Tuesday, January 15, 2013

New New Media Tools and Experiences

With all the different aspects of the social web out there, I’ve gotten linked in to a lot of different sites—though I don’t have any sort of LinkedIn account.  There are, in fact, a lot of accounts that I don’t have, or that I didn’t get for a while.  Why is what I use or don’t use in terms of new new media tools important?  Well, believe it or not, you can actually tell quite a bit about a person by what new new media tools they use and how they use them.

By Randall Munroe of xkcd.com

So what do I use and how do I use them?  In rough order, here’s how I started joining and using new new media sites:

Facebook Account: I joined Facebook in early 2007.  I’ve had a love-hate relationship ever since.  However, it’s where the people are.  I can find pretty much anyone I know on Facebook, making it an incredibly convenient communication tool.

YouTube: I joined YouTube primarily to subscribe to video channels and comment if necessary.  The secondary reason was to create videos.  The latter has not worked out so far, but I still plan on starting up a few reviews and/or webshows.

Forums: I’ve been on a variety of forums that are now mostly dead.  I count this as a form of “new new media” even though they’re usually more along the lines of just “social media” or “new media,” because the areas of the forums I would frequent most were more than just discussions, but involved the sharing and critique of writing and art.  I actually moderated the Inheritance Forums for a point (fan forums for Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle), but I’ve since moved on and am not currently part of any forums.

TV Tropes Wiki: It was a while between the time I started reading and when I created an actual account, but I’ve dabbled in editing the TV Tropes wiki.

Wordpress: I have several Wordpress blogs, which I started after I downloaded Windows Live Writer with a version of MSN Messenger.  The first was a personal blog, the second was a blog about internet-born urban legend the Slender Man, and the third was Bad Andy-Reviewed Fiction, a site where I poke fun at terrible fanfiction and original fiction.  All three sites are still running, though the first and third are largely inactive and the second has moved to a different site.

Blogger:  Ooh, boy.  Blogger blogs.  This is what I have the most of and what I’ve actually seen the biggest “new new media” interaction.  Well, after starting my blog about the Slender Man, I decided  write several stories in a blog medium.  I’m not the only one who’s done it.  There are a lot of “slenderblogs” out there, and the best way to find them is comments on other blogs.  My stories, in order of writing, are Now I Shall Know You Again, Don’t Shoot The Messenger (perhaps the most well-known one, currently sitting at 112 followers), Unplugged 161 (my shortest and perhaps most accessible blog), and Wandering from Death (my current, ongoing one).

After a while, I started some more traditional blogs on blogger.  These include DaLadybugProductions (where I post reviews, thoughts, and project updates) and A Terrible Fate (a series of essays that take a critical look at The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask).

Slenderbloggins: This is the first website I actually ran, a Slender Man fansite that continued off of the aforementioned Wordpress blog.  It was kind of a taxing experience, and I’ve had all sorts of issues—the site is currently still down—but it was interesting to be running something on a scale a bit bigger than I had been.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

A Fly in the Social Web

Buzz.  Buzz buzz.

Oh dear.  I seem to be caught.

It's not surprising with all these social websites, overlapping with each other, sending all sorts of criss-crossing strands everywhere.  As Paul Levinson says in the intro to New New Media, "a post on a blog with an embedded YouTube video can be automatically sent to Twitter...which in turn can be set to show up on Facebook and LinkedIn, and via widgets or other special applications on other blogs."  Really puts the net in networking, doesn't it?

The social web's not too bad of a place, though.  After all, I've got all sorts of fellow flies and other insects to keep me company and interact with (though I try to ignore the mosquitoes and box elder bugs--they're kind of pricks).  I tell them whatever pithy and pretentious sayings come into my head, and they entertain me in return.  It's all good fun.

There are some spiders out there, though.  Hackers.  Trolls.  Corporations that don't care about our privacy as much as they claim they do.  And sure, they'll probably be along any second to wrap us up and sink our fangs into us and slowly suck our our internal organs and I think that by this point my metaphor has kind of overextended itself.  So, uh....

Um...hope you enjoy the blog?

...Buzz....