Covid-19
As I am conducting my writing and research efforts, I cannot help but to think about the people who have been affected by Covid-19 and the heroes who are taking care of the sick every day. Unfortunately, the country has passed the total number of deaths it had projected for the virus. However, there is still a lot of work regarding testing, social distancing and potential medical solutions like antiviral medications or a vaccine that are in development. Even though it is going to take time for the world to get back to normal, I am optimistic that we will get there. I am committed to doing my part to deter the transmission of this pandemic and I hope you are too.
Blogging: from Personal Use to Research
Throughout my life, I’ve always had some kind of journal. As I started to use the internet more over time, my journals became digital. Two of my earliest blogs were on GeoCities and Xanga. I enjoyed using those platforms because they helped me reach a broad audience. I do not know the total number of people that I was able to reach, but it was many readers throughout the world and I think I know the reason why-social media platforms did not reach millions of users yet. As social media was gaining a growing audience, I was still using platforms like Blogger to share information and connect with other readers and writers.
In 2008, I wanted to create a platform that had social media features and members could blog in the same application. Over the lifespan of this technology I only amassed a userbase of 641 people, but the content we produced had been seen and shared by millions. What I liked most about the project was getting to read about the creative works and inspirations that members expressed when writing about art and its various mediums.
Things changed for blogging when Facebook, Twitter and Instagram gained millions of users. A lot of writers decided to put their content on social media rather than the blogging platforms we had been using for years. Today, I would assert that most content creators are more likely to put their information on social media than the traditional blogs, after all that is where all the potential readers are connecting with information. There are only a few options for creating a blog with a membership section, that receives web traffic through Google’s search algorithm. Some of the older blogging platforms that I used for so long are still around, they just no longer have the readership.
I’ve learned a lot from using so many different types of blogs and social media websites. Social media is kind of like microblogging where people share a few lines of information and have the ability to blog as a feature. Arts Tribune is the inverse of the social media model; it presents the short, medium and long form content first, and then gives users the chance to comment on other’s post in order to build a community.
Critical Infrastructure Models
Arts and entertainment, commonly referred to as “the Arts” is a global economic sector with many different types of mediums. I’ve always believed this, even in my early blogging days, but it reaffirmed in my mind when I took a course in Critical Infrastructure in Cybersecurity. We looked at dozens of different socio-economic models from a technology perspective and two of them applied perfectly to the Arts-economic model and interdependency model. Just as critical infrastructure plays a tremendous role in world economies, the same is true for the Arts with their various forms of economic activities (building sets, ticket sales, admissions to galleries, etc.). Critical infrastructure from a technology perspective depends upon each other for effective energy, water, transportation, finance, defense systems and other critical areas; through collaboration, the Arts uses different mediums to create art, as well as products and services.
I have a research interest in discovering the ways in which economic, interdependency and the Arts lead to technical and creative innovations.