From "The Language of New Media"

...the computer media revolution affects all stages of communication, including acquisition, manipulation, storage, and distribution; it also affects all types of media --- texts, still images, moving images, sound, and spatial constructions.

I think this statement can help clear up a lot of the ideas we went through during class. Especially the idea of what art is.

I tend to disagree with Patricia Lange’s article "Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube." It is my understanding that privacy is very easy to maintain on that particular social network. It seems pretty straightforward. You decide the content of your video and what personal information you will release. It is not like Facebook or Mypace where people can upload compromising pictures of one another without the individual’s knowledge or permission.

Social networking and my generation’s magnetic attraction to its use seems to be a defining characteristic that goes along with our rampant use of the internet. As Boyd points out, while not everyone uses social networking sites, the most popular being MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, everyone does have something to say about them. Additionally, both MySpace and YouTube have expanded beyond just the basic social network consisting of people with their personal profiles or videos.

Reaffirming the Internet’s amazing powers of communication and social networking, and their implications, is the rise of the controversial new household issue of profile regulation. Parents are afraid of what their child’s profile might look like and who might see it, and children are afraid that their parents might see their profile and make them change it. A child’s appearance and actions in virtual reality seem to be under even more scrutiny than his actions in the real world.

As the Internet continues evolving and expanding, we see a shift from older to newer forms of entertainment, specifically from television to video-sharing sites such as YouTube. It has become a popular form of entertainment among teenagers. With younger generations spending more time on the computer, online network sites have developed ways to attract them to their sites. YouTube allows anyone to post up videos, enabling unknown individuals to share their stories with the World Wide Web audience.

I generally do not think too much about online privacy concerns, and am often dismissive of most threats. Count me as one of the few and proud mac owners, who gleefully downloads whatever email attachment and visits whatever site with the knowledge my computer wont be infected. But after reading last weeks articles on privacy, and looking over my facebook security settings, I see my worry free attitude toward internet security has crossed over into the protection of my personal information.

An issue that used to be important to my friends and I, although it doesn’t affect me much anymore, is the regulation and prohibition of online networking sites like MySpace. As we all know, many parents prohibit their teens from using these sites, or try to control how they use them. Boyd writes at length about this these regulations, and they become a significant dispute for many families. At the risk of sounding like a teenager who wants to complain about his or her family rules (they’re like the most unfair ever!), I want to champion a more relaxed method of oversight.

I was especially interested in Boyd’s essay. Now we can use social network service very easily, without special knowledge or technique. However, now we are required more complicated social skill besides the skill face to face because almost all of us are using those as a communication tools with friends for granted.

I was very surprised to know that there are 700,000 people who hate the new feeds on facebook. I’ve always enjoyed the new feeds because I get to see what my friends are doing. I can understand why people dislike it because it can be an invasion of privacy, but there’s a feature on facebook that is being undermined. There’s a small ‘x’ next to the box of the event and when clicked on, you can choose to ‘hide the story.’ When you click that, it no long appears on the news feed. It’s understandable if there are things that should be hidden.

As Patricia Lange discusses throughly, the use of the internet has and continues to redefine the meaning public and private space. She says that, " public and private are relative terms and shift according to individual perspectives." Be that as it may I assume that most people would describe their homes as more private than say the grocery store or movie theater. Still through videos and social networking sites we invite people into an identifiable personal part of our lives.