which was founded by a mainland China software company named Tencent. The first version of QQ started with the same function as ICQ but targeted to Chinese-speakers market and it add many innovative and creative new ideas into the programming. For example, users can change their appearing pictures in front of their names and there are many different kinds of emotions they can choose from when chatting with others to express themselves more visually. When I was in junior school, having a QQ number is a symbol of fashion among friends and it was a new way of meeting people. Till now, QQ is still the most popular free instant messaging computer program in Mainland China, and the world’s third most popular IM service.

After the emerged of these two important social media tools happened in my life, the relationship for me with social media technologies are getting tighter because more other kind of social media appeared in the short time and with more attractive usages. For instance, Blog and Forum. I think I have 10 Blogs at least from the first trend of it. From my point of view, Blog is more private and personal while forum is much public with more practical information but both of them cover more scale of people than ICQ or QQ.

To put all in a nut, I think I started to use these tools just for fun and continue using them because these social media technologies are becoming more fun and user-friendly through the additional applications along the development of the techniques.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