Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual reality is a computer generated simulation of a three-dimensional image or environment that can be interacted with in a seemingly real or physical way by a person using special electronic equipment. With this technology advancement, virtual worlds can be used as a representation of reality to practice many different things such as medical surgeries, class room lessons, video games and etc.. 

There are many pros to this technology, such as the improvement of gaming experience, virtual prototypes, training programs for military, medical training, psychological therapy, and many more. In the article by the Wall Street Journals, "Avatar II: The Hospital" shows that online simulations can teach the nurses to make what decisions to make during emergencies without really doing any harm in the real world.  In another article by New York Times "No Budget, No Boundaries: It's the Real You" gives users the opportunity to live a lavish life to try on all kinds of designer clothing and go on lavish vacations. This gives them a feel of lavish living without spending much money to do the actual activities in real life. 

However, there are also some cons to this virtual world. This includes that the virtual world cannot captures the real world because it is difficult and time consuming to recreate every little object of the real environment, and the users behavior can be impacted by virtual worlds. The article "Virtual world may impact real-world behavior" showed that with a research done to see the behaviors after participants randomly assigned to be a hero or a villain turned out that their behavior were affected by the role they played.

Virtual worlds can challenge its users to come up with creative thoughts and be tested in the virtual settings without doing harm to the real world if it did not work out. In a way it limited a lot of risks and helped coming up with creative ways to solve and test problems. I think the future of virtual worlds will be very useful to many people whether it is doctors, teachers, or gamer. It will be able to bring an incredible experience and be able to innovate creative ways to solve problems.

References:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/fashion/22Avatar.html 

https://www.health24.com/Mental-Health/News/Virtual-world-may-impact-real-world-behaviour-20140210 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703909804575124470868041204.html?KEYWORDS=avatar+ii+the+hospital

Twitter

Twitter, Blackboard and in-class discussions are some ways to have discussions, but the use of them are somewhat different. When using Twitter for a discussion, one usually have to be concise with his or her idea, and it is usually less formal as people is generally more expressive as he or she is behind the computers. While on 
Blackboard, because one knows that it is for a certain course, so there is definitely a more formality in the way one speaks his or her thoughts. An in-class discussion can sometimes be hard because some students may shy away from telling his or her opinions on the subject, but I believe that in-class discussions may be the best way to get across one's opinion and to have an immediate reaction from the students or the professor will enable an efficient discussion. 

Social Networking Sites

Everyone these days has at lease one social networking sites, whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn. Although they may all just be social networking sites, each site has very distinct differences which is the reason why one person would have multiple social networking accounts. 

Facebook was one of the first networking sites I started using. It has many different features such as posting a photo or video to posting an entire album or to posting your thoughts for those you would like to share with. It was a great way to connect to friends and family away from you. In addition, you could follow any news or celebrities of your preference and it will come up in your news-feed as soon as you open it.

Twitter is different from Facebook as people generally express their thoughts more in this social platform, whether it is about politics, entertainment news, sports or music. Users can also find what subjects are trending in the moment they are using Twitter with the hashtags. One thing about Twitter is that it could be confusing at first, because the home page looks messy. It took me sometime to get used to the format of Twitter. 

Instagram is definitely a platform for more of the younger generation where they posts pictures or videos that they would like to show to friends and family or even to the rest of the world. But usually these pictures are captured in the best moment so that the user can get more likes than the previous posts. It has become almost unhealthy mentally for the user to feel pressured to get more likes. 

LinkedIn is distinctively different from the above three social networking sites because LinkedIn are primarily used for recruitment process. Whether it is sending a thank you email to your interviewer, or linking yourself to the people you know in order to meet more people who could potentially be your future colleagues. 

All these social networking sites have been widely used by many audiences, but there are some differences between each of these sites which is why one person can have multiple social networking sites and he or she will say that it is all for a different purpose and would not feel as if he or she has way too many accounts. 

Blog Social Networking

Blog Social Networking can be a way to reach out your ideas to a wide variety of people out in the internet. Former President Barack Obama "had used the Web to lower the cost of building a political brand, create a sense of connection and engagement, and dispense with the command and control method of governing to allow people to self-organize to do the work." Obama was up against Senator Clinton, who already had a lot of recognition, and then Senator McCain. This just shows that there is a tremendous power in opening citizen access to government. There are many benefits of these technologies to society, such as being able to know all these information almost instantly and at a very low cost. 

But along with the benefits also come with some dangers. As people are behind the screens, they tend to have more courage to express things that they usually would not say face-to-face. For example, JuicyCampus, a site that encouraged students to talk trash about their peers in an anonymous forum back in 2007 has brought up a lot of controversies before it was shut down in 2009. Nowadays there are many younger audiences on the Web, I would hope that netizens be aware of these audiences and be aware of the actions that they're doing can be reflected into children and it is not healthy for children. Although people should speak out their opinions and thoughts, they should be aware with the word choices and impacts of a violent sentence. 

References:

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html

https://www.chronicle.com/article/theyre-backtheyre-bad-/48220

Blog VS. Wiki

A blog is theoretically a linear format, where articles are offered in a reverse chronological order (youngest first), usually written by a single or few people, and edited after posting. A wiki is a nonlinear collection of pages, ideally connected by many internal links, with no chronological concept. Wikis were originally invented to be editable by all comers, enabling a read-write web. They are usually contributed to by many people (with sometimes wildly different opinions on basically everything). They encourage editing wrong or outdated information, so that the whole subject stays up to date.

The convergence of has a great impact in society advancements. Media has allowed industries to expand and develop new technologies through media sharing data, research and etc. In an article by the New York Times, "Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid" shows how media was used to alert and notify a community in Brooklyn of the drug use in the area. This blog helped the community become a safer place through creating awareness. 

https://www.cio.com/article/2436789/more-on-how-to-build-your-own-wikipedia.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/nyregion/26bayridge.html

Analysis of MeiTuan: How did MeiTuan survive and succeed in the dominated e-commerce in China

I chose to do my project on the analysis of 'MeiTuan,' which is an app similar to 'Uber eats' or 'Grubhub' but has even more abilities such as ordering tickets to a Broadway show to booking a hotel and etcetera. This app is functional all around the globe. China’s consumer internet has long been dominated by e-commerce giant Alibaba and social media titan Tencent. But this hasn’t stopped one young company from capturing an ever larger share of people’s online spending. In this research topic, I will touch upon some of the hardships that exists for young companies to succeed in China in a very dominated society, as well as some of the strategies MeiTuan used to succeed as its estimated to be $30 billion in value just in the past year. I plan to touch on all these aspects and much more in depth.