Crowdsourcing has been able to connect people from all parts of the internet and it seems to have been mainly a good thing. Like in the article ‘The Rise of Crowdsourcing’ there are photographers who don’t need to apply for a job, they can simply create for other people. For example, if someone wanted a high resolution of a tree, a customer can pay an armature to do it. In a sense, it really benefits both parties as the amature can have a chance to shine and the person paying can pay less than what they would normally pay a professional. personally, I have had a great experience with crowdsourcing. I paid this person to do a custom computer wallpaper and i was very satisfied with it. What this shows is that we are giving people with a niche skill  set the opportunity to do what they want for money. Without crowd sourcing, these people would not be doing what they love or would have a harder time trying to make a living. The photographer in the first article said he has noticed he got less money for the photos he was taking. I think it is because there are people who noticed they could pay less for a photo of similar quality but also the fact that there are more people willing to take the job and thus higher demand means they can be paid less.

The only downside I see to this is that this eliminates all sorts of relationships. Lets say i hire someone to build me a web page, if they come into an office every day, there is a sense of a relationship between the web builder and the boss. But if I hire someone through the internet from three hundred miles away, if I don’t need them, I could just tell them they’re fired without giving them a severance package. Like in the third article, the guy name Charles Murray got paid 75 dollars to do a writing. I think it has to do with how with the rise of companies like ‘fiver’ and  ‘Upwork’ the NYT was able to have a huge amount of contributing writers; all ranging from good to professional. So since they had access to them, Murrays wasn’t as important to the NYT. If he wanted to leave, the NYT wouldn’t care.

In summary, crowdsourcing opened a lot of people to the opportunity to do what they love without having a reputation, but it has also allowed for larger companies to take advantage of these same people to cut costs wherever they can.

The first article, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing”, is about the first beginnings of examples that created and started the action of Crowdsourcing. It also speaks about the different ways that crowdsourcing was put into work in its earliest uses with minor companies. Crowdsourcing seems to be utilized more prominently these days especially with the advance in technology. It seems to be changing our methods of labor on the Internet because now companies are using crowdsourcing for their customers to access their products. 

In the second article,  Shirky argues “that what looked like a fact about human nature turns out to be merely an artifact of limited 20th century media technologies. Because only a small group of professional writers had access to the technologies of mass publication, it seemed obvious that writing for publication was a job for professionals. And because the rest of us had never participated in the process, it was widely assumed we didn’t want to. We now know that assumption was wrong. Many ordinary people jump at the chance to be producers as well as consumers.” This entire quote is the basic purpose that there doesn’t just have to be a professional who’s a journalist with a degree. But rather than any individual can go ahead and use their own platform to create discussions with others. 

In the last article, “The future of Crowdsourcing, Why the crowd is changing and What you can do about it”, it speaks about how the growth of crowdsourcing is changing it’s own future and what can most likely be expected because of it. The article also goes into different steps a person could take to go through their own crowdsourcing experience as well.

I’ve spent the past few years off of Facebook after I canceled my account to escape the anxiety that I felt it was giving me.  I only rejoined in the past few weeks because my community board only meets on a Facebook page for this rural Florida town that I own property in.  I deliberately added contact information that only friends could read, to know where to reach me more consistently.  I don’t plan on adding friends on the platform because I will not be posting there or participating in online dialogue unless it deals directly with my community board.

Living without Google is virtually impossible.  I was using google before smartphones became popular because It was the easiest yellow pages anyone could use.   After some time, I figured out that you can probably find the answers to some of life’s biggest secrets by paying attention to the common search results.  I tried to not use google for the week but I couldn’t because plenty of research is required when enrolled in 5 classes.  The same was true with avoiding amazon.  It may not be as difficult to avoid purchases but with so many classes and books to order; I couldn’t not use amazon.

Yahoo & Bing search engines failed in their respective challenges to Google, so I don’t anticipate my own engine to do any better.  When it comes to addressing privacy and the monetization of web-tracking, I would have more interest in using whatever information has been aggregated, to present closer search results for the user.  Presenting similar results rather than purchase options would probably restore human curiosity to the internet.  I would also make it more user friendly and perhaps include exercises or short tutorial clips that show users how to tailor their search attributes in order to achieve more accurate search results.  I’m not sure what I would call it.

