Online entertainment a decade from now will obviously have quite a few changes!
Micro payments will be the way everything is viewed and purchased. Instead of being able to access information for free, companies will now be charging very small fees for accessed viewing. Consumers will be willing to do this because the fees are so small, but the amount of consumers paying the fees will mean huge revenue for corporations and businesses. For example, instead of being able to read the latest headline of the electoral race for free, you would go through a news site such as CNN, and pay a nickel for every article you access. It will be the same for entertainment sites such as People, TMZ, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Maxim, etc.
Data transmission speeds will be so phenomenally fast that mobile gaming will be THE platform. All online games will be fully accessible on mobile platforms.
The recently invented 3-D erasable and re-writable hologram technology from the University of Arizona will lead to holographic 3-D becoming prevalent in entertainment. Viewing sports games at home will be a whole different experience! Imagine if this had been available when Prince William got married. We could have paid a small fee to watch a hologram of the wedding, feeling almost as if we were there!
3-D technology will also advance to become the way most games are played. Not only will the 3-D technology we know today be a part of gaming, but touch, smell, and taste will be included. Motion sensors will play a big part. Your entire body will be involved in the game-play. It will be more and more difficult to differentiate between games and reality.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Our group presentation
Our group presentation was on Social Networks. We broke the presentation down into six sections of Social Networks: their History, Relationships, Crime & Deviant Behavior, how Corporations use social networking, how you can use them in your professional life,and Privacy aspects.
A social network is a social construction of many individuals connected to each other by various kinds of relationships. The history of social networks goes all the way back to 1997, with a site called SixDegrees.com. You could create a profile and share it with others. Eventually, SixDegrees.com had about one million registered users. Now, the most popular social networking site is, of course, Facebook, which currently has over 800 million active users!! There are over 70 languages available on Facebook. A statistic that may seem surprising: over 80% of Facebook users are outside of the US. Email is also considered a social network, but it comes in second to Facebook.
Relationships are an intriguing part of social networks. Many people argue that you cannot form a relationship with someone you have never met. Social network relationships seem to prove that theory wrong. Really, consider the "old days." Relationships were formed through letters and then through phone calls, long before people met face-to-face. There is an interesting tendency for people to share much more about themselves online than perhaps they would face-to-face, which can lead to dangerous consequences.
There have been crimes committed through the use of social networks. These crimes include identity theft, phishing, data mining, fraud, stalking and crimes committed by sexual predators. There are ways to protect yourself from these crimes when using social networks. Set your privacy levels at the highest setting, and change your password often and make the passwords something very difficult to figure out (throw a number into the middle of the word, put a capital letter somewhere random in the word, etc.) Do not use words that are used as answers to the questions given to retrieve forgotten passwords, such as place of birth, mother's maiden name, or favorite pet. Always log off when you leave a site. Don't overshare!! Verify friends before "accepting" or "friending" them. Monitor bank and credit card accounts often. Have a second email set up in case the first one is compromised. Have email alerts set up to notify you of changes to your accounts. Be suspicious of anyone-even friends-who ask for money. Act quickly if you think your account has been compromised and report it at once.
Corporations mainly use social networking to engage their customers and to promote business. They do this through placing ads, running promotions, and sponsoring stories. They also develop relationships with customers on their account page. 99% of retailers now have a Facebook account. 11.9% of fan pages on Facebook are for product, and that number is steadily rising. Many of the promotions run by companies on Facebook now are to get their fan numbers up. 77% of fan pages have less than 1,000 fans, but that number will probably drop drastically in the next year or two as more and more companies offer giveaways limited to their "fans."
Social networks are a good way to get ahead in the business world, also. Based on a survey in 2011 of almost 3,000 active social network users, 59% felt it was important to have a LinkedIn account, 53% said the same of a Facebook and a MySpace account, and 58% saw the value of having a Twitter account. They use their accounts for job searching, networking with former employers, within the industry, and with co-workers. Business also used social networks for hiring, keeping in touch, and promoting the business. So both an employee and an employer sees high value in using social networking sites.
Wrapping this up is the idea of privacy. Or should I say the illusion of privacy. Just remember there really is none. What you throw out their in cyberspace cannot be taken back. Even a deleted file can many times be retrieved. Use common sense!
A social network is a social construction of many individuals connected to each other by various kinds of relationships. The history of social networks goes all the way back to 1997, with a site called SixDegrees.com. You could create a profile and share it with others. Eventually, SixDegrees.com had about one million registered users. Now, the most popular social networking site is, of course, Facebook, which currently has over 800 million active users!! There are over 70 languages available on Facebook. A statistic that may seem surprising: over 80% of Facebook users are outside of the US. Email is also considered a social network, but it comes in second to Facebook.
Relationships are an intriguing part of social networks. Many people argue that you cannot form a relationship with someone you have never met. Social network relationships seem to prove that theory wrong. Really, consider the "old days." Relationships were formed through letters and then through phone calls, long before people met face-to-face. There is an interesting tendency for people to share much more about themselves online than perhaps they would face-to-face, which can lead to dangerous consequences.
