Reflection

The whole idea of creating this web blog is to gain more information and knowledge on the media issues around us . This blog make me realize that there are many issues that we constantly need to be updated on as days goes by. Is important for us to do because no one wants to feel left out in this rapidly improving world.

This is not my only blog, i have 2 other blogs . As a blogger, i realize that when i blog with different topic i have my own say over different things. People may not agree and can leave comments but i have a stand to what i want to say except for sensitive issues. No matter how much freedom i believe we get in blogging, everything is bound to have a certain limits.

In my blog post, i realize to keep my audience have interaction between text and reader and they understand the document based on their knowledge and culture as well. (Putnis & Petenil 1996)If i can often relate my blog posts to common general topics, audience tend to be more interested and will keep coming back for more. That is particularly how i feel because i often go back to my favorite blogs for updates.

One more thing is that i realize in my blog post the framing is very important. Is good to have pictures to enhance the meaning of text but it will not do so much of a good job if it is not framed nicely. (Schriver 1997 ) Having my pictures and text arranged in order will ensure my blog is neat and tidy. It can avoid cluttered items in my blog. Besides so, having the layout to fit the theme of my blog is really important as well.

The design for my blog is simple and easy to navigate. I only have one page and as soon i have links to other similar blogs. I find it pretty easy for people to leave comment as i have a tag box on the side where non blogger members can too have a piece of their mind in my blog. Overall, it has been a great experience and i will continue to blog.


Referencing :

Putnis, Peter & Petelin, Roslyn 1996, Professional communication: principles and applications, Prentice Hall, Sydney

Schriver, KA 1997, Dynamics in document design: creating texts for readers, Whiley Computer Pub., New York

The awful stories about child pornography

Child pornography has been going on for a very long time now. Not that people has not done anything to put an end to it, but it just seem to be unstoppable. If a site is closed down, immediately another site will be open again. How can we put an end to something where it is in a border less world like the internet?

Source: Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection (ASACP)
Child pornography is something really disgraceful and it shouldn't be happening. The idea of some people getting really amused by child pornography is pretty insane. Many of this children who appears on this websites and home videos are often exploited and most of them end up being traumatized growing up. It will not reflect well on them and will just create a lot of unnecessary problem to them.

• Every second - $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography
• Every second - 28,258 Internet users are viewing pornography
• Every second - 372 Internet users are typing adult search terms into search engines
• Every 39 minutes: a new pornographic video is being created in the United States

Text and image enhancing each other will evoke different feeling towards the reader (Schirato & Yell 1996 ) . One very effective way to stop this is to create a lot awareness among the adults. This are the people who will understand and know what's right and what's wrong to do. By having mature images on brochures, and text together with it to further explain the images, i believe it will somehow get to the adult's heart and will do something about it.

Is everyone's responsible to stop child pornography. Is unethical and demoralizing. We would not want a world that is unsafe for our future children. Is entirely up to you. When the demand stops, the production will be stopped.

Referencing:
YouTube- RTA Press Conference 2007, Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection (ASACP),viewed on the 31st October 2007,<http://www.asacp.org/page.php>

Pornography Statistics 2007, Family Safe Media, viewed on the 31st October 2007,
<http://www.familysafemedia.com/pornography_statistics.html>

Schirato, T & Yell, S 1996, Communication and cultural literacy: An introduction, Allen and Unwin, St. Leonards NSW, pp. 110.

Media Violence

The shooting rampage at Virginia Tech have shook the world by storm and has created awareness to all of us about the violence in media. The reason behind this rampage have been closely relates to media violence where the Korean shooter was playing too much video games that contain violence at an extreme level. With researches done, this article explains to us that many of today's aggression behavior in young adults are due to media violence.

Teenagers and young adults are often influence by the things they hear, see or do. For an audience to read an understand a message that someone or something is try to convey, he or she must possess some background knowledge on that certain topic, ( Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006) If a teenager or a young adult have been playing to much games which contain violence or watching too much of shows that portrays a lot of violence, someday, they are facing a very high chance of being brainwash into thinking that violence is right. Is show in television, why isn't alright to perform it?