I am more interested however in more of an open GPS type of software that incorporates historical data that reaches beyond what augmented reality apps have accomplished.  If the entries were open-sourced, similar to Wikipedia; users would have more of a cultural experience combined with local commerce, rather than a standard functionality.  I would like it to work similarly to how gps apps currently aggregate info from other drivers to determine shortcuts or detours.

I would probably name this GPS search “GOB4”, sort of a play on the word GO and Before, visiting somewhere new and walking, learning amongst its past.

I feel as though digital media both impede and expands our knowledge; on a personal level as well as the human collective.  Recent world reactions to the George Floyd-BlackLivesMatter movement and the global response to the pandemic are fantastic examples of how social media expands our knowledge collectively.  The google opt-out satirical video poked fun at the inability to escape google’s data mining grasp.   Imagining a mountainside community of people living off-grid isn’t so far fetched.  The show Upload (Amazon Prime) imagined similar fictional communities as an option to the traditional afterlife, that allowed contact with those still living.  They lived off-grid and maintained limited physical contact with the living.

Raymond Williams warned us about the potential for social and political intersection but did he imagine the political disruption that would ensue after Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in data mining during the last presidential election?  I do agree however with both Rheingold and Knapp in how the internet would foster a new politically conscious community.  There is an online community on different social media platforms called 7 Train Blues. This community is somewhat specific to me in Queens because allows us commuters on the 7 train and outlet for issues that we felt were falling onto deaf city official ears.  They use the pages to report on various issues from the train line (decaying infrastructure, delays, etc) that crosses various communities in Queens. It allows the train’s regular commuters to look beyond their specific neighborhood to identify broader problems and potential solutions and some local political figures also use it.  My favorite so far has been locals decorating roadkill going viral in order to get their community to clean up the carcass.

If I was to create a search engine it would be similar to google but the major difference is that you would have direct links to what can help you and what you’re looking for. As far as google there are millions of links but not all of them are helping with what you are searching for. The engine would give you the exact answer to your question and or what you are researching for. As for digital media, it is very important and I believe it is expanding our knowledge. With digital media we are able to learn about different areas around the world without having to travel there. We are able to gain knowledge online about different cultures and connect with others around the world. Digital media can be bad and impeding because fake news surface many platforms misleading many to believe something that is not true.

I think digital media is impeding and expanding our knowledge. There are so many pros and cons to this topic. Digital media is so big in today’s world that it’s still expanding and so many new digital media outlets are coming out, but two major powerhouse digital media in today’s world are Facebook and google these two companies have data from millions to even probably billions across the world. One thing I like is my privacy and when I see our government is involved in data mining it worries me especially what they said in this article it states that  “There are more than 100 million registered Twitter users, and the Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring — and permanently storing — the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.” “new york times” whenever I hear that the government is involved it automatically shows me that whatever we are doing is under watch which is creepy, this is a con toward digital media. The way it is helping us expand our knowledge is that we can access more information and learn from different digital media outlets, for example whenever am stuck on an assignment in go straight to google and it finds my answer or if im looking for a specific place it finds it or if I need to do research it helps me tremendously. Also, another example is youtube if you want to learn how to do anything and I mean anything youtube can pull up a video and there would be someone instructing you on how to bake a cake, lift weights, how to hack your iPhone, or hack someone on Xbox, this goes to show you you can gain knowledge from the web. Furthermore, we as a civilization have been evolving for millions of years and in the 21st century it’s happening even quicker we as a people always have something bad to say about new technology or even new digital media outlets, but before saying anything negative without the internet we wouldn’t be where we are at today without it.

My new search engine would be very similar to Google. This search engine would be more personalized, however, according to your interests based on your browser history and cookies. So if someone were to look up “Funky Cabinet” and that person has a history of looking for Alice in Wonderland, then anything that could merge the two would come up. This is a very general search, in the example given, however the idea should be that my search engine and your history work together to curate what you want to find. This would be called “You It.” I named it this because it can also be used a verb, like Google, and someone can say to their friend “just You It and you can find it.” It’s simple and easy to use! You It is designed to be personalized which is why I wanted to incorporate YOU into IT. Also, I’m not good at sketches at all but I imagined it to look like Google except the words read “You It” and the background would be customizable to any images the user wanted. 