There have been crimes committed through the use of social networks. These crimes include identity theft, phishing, data mining, fraud, stalking and crimes committed by sexual predators. There are ways to protect yourself from these crimes when using social networks. Set your privacy levels at the highest setting, and change your password often and make the passwords something very difficult to figure out (throw a number into the middle of the word, put a capital letter somewhere random in the word, etc.) Do not use words that are used as answers to the questions given to retrieve forgotten passwords, such as place of birth, mother's maiden name, or favorite pet. Always log off when you leave a site. Don't overshare!! Verify friends before "accepting" or "friending" them. Monitor bank and credit card accounts often. Have a second email set up in case the first one is compromised. Have email alerts set up to notify you of changes to your accounts. Be suspicious of anyone-even friends-who ask for money. Act quickly if you think your account has been compromised and report it at once.
Corporations mainly use social networking to engage their customers and to promote business. They do this through placing ads, running promotions, and sponsoring stories. They also develop relationships with customers on their account page. 99% of retailers now have a Facebook account. 11.9% of fan pages on Facebook are for product, and that number is steadily rising. Many of the promotions run by companies on Facebook now are to get their fan numbers up. 77% of fan pages have less than 1,000 fans, but that number will probably drop drastically in the next year or two as more and more companies offer giveaways limited to their "fans."
Social networks are a good way to get ahead in the business world, also. Based on a survey in 2011 of almost 3,000 active social network users, 59% felt it was important to have a LinkedIn account, 53% said the same of a Facebook and a MySpace account, and 58% saw the value of having a Twitter account. They use their accounts for job searching, networking with former employers, within the industry, and with co-workers. Business also used social networks for hiring, keeping in touch, and promoting the business. So both an employee and an employer sees high value in using social networking sites.
Wrapping this up is the idea of privacy. Or should I say the illusion of privacy. Just remember there really is none. What you throw out their in cyberspace cannot be taken back. Even a deleted file can many times be retrieved. Use common sense!
My presentation
My presentation covered the topic of online sweepstakes. I have been a "sweeper" since 1995. Back then, it was much harder to find online sweepstakes, but also much easier to win them because there were so many less people online. There were basic bulletin board groups, such as Delphi, where someone would start a group and others with common interests would join. I joined a sweepstaking group on Delphi, and we would post sweepstakes that we came across to help other sweepers have the chance to enter. Rather than looking at this as making your winning odds worse, we looked at it as "what goes around comes around." (If I help someone else who ends up winning, someday I may end up winning something because he/she helps me.) There are much larger forums online now with the same purpose in mind. Some sites charge a monthly fee to belong, and many of those sites are the ones with the best sweepstakes: the ones with better odds because they are local, or the ones with many valuable prizes, etc. However, there are many great free sites as well that list sweepstakes after sweepstakes available to enter. Many have a direct online link to the entry page.
Why would someone give something away? Many people worry that sweepstakes are not legitimate, and sometimes for good reason. People say "you can't get something for nothing." Companies use their marketing dollars to give product and money away to advertise their company. If a company can get someone to their website to enter a drawing, and then that person looks at their site and ends up buying their product or service...multiply that by thousands of people, and you can have a very successful promotion. There are scammers out there who will set up fake promotions to get your information so they can spam you. That is one reason that having a paid subscription to a sweepstakes website is a good idea. The sweeps site's owners and editors check out the sweepstakes before posting them to determine that they are legitimate. Another way to protect yourself is to enter sweepstakes of companies that are well-known, such as Coca-Cola, Amazon, Pepsi, etc. Set up an email strictly for using to enter sweepstakes, because you definitely will get junk mail. You could look at it as the "nothing" part of "you can't get something for nothing." Is it worth it to me to get a ton of junk mail, but in the middle of all that, find a legitimate email that tells me I won a big-screen TV (or a trip, or computer?) You bet it is!!
Why would someone give something away? Many people worry that sweepstakes are not legitimate, and sometimes for good reason. People say "you can't get something for nothing." Companies use their marketing dollars to give product and money away to advertise their company. If a company can get someone to their website to enter a drawing, and then that person looks at their site and ends up buying their product or service...multiply that by thousands of people, and you can have a very successful promotion. There are scammers out there who will set up fake promotions to get your information so they can spam you. That is one reason that having a paid subscription to a sweepstakes website is a good idea. The sweeps site's owners and editors check out the sweepstakes before posting them to determine that they are legitimate. Another way to protect yourself is to enter sweepstakes of companies that are well-known, such as Coca-Cola, Amazon, Pepsi, etc. Set up an email strictly for using to enter sweepstakes, because you definitely will get junk mail. You could look at it as the "nothing" part of "you can't get something for nothing." Is it worth it to me to get a ton of junk mail, but in the middle of all that, find a legitimate email that tells me I won a big-screen TV (or a trip, or computer?) You bet it is!!
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