What makes a community?

I don't know.

I've been asked this twice in different classes. I've come to the conclusion that a community is a group of people. That is the only thing that they have in common; from communities in your neighborhood or city, to threads and online games. They could have an interest in common, like: living in a particular city, playing the same game online, knowledge or interest in the same topic in a thread. But does that mean two people are a community? No -- maybe. It depends on one's definition of a community. League of Legends, a game a play online is supposedly a community. But many of them are trolls, and people who put other people down, or don't ever interact with other people in the "League community," can we say that it is a community then? Or do we just not count the people who don't contribute? Maybe a community also consists of people who contributes to the so-called "community." But either way, a community is whatever one deems it to be.

Dot.Com to Dot.Bomb

The boom and the bust disappoints me. I wish that the bust never happened, the world would be a very much more different place today if it didn't happen. It is disappointing that people pulled out when they heard of things such as Artificial Intelligence. Sure, it is a scary thing, but we'll never know until we try! I'm sure that, as a novice programmer, we could somehow "shut down" the program we made if given the programmer made an emergency shut down button in case the AI does not function as wished, or starts to take over the world. Imagine if the market never crashed; imagine if the research for AI started earlier. Where would we be today? And how many AI's would be around us? These questions makes me more excited and scared for the future as a beginning programmer. I hope to contribute immensely in this world of rapidly growing technology.

Startup.com

I'm not really sure what to say about this movie. It gave me a lot of insight on building a company. I might want to start my own one day, hopefully the market doesn't crash when I do. I shook my head at Khalil's management of the security of the company. I couldn't believe that someone broke in. We take care to secure out belongings but he didn't think about investing in a good security system? Blasphemous. 

I'm disappointed that the market crashed and took down many companies with it. I try to imagine how the world would be if every company that started during the time this movie was being made survived. Technology, the internet, the web, and everything related would be booming and changing our lives every minute!

HTML Adventure

Yesterday, I made a webpage for an assignment in my class. It brought me back to the years when I used to use myspace and customize my page however I wanted. I thought that it was difficult but now that I have more experience in coding, it's fairly easy. It only took me a few minutes. My friend actually gave me a book on HTML & CSS, and I'm really excited to study it and get better at making webpages. I'd like to experience being a web developer one day, I think that would be fun. I can't wait to be able to make complex webpages.

What I would not buy online

A question was raised in my TINST 207 class, "What wouldn't you buy online?" As I pondered about this question for about a week... I realized that I was taking a while to come up with an answer! Why? Because personally, I wouldn't mind buying my things online. It is safe-- safer now compared to when e-commerce was a new concept. We talked about how when e-commerce began, the only thing people ever bought were books! Why? Because they knew what they were getting and it wasn't too expensive to risk sending your information from one place to another where sniffers might find your credit card information. Somehow I never thought of my information's security twice anymore when buying things online. Even though, I am well aware of hackers and people who are trying to take take information from other people online. Businesses have made the transaction more secured, or have they? Back then, a person that takes the information that we send them has to manually input the information sent to them into another database. What if this person takes the information and keeps it for himself to use? That person has now been eliminated through the process of the transaction online. Most of the processes are now done by the machine therefore people became more willing to buy online.
After a lot of pondering, I thought I wouldn't buy my food online. I like grocery shopping and I want to choose the things that I eat. I need to make sure that they aren't rotten or as ripe as I want it to be. Maybe one day, we will be able to choose all of these things and select them online.

A Visit from Derek Young

On Oct 29, we had a visit from Derek Young. He is a very successful entrepreneur, being one of the founders of Exit 133 and the core runner of the Tacoma Runners.I thought Exit 133 was a very interesting swing at journalism. They strive to create dialogue on news between people; to create positive conversation, eliminating toxic environments of conversation that usually revolves with news; to enforce civil dialogue, without negative and hostile attitudes. I thought that it was great because when I think about the news, many will have different opinions on each news report. Political beliefs and social expectations by each person is different which will turn some dialogues into somewhat dialogues of opinions or sometimes people try to force their opinions on others. One of the most interesting things that came up in conversation was that Exit 133 tries to eliminate the yelling between people through banning quotes. They want people to listen and think about what others say, and not focus on a quote that could just distract people.

Derek also shared how he made his non-profit organization, Tacoma Runners events successful. He mentioned that they are a fast growing organization because of social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. They are now planning to have events abroad and I thought it was an exciting thought. It made me want to think about how I could help my club here in the University of Washington, Tacoma grow. I thought to myself, we have Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and this year our club has grown twice its size since the previous year! Social media is a powerful tool if it is used properly. Also, he mentioned that he managed to get people to show up to a movie and fill the movie theater with people he mostly knew, it's crazy! After this visit, I definitely need to talk to my club's Public Relations officer to encourage using all of our social media accounts.