Are the tools of digital media impeding or expanding our knowledge? 

Digital media is constantly expanding our knowledge, but when false information spreads on platforms like Facebook or Instagram, or even reputable sites, it does impede our knowledge. We need to be careful in where we get our information from and double check the validity before spreading the same information that may do more harm than good. I think if used properly, for research and experiments, then digital media is more useful. It depends more on the user, than it does on the content.

Through my personal experiences with social media, it seems like social media can be both a blessing and a curse. A hundred years ago, one could take a picture and save it if they choose. If they didn’t want it or if the photo was very embarrassing, one could simply rip it up and throw it away. Now, if one were to post a picture that is embarrassing, it can really haunt them in the real world. Those pictures that are put online, those will be on the internet forever. For as long as you live ,those pictures will be out on the internet forever. Even if you delete it on your facebook profile, someone somewhere or facebook themselves will have a copy of it. Stacy Snyder had to deal with this herself as a photo she took and posted came and bit her. She took a picture of herself in a pirate costume and the dean found out. At this point, there was absolutely nothing she could have done, even if she deleted it off of MySpace, the dean or somebody else would have had a copy. 

Another thing I want to address is cancel culture. Cancel culture is when a mob on the internet tries to blacklist someone from jobs, places, etc. Basically banishing someone. If you decided to make a joke about blackface like Shane Dawson ten years ago, people would take your livelihood away today. My point is, the internet has made it so that our lives can be completely uploaded to the internet and that people in the future will focus on and judge us based on the poor choices we make instead of looking at our lives as a whole. The fact that people post about 70 pieces of content per month just shows how much we rely on the internet.

That said, the internet isn’t all bad, it really helps us to not forget anything. We will never forget what happened on 9/11 as it is on the internet forever. We have so many pictures of it and we make posts every year. A hundred years from now, we will still remember 9/11 but we might not remember what happened 300 years from then because there was no internet 200 years ago. In fact, as technology advances, we might even upload more.

Amazon, if all bad, can do some things right. As stated in the ‘applefritter’ article, “If the wishlist creator specifies a shipping address, someone else can even purchase the book on Amazon and have it shipped directly as a gift. The wishlist creator’s city and state are made public on the wishlist, but the street address remains private”. This is a plus for the internet, the internet is a scary place but this can really help people. If someone whole lives in a less fortunate place wants to read the latest harry potter book, they can show this wish list to their family members and friends and I am sure someone would buy it for them. It really gives a voice to people who need help and connects people who can give and those who need. 

APP:

I personally would like to create an app for introverted people like me. I really don’t like seeing people because I am very nervous when it comes to meeting new people. So this app would include things one likes and would enter them into that community. For example, if I like video games (For Honor), I would type it into the app and it would show me that community. I would then feel less pressure to make friends because we all have something in common. We would go from there.

Am I doing this right?

Honestly there isn’t much I’d change about Google, so here is my Google 2.0. The biggest change I’d like to make to Google is adding a filters button. Everyday, people use Google to search for information regarding literally anything you can think of. Imagine having loads of information in the palm of your hands, why wouldn’t you just use it right? The problem is, there’s a TON of information. Whenever I start feeling sick or have a body pain, the first thing I do is Google my symptoms. If you’ve done this, you know sometimes you get the craziest answers and almost always, the Internet will tell you you have cancer. Now, thankfully for me this isn’t triggering but for others it can be. I think it would very helpful if Google had a page where you could insert your triggers or mental health disorder and Google will filter out anything that can hinder you.

I also added that I’m not too sure what the “I’m feeling lucky” button does but I would like Google 2.0 to let you decide a subject you’d like to learn more of. It could be anything (that cannot cause harm to you or anyone). You would do your own research at your own time and google will track it (google tracking your information-scary I know). Then in order to test yourself to see if you’ve retained vital information, you’d press the “I”m feeling lucky” button and google will create a small and fun quiz for you. At the end of the quiz, Google 2.0 could even give you suggestions of what you could do now with your new skill/information or where you can go to enhance these.

Lastly, I’d like to have a personalization button. Once you start searching on Google, it goes to its uniform white background. It would be nice to have your own customization and it would follow through in all of your searches unless you say otherwise.

Again, I’m a huge fan of google so these are the small changes I would make.