Nicholas Pooran's Blog

The next great step in new media is a virtual social meeting place where everyone can use a virtual headset and meet up in a complex virtual world that emulates the basics of social media capabilities but feels like real life without beimg real at all! The real Sword Art Online but friendly and where we can meet up and be completely different characters that can't bw judged because all that history and bio isn't necessary! Sure there's the antisicial worries and disconnect from the real world but we can cross that bridge when we come to it!

P2P file sharing is a system that allows users to share various media and files from one computer to another. Users can access the content through the internet without accessing a server. You would need to use a P2P software to use this resource. This is just one way of file sharing. The earliest form of p2p software is Napster which gave birth to systems such as BitTorrent. According to Clive Thompson in the article "The BitTorrent Effect," BitTorrent lets users quickly upload and download enormous amounts of data files that ate hundreds or thousands of times bigger than a single MP3." This may be a great source of content for many to take advantage of to save time and money but it creates a legal as well as an ethical issue considering that some content may be the the intellectual property of someone else.

Privacy is a concern of many users of social media. Completing your profiles on many social media sites may requires a boatload of personal information and allows us to share so much but sometimes its easy to take for granted what can be done with this information if it falls into the wrong hands. Companies like Facebook make it a priority to collect user data from our profiles but how much of it do they take and what do they do with it? How much of that data is considered confidential? What are the chances of your profile being hacked? There's so much to be afraid of. And the freedom we have to express ourselves and post what we want creates more opportunities for vengeful exposure of others at the expense of their dignity and pride. Identity theft is not the only concern. The mental health of users are at risk as well. It may also be worth wondering if the laws on privacy and confidentiality are strict enough to keep companies and individuals in check.