Thursday, November 13, 2008

Issue#3; In Wiki We Trust?

Dear readers,

How many of you, when given an assignment, head straight to http://www.wikipedia.org/? I’ll admit: the site’s clean-cut lines and neat layout are seductive. The matter-of-fact information is compelling. But hark: what of the cries regarding its inaccuracies?

A bit of background information for you readers: Wikipedia was founded in January of 2001 by employees of the American company, Bomis. The now-head of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, was the chief executive of Bomis. After developing Wikipedia, he created a non-profit organization to run it. Currently, the Wikipedia Foundation is fuelled by donations and has a paltry three employees: a software developer, an assistant for Mr. Wales, and an intern (Hickman & Roberts, 2006).

Alistair Coleman of the BBC wrote an article entitled Students ‘should use Wikipedia’ (click for the article!). In this article, he discusses Jimmy Wales’ viewpoint regarding teachers who ban students from using Wikipedia as a source, calling them “bad educators”. The article goes on to argue Wikipedia’s credibility and reliability as source; with Wale’s insisting that “there is no substitute for peer critique”.

On the flipside, however, Ian Allgar of Encyclopaedia Britannica maintains that thanks to its 239 years of service, it remains the best source to use: the basic argument of “of paid-for, thoroughly-reviewed content” versus peer-reviewed and prone-to-vandalism Wikipedia.

However, according to Terdiman (writing for CNET News, article here: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica), “is about as good a source of accurate information as Britannica”. This fact was uncovered in a study by Nature journal, which found “eight serious errors (such as general misunderstandings of vital concepts) in the [selected] articles. Of those, four came from each site”.


(Cyanide & Happiness, Explosm.net, 2005.)

However, Britannica would definitely never have mistakes such as the following!:

- David Beckham was an 18th-century Chinese goalkeeper.
- The Duchess of Cornwall carries the title Her Royal Un-Lowness.
- Robbie Williams earns his living by eating pet hamsters in pubs “in and around Stoke”.
(Roberts & Hickman, The Independent, 2006.)

To conclude, despite the obvious credibility and reliability issues inherent in Wikipedia, I personally would still head there first when given a topic to research. Obviously, I would back it up with concrete facts later on: but to give me a vague, overall feel of a topic; it is the first stop on the information superhighway I’d make.

References
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Issue#2; New Media Publishing: Citizen Journalism


Dear readers,

Jeff Ooi, Raja Petra Kamarudin, Scott Thong – these are shining local examples of citizen journalism via blog. What is citizen journalism, you ask? According to Laura Riggio (2007), citizen journalism is the principle that “anyone can be a journalist – it doesn’t have to be left to the professionals. Blogging gives the amateur a chance to voice his or her opinions, ideas, and thoughts without an editor”. NYU Professor Jay Rosen writes in his blog PressThink that “the people formally known as the audience are taking a permanent seat in the changing world of journalism”.

Citizen journalism has several advantages over traditional journalism: they can cater to niche markets, or perhaps report on things that traditional newsrooms cannot do due to time or budget constraints (just run a Google search for the 2004 tsunami and see how many examples of citizen journalism there are!).

Korea currently leads the way in pioneering citizen journalism, being one of the most Internet-literate countries in the world, according to The Media Report’s show on Alternative Online Media (click the link for a transcript!). The news website OhMyNews, brainchild of Jean K. Min, has more than more than 45,000 people who act as journalists. Being a liberal and progressive media, we learn that despite tradition being dispensed with, principles such as credibility and accountability are still paramount.

According to Bentley (2008), citizen journalism in the form of blogs provides an outlet for those discontented with the everyday media. There are also the obvious, theoretical benefits of blogs and citizen journalism: with more and more Internet users each day, functionality increases. According to Penman (1998), “a document’s functionality is dependent on its structure matching readers’ habits, expectations, and context of use”. This is a highly pertinent point as more people are become accustomed to using the Internet for everything.

(Cartoonstock.com, Royston, 2005.)

As Bentley said, citizen journalism is improving journalism as a whole. I hold with this idea firmly: the future of traditional journalism and citizen journalism is the same, two paths to the same location. Journalism without a preface.

References

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Issue#1; Photojournalism: To Click or Not To Click?

Dear readers,

Why is a photograph of a dead child so much more upsetting than a dozen articles? They say a picture speaks a thousand words, and photojournalism is a brilliant example of this. In The Power of Photography, the speakers discuss the War Photo Gallery in Dubrovnik: a gallery dedicated to conflict zone photographs only. Here, wars from all over the globe are photographed and displayed for public consumption: to increase awareness. Suffering and pain are so more shocking when seen through images and with an impartial filter. Print/TV news tends to have a political agenda behind it, which can affect the news, compromising impartiality. According to Schriver, “memory for pictures tends to be better than memory for words” (1997).
However, people can also misuse the power of a photograph for their own ends. Take the case of Adnan Hajj, who used photomanipulation to subtly but significantly edit an image he snapped of Beirut after Israel had attacked. This photo caused public outcry, which increased dramatically when the photo was revealed to be a fake.