Kansas State University professor John Murray says that, "The most plausible interpretation of this pattern of correlations is that early preference for violent television programming and other media is one factor in the production of aggressive and antisocial behavior when the young boy becomes a young man."

I had my own fair share of getting addicted to video games but luckily i have caring parents to stop me. Parents play a big part in the aggression attitude among teenage and young adult are today. If they are exposed to the right medium of media , they will grow up knowing how to differentiate what's right and what's wrong . With that, they will know how to make good decisions in life.

References :
Research on the effect on media violence 2007, Media-awareness.ca, viewed on the 30th October 2007,
<http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/violence/effects
_media_violence.cfm>

Kim A 2007 , Msnbc.msn.com, viewed on the 30th October 2007,
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18134671/>

Partenheimer, D 2003, APA Online, viewed on the 30th October 2007,
ttp://www.apa.org/releases/media_violence.html>

Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T 1998, ‘Front pages: (the critical) analysis of newspaper layout’, in Bell, A & Garrett, P (eds) 1998, Approaches to media discourse, Blackwell, Oxford, chapter 7, pp. 186-219.

Downloading.. illegal?

Have you heard the new song by Briney Spears? I bet you have. Where did you got to hear it? And the answer "downloaded it" does not come to a shock to anyone. Downloading songs, television series, videos, music videos and any other form of media is a common practice in most of the people today. Downloading media files from the internet often saves us consumers a lot of money because as long we have a broadband service and a peer-to-peer service down loader, we are on our way. Downloading may seem alright to us but it has soon become an issue and downloading media files from the internet has soon become an issue and is illegal in some part of the country as it is consider piracy and causes revenue losses to music producers and music selling companies. Based on this article, if a person downloads his or her favorite song off the internet, he or she would not have to purchase the CD and that would incur loss to the company who produces the CD.

Referring to this issue, Malaysia have done quite a bit to put this action to stop. Many posters and announcement through radio and concerts have been made to bring out the awareness to this issue. This has showed a different change of genre in sending out a message. It is evident that the process of meaning-making itself might occur in similar ways for print based and multi modal texts, yet the "processing"of modes is different ( Walsh 2006). In different genre using the same context, the effectiveness of send out a message differ as well depending on how interesting the genre itself it.

The Recording Industry Association of Malaysia (RIM) said music sales were plummeting.
“We are feeling the pinch from foreign websites offering illegal downloads to Malaysians,” said RIM chief executive officer Tan Ngiap Foo. (Patrick 2007)They have proposed to the Malaysian government to impose a ban on all illegal download sites on the internet. A whopping amount of RM117 mil of sales was dropped compared to 10years ago. I personally feel that illegal download is really very unethical and is like stealing of someone's precious hard work. On the other hand, getting my favorite song of the internet within minutes and free of charge, how do you expect me to resist such an offer.

References:

Beal, V.A 2004 , Wepobedia.com, viewed on the 29th October 2007,
<http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2004/music_downloading.asp>

Patrick , S 2007, The Star Online, viewed on the 29th October 2007.
<http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2007/9/21/nation/18915404&sec=nation>

Walsh, M 2006, ‘textual shift’: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts, Australian journal of language and literacy, vol.29, no.1, pp.24-37

Stick Thin Models - Who to blame?

Many young teenage girls strive to be thin. They are often seen browsing through fashion magazines and we almost see them drooling. In today's society, being thin is the "in" thing. Kate Moss is thin, Linsday Lohan is thin, why can't i be thin? The death of two young models have made the fashion world realize that models these days are looking more skeletal and need to project a healthy image of beauty to the world. Models have to go through a test to determine the BMI in order for them to participate in fashion shows.

This phenomena of being thin is common but extremely unhealthy. The fashion industry have become the scapegoat for the reason behind the increasing number of anorexia and bulimic cases. But is it true that the fashion industry is to be blamed 100%?

