1. As technology progresses and high quality cameras will become widely available I believe amateur content quality will improve with time. For the amateur artist the goal is to look as professional as possible, often times a major roadblock to this goal is camera quality. Amateur videos have a lower quality look about them not because of choice, but rather lack of. The amateur artist often uses what is at his disposal, for many this is a video camera incapable of taking high-resolution picture.
With the improvement and dissemination of camera technology the price will drop, emulating the price drop with HD TV’s. The lower price will allow more people the opportunity to own a camera with high-resolution capabilities, and thus raising the level of quality of amateur work. Given enough time, hand held cameras may be able to match the quality of professional cameras, creating an equilibrium between professional and amateur quality. While this equality may be good for amateurs it will have a negative effect on professionals. Professionals will seek to reestablish the gap that once existed between the two by emphasizing production quality that amateurs will never be able to grasp.
2. I find the majority of social media to be a waste of time with no tangible benefits. My time on Facebook was boring and fruitless and now I only use it to share videos. Of all the social media sites the only one I find tolerable is Reddit, which I probably spend about fifteen to twenty minutes on per day. Reddit, a news aggregator, is simply more convenient that traditional news channels and I am able to read more content in a shorter period of time.
I believe Facebook is more popular than MySpace because of the convenience it offers users. The Facebook layout is streamlined and easy to use while at the beginning MySpace was hard to navigate.. With time MySpace has achieved this, but it appears too late to stop the media juggernaut that Facebook has become.
Predicting which websites will be popular in even a short amount of time is an impossible question to answer. There is no way to predict which new sites will come along in the time period or when users get tired of a particular website. However, given Facebook’s incredible popularity and constant growth I believe it is fare to say that it will continue to dominate social media. Both the product and the size of Facebook will help ensure its long-term popularity. Social media works best with many users all using one website, Facebook has achieved this goal. I do not believe it possible for another website to grow to the scope of Facebook and be able to challenge its dominance. Should Facebook continue to grow I believe that it may eventually become the standard for social media much in the same fashion the Encyclopedia Britannica is the encyclopedia standard.
3. In the social media world credentials are now optional. Anyone can create a blog and begin to talk about whatever subject they please. This “freedom to post” carries with it inherent responsibility to be transparent about the blogger’s motivation behind the post. Product endorsements should either be genuine or the reader should have forewarning about an agreement between the blogger and the company. If such an agreement is in place the blogger has a responsibility to tell his readers. Readers expect bloggers to hold themselves to the standard of honesty expected from journalists.
Transparency is less important offline rather than online because of the source. The majority of time offline news is gathered from the news or a person you trust. Either way you know the source and can expect the person is being honest and forthright. Such a relationship does not exist in the online world, people take blogger’s words as genuine news. As such, bloggers have a responsibility to be transparent in their dealings.
“Cyberspace” – The Internet has been dubbed “Cyberspace” since its inception. The picture visualizes this saying, the earth remains but traditional space is replaced with the Internet. Specifically space takes the form of the Reddit homepage. Reddit has grown from simple news aggregator into a full on Internet community. While sharing news is still one of the primary focuses of the Reddit website, the community has developed it’s own, for lack of a better word, language. This Reddit language is visualized through the use of Internet memes, showcased in the various images covering the Reddit homepage. These memes hold true to McLuhans “medium is the message”, the text may change but the picture remains. The picture serves as the medium and delivers a unified message regardless of the text.
