Creativity

Discuss how new media fosters creativity. 

This form of social networking gives users of all types many options when posting to others online. This new media allows users to download large amounts of multimedia files and store them onsite. Users have many choices with future developments such as taped or live videos. Users can use new media such as YouTube (which is said to be the largest video sharing Web 2.0 social media with over 100 million video accesses daily) to share various types of information-either as a learning tool or as entertainment. 

In the article, "YouTube Traffic Characterization: A View from the Edge," authors Gill, Arlitt, Liand Mahanti researched local campus and global user and the many ways they use YouTube as a form of new media versus traditional (old) media. One example, was their findings about how videos are utilized. The research discuss many features such as patterns of use, reference behaviors, and the properties of files of users. 

The findings state that very little requests were made for videos, but the most downloads are transfer bytes from videos. Some advantages of this form of new media is that the videos are rated and they are categorized compared to old media. If a user goes to YouTube and want to find videos about learning in any category, they will get a range of videos with ratings. These ratings can help a user determine if they would like to either view the video and determine if the video would be helpful. Also, when a user is looking for a video, there are other videos of that topic made available. 


The user can then pick and choose from those videos to watch and determine which one or ones fit their needs. New media files can be downloaded instantly and watched immediately after downloading it; old media needs a FLV (flash video) file to downloaded before the video can be viewed.  The speed in which a user can watch a video with new media is much more improved than with old media which needs more time to upload the FLV file (file format) before a video can be downloaded and watched. New media presents a greater form of using the internet; with the advancement of technology daily, new media will continue to outpace old media. Old media is the traditional and new media is the advancement of old media.