The media had its own influence as well. According to this article, girls of size 12 are to be called fat. I believed this is just plain stereotyping. Is size discriminating to girls who wear other sizes besides 0. “We’ve seen that in order to orchestra prose and graphic combinations that enable readers to meet their goals, document designers need information about the process of interpretation itself,- about reader’s knowledge – driven and text driven understanding of documents”, (Schriver 1997). In this case, many young teenage girls are exposed to many form of media such as television. cable television and print media such as magazines. If they from young are so exposed to the media who shows so much of stick thin models and no issue is being raised from it , they might all believe that is alright and healthy to be stick thin.

References:

Stall W 2006, Sunday Metro.co.uk, viewed on the 27th October 2007,
<http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=25566&in_page_id=34>

Ekunkunbor J 2006, Vanguard, viewed on the 27th October 2007,
<http://www.vanguardngr.com/articles/2002/features/fashion/fas105112006.html>

Yacoob T, 2007, Daily Mail, viewed on the 27th October 2007,
<>http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=
418780&in_page_id=1773>

Schriver, KA 1997, Dynamics in document design: creating texts for readers, Whiley Computer Pub, New York

My serious blog

This blog happens to be my third assignment for Document Design and Publication. I was assign to blog about today's media issues. This blog is targeted to all of the people out there who are interested in what's happening in the media world today. Regardless of who you are, you can feel free to drop by here anytime of the day. The thing that I want to achieve with creating this blog is that i want people to get to know more about the media world and try my best to share my knowledge and opinion on the media issues on today's ever rapidly improving media world.

What is a blog?

Look around, everyone is in the blog sphere. Well, almost.. Blogging in the Asian scene is becoming very normal. Especially in Malaysia, most of my friends own a blog and i made many friends through blogging too. Blog is like one form of communication for many people around the work these days. I often get to see my friends keeping in touch with relatives overseas using blog. Is free and is easy for one to express his or her thoughts and message through it.

Though many people of today's world blog, they are often classified into different types of blogs. They are respectively put into different genres. Different genres somehow give the author of the blog different ways to blog and different mean of expressing themselves. We can often find bloggers "beautifying" their blogs with really pretty layout. That is one way to express themselves. The genre change of blog these days is to send out message in a clearer format. With different genre, the impact of sending out message is different. For example, a vlog can often send out a clearer message to the audience as it keeps people watching the video where else a text based blog post will require the audience to read and it needs to be interesting, or else it will not keep the audience reading.

Subject Matters: Political Blogs, Religion Blogs, Fashion Blogs, Food Blogs, Travel Blogs, Entertainment Blogs, Audio Blogs and many more text blog that are focus mainly on one particular subject.

Device: Moblogs (blogs which can be accessible through mobile phones)

Media Type: Vlog (video blog), Linklog (hyperlink blog), Sketchlog (sketch blog), Tumblelogs (mixed media blog), Phlog (photo blog)

The blogging community in Malaysia is pretty large. People from West Malaysia and East Malaysia often meet up and catch up. Blogging community are often form due to similar interest in a particular subject. Famous bloggers like smashpop.net has his own blogger community. His blogger community are made up with photography fanatics. Smashpop is a very good photographer himself and many people often go out with him on photo shoots to share knowledge in photography. With people who have blogging community, knowledge on different things in life can be shared among everyone as the internet is free. We do not need to be associate with these people to know what they are doing and that can be beneficial to us.

In today's society, the online media has taken over the traditional print media ( Walsh 2006). This have explain to us that many people have put much emphasizing in designing a better online web page compared to a normal print media. The design of the online web page is often more interesting as it can be multi modal. Video, audio, pictures, hyper links and text can be added into a online web page. This are the couple of ways to enhance the creativity of a web page and how they keep audience from staying at their web page. Unlike the traditional print media, text and images are often use. Without the hyper links, video and audio input, the print media is far less interesting than the online media and it only depends on it's unique way of the author's writing to keep the audience reading.

References :

The world of blogs 2007, The different kinds of blogs , viewed on 27th November 2007, <http://www.slais.ubc.ca/courses/libr500/05-06-wt1/www/A_Cho/
kinds.htm>

Goh, J 2007, Smashpop, viewed on 27th November 2007, <http://smashpop.net/>

Walsh, M 2006, ‘textual shift’: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts, Australian journal of language and literacy, vol.29, no.1, pp.24-37