Scavenger Hunt Rush

Today in class, we had a scavenger hunt to look for information on many things. A quick glance at the sheet made it seem impossible to find any of the information. However, Andrew Fry says that it will be possible. so we searched for information in groups of three and lo and behold, every little thing that was on the sheet had information for us to find about the subject matter. Even the married sur name of someone's middle sister! However, when we think about this a little bit more... when we forget our passwords, some of the questions are "What is your mother's maiden name?" or "What city were you born in?" how hard is it to look up those information online? Should we be using these questions to retrieve our password? If it's this easy for someone to look up information about anyone, should this system be improved?

EPIC 2014: The World Now

The video EPIC 2014 is a scary guess from 2004 on what the world would be like with technology in 2014. It mentioned that newspapers will be overthrown by e-papers, which are electronic newspapers. The video said that newspapers will slowly die and news and media will slowly but surely be consumed by people online. Thus, leaving newspapers to extinction. Today, in 2014 most people prefer to read their news online because it is quicker. However in class, Andrew mentioned that sometimes even the quickest option is not as reliable. But this does not matter, on the internet, things can be edited and are not exactly permanent. But on paper, once the news comes out, the newspaper company would have to wait for another issue to be able to apologize for giving out the wrong information on paper. I personally would like to have the news first and corrected as soon as possible, rather than having to talk about it and later find out after a week that it was false. The newspaper has truly become just for the "elite and the elderly" as the video predicted, I don't see many young people reading the newspapers. In UWT, there are always newspapers stacked on the racks, but never empty. The news travels fast and they travel through word of mouth and the internet. The newspapers "per se" are now longer than 5 minutes behind on the news because of our access to site such as: Twitter, Google News, CNN.com, etc..

"Welcome to our world the Evolving Personalized Information Construct [EPIC]. Is the system by which our sprawling chaotic mediascape is filtered, ordered, delivered. Everyone contributes now from blog entries, to phone cam images, to video reports, to full investigations. Many people get paid too, a tiny cut of Google's immense advertising revenue." Think about it. This is happening right now. The computers filter, order, and deliver our: e-mails, searches, news, etc.. We contribute through: Twitter, blogs, YouTube. And yes, many people get paid for their sites for having advertisements in their blogs, and the media and information that we provide in our social media is contributing to the information that can be accessed in the web; whether it is private or not, it is accessible in one way or another. We are living through the world of EPIC 2014.

A Visit from Erik Hansberg

Erik Hansberg's visit has me thinking about my identity on the internet. "The person on the internet isn't really them in real life." he said. That is true, when you go on a site that someone actively participates on, you will only see one side of them. However, if we put all the data of a person in different sites together, will we see the whole person?

Nowadays, the majority of internet users have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and/or Tumblr. All these things are all connected to one's personal life. If all the data of each of these sites would merge together for a certain person, we could possible guess what the person is like. During Erik Hansberg's talk, LinkedIn came up in conversation. And I ask, are we willing to give out our professional life out for the world to be accessed as well? If we add LinkedIn to all the social media sites that we already own, aren't we basically giving out all information on who we are on the internet? Will we ever have complete privacy without giving up advantages like security?

User or Used: The Machine is Using Us.

Growing up, already introduced to the www and the internet, I thought it was an amazing thing. A machine is organizing and giving me outputs because it is "smart." I received a smartphone which was capable of almost everything that a desktop computer or a laptop was capable of. In comparison to my first 3310 Nokia phone, it was extremely "smart." , hence I thought it made sense that it was called a "smart"phone. 

However, having a better understanding of computers with a little programming insight, really we are teaching the machine to do things. Professor Monika Sobolevska mentioned at the beginning of this quarter that computers are "really dumb" and through programming, we teach it what to do. It's like a child, we have to teach it the most basic things step by step. I forget this often and this video reminded me that information and the things the machine does is because of the people who teach it what to do. It does not have a mind of its own, the machine was taught to do things by humans from different parts of the globe. The machine is us, connected.

Hopes for My Adventure in the Virtual World

In my studies in TINST 207, I hope to learn and be reminded of the power of the technologies of the world wide web. This class was recommended to me by my adviser because I am a computer science and systems major. I agreed to it knowing that it would be nice to actually be educated on the world that I have been born to.

I would like to have a better understanding of the technologies that surrounds the world and the effects of these technologies. The world has progressed its development of technologies and cultures are immersed and affected by the technologies that surrounds them. Computers not so many decades ago took up the whole room; today, computers sit on a desk, and fit in the smallest front and back pockets of jeans. Phones, iPods, tablets computers, laptops, all these are smaller and even more powerful than the computer that took a whole room not too long ago.

What's even more baffling is my class was asked to raise their hands if they owned a smartphone and all but one person raised his hand. The class discussed that the protocol for contacting someone today is through text messaging that it only takes a few minutes for a person to contact somebody with the help of text messaging and e-mails compared to sending paper mail to the post office. I would like to learn how we adopt to a rapidly changing world with new technologies being developed every day.

We also touched a little bit about something called the "dark web" in class. The dark web is where everything on the internet is in memory. Which means, everything and anything can be accessed and retrieved through it. I woke up to the reality that the internet, although it is a very powerful tool, is a terrifying place to share information in. I would like to learn in the class why people continue to use the internet and how I can protect myself. I'd like to delve deeper into subject matters that not many internet users know but should be aware of.