Blog v Wiki

     Today, blogs and Wikis have become a new medium of communication and a valuable source of entertainment and information for many. Blogging is a way for individuals to share personal thoughts and feelings to an online community and gain insight and opinions from others on a certain topic. Wikis are web pages on various topics that users can collaboratively edit, modify, and delete content from.
     Both sources of new media have gained popularity among individuals and online businesses. Wikis allow users to edit open source documents in a collaborative manner. This makes the days of having to piece together different sources of information from various websites, done with. Wikis allow for a simple and manageable way to organize and provide others with information on a certain topic. However, Wikis do not allow just any content to be uploaded and published. According to the article "How to Use Wikis for Business" by Goodnoe, he states "Thousands of people police the site (or at least those areas in which they have expertise), fact-checking and editing as necessary, so the quality of the content generally remains high." Inappropriate and irrelevant content generally is spotted and deleted on Wikis to ensure that users are viewing pertinent information on a certain topic.      
     Blogs are personal thoughts and feelings that users share with the online community. It can be compared to a modern day journal or diary. Blogs can be written about essentially anything and people can comment and give their thoughts on the blogger's piece. Due to the freedom that users have to write about virtually whatever they please, there has been controversy in the past over defamation issues. Like in the case of, "Liskula Cohen, a 37-year-old model and Australian Vogue cover girl was surprised to find herself winning a “Skankiest in NYC” award from an anonymous blogger" from the article "Stung by the Perfect Sting" by Dowd. This matter was brought to court and Cohen won the case. Unlike Wikis, blogs are not monitored as much and content on these blogs will often mention names, places and almost anything that one pleases to write about. Blogs can be used for collaboration by people continuously commenting on a certain topic and having the blogger write posts that incorporate information that users have commented on his/her blog on.  
     Blogs and wikis are both a unique way of communicating and forming an online community centered around specific topics. Convergence is an important factor in both these forms of new media. Convergence in terms of how people interact with each other on blogs and Wikis play a major role in how successful these new forms of communication become. Without convergence many forms of communication that are relevant and popular nowadays would not be what it is today without convergence of today's networked world. 

Social Media: Strengthening or Weakening our Communication Skills

Social media has become a major part of our younger generation. It is quite common to see teens spending more time with their friends on social media sites rather than in person. Which begs the question, is social media strengthening or weakening the communication skills of our younger generation. Are our teens growing up in a society where social media has completely cluttered their minds and the thought of talking in person or on the phone has become awkward for them? Or is it creating a generation of creative writers and thinkers? Through my research, I hope to discover how social media has affected the communication skills of our younger generation.