(Adnan Hajj/Reuters, 2006).

Not only this, but graphic images can lead to compassion fatigue. The ease with which pictures are taken can lead to compassion fatigue, wherein audiences are so numb to images of suffering as the media has become inundated with it. According to Moeller, compassion fatigue is a state of utter habituation to disasters, which "militates both against caring and action" and creates passivity. Do graphic photos of war, famine and turmoil truly educate the public, or do they just add to this overall fatigue?

To conclude, photographs can be used to expose expose poverty, famine, disease. But they are also able to showcase the hardiness of the human spirit, the small victories.

To inspire.

References
  • Moeller, S. (1999). Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. Routledge: New York.
  • Schriver, K. A. (1997). ‘Chapter 6: The Interplay of Words and Pictures’, Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Texts for Reader, Wiley Computer Pub: New York.
  • The Media Report. (2007). The Power of Photography. Viewed 16 November 2008 from http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2007/2051819.html
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Wednesday, November 12, 2008

The Blogging Phenomenon: New Forms of Media Publishing

Dear readers,

Blogging isn’t just for geeks anymore. Trends that spark online are just as in-style as those on the runway: take the new crazes regarding video blogs (or ‘vlogs’: lonelygirl15, anyone?) or alternative news sources.

Let’s talk about alternative online newspapers, readers.

According to Meza (2006), “many mainstream television programs today claim to offer the viewer an impartial approach on any given issue, this just isn’t true”. From a local standpoint, this remains pertinent. However, Malaysian mainstream media is getting much less readership due to the rising preference for more balance. Nowadays, to get the “real news”, Malaysians turn to MalaysiaKini or MalaysiaToday: both of which have substantial readership (Foo, 2008). We turn to alternative media because the articles in them “hit the spot because they’re tapping into concerns out in the public arena” (Big Ideas, 2005). We want the truth, and we want it now. Web 2.0 has spoiled an information-hungry populace with instant gratification, and this case is no exception.

(Socialcritic.org, Wuerker, n.d.)

Not only this, but there are aesthetic reasons. Online newspapers are easier to read due to their succinctness and multimodality (Kress & van Leeuwen). Archives and other records are more easily found with online news. Online newspapers can also hyperlink to pertinent sites, creating intertextuality (Schirato & Yell, 1996) – we make sense of texts in reference to relations with other texts.

References
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The Blogging Phenomenon: Online versus Print

Dear readers,

Designing for print media and designing for online media are two very different challenges. Visual appearance and the arrangement of writing with other visual representations “contributes to meaning” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1998). Colours, layouts, voices, pathways, spatial positioning – these and other elements contribute to an overall meaning.

When designing for print, it is important to make sure your text has a voice and can appeal different reading habits. This article from Vogue magazine has been designed according to the Gutenberg diagram, which theorises that writing in a Z-shape for print is more appealing. It is two-dimensional, with much attention paid to layout.

(Vogue, 2007.)

According to Nielsen (1997b), writing for the Internet requires succinctness and scannability. Because reading from a computer screen is up to twenty-five per cent slower than from paper (supra), there should be less text present on a page. Eyetracking visualisations have shown that we read online content in an F-shape (Nielsen, 1997a), meaning “two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe”. Because readers won’t read text thoroughly, subheadings, bullet points and emphasising information-carrying words is used. The plus point of a website is that it is more reflexively intertextual. This article from Vogue Online is done according to these theories: an F-shaped layout, headings and subheadings; as well as hyperlinks and large text are used.

(Vogue, 2007.)

References

  • Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (1998). Approaches to Media Discourse. Ch. 7, Front Pages: (the Critical) Analysis of Newspaper Layout. Hodder Headline Group: Great Britain. Blackwell: Oxford. UniSA Electronic Library.
  • Nielsen, J. (1997a). F-shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content. Accessed 13 November 2008 from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html
  • Nielsen, J. (1997b). Writing for the Web. Accessed 13 November 2008 from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html
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Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The Blogging Phenomenon: Classifications & Communities

Dear readers,

There are many ways to classify a blog. You could classify them through the device used to create the blog: moblogs, for example, are blogs made through a mobile phone (Twitter being a popular moblog platform). You could classify them by the media used: vlogs, phlogs, tumblogs - video blogs, photo blogs and mixed-media blogs respectively. You could classify them by genre - technology, news, fashion, politics, hobbies.

Sites such as BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog are online communities devoted to blogging. On sites like these, people can be connected to blogs and bloggers to other bloggers (MyBlogLog). They are a cohesive of people interested in a common, unifying theme. Creating a blog community is a simple matter: all that is needed is links to other, similarly-themed blogs and a way to collect feedback for instance, a comment box. Ensure that you "foster discourse" (Kawasaki, 2006). Remember: publicity is everything (supra). A well-known community would be The Knowledge Tree, an "e-journal generated by members of the Australian vocational education and training (VET) system to enable the sharing of research and learning innovation in national and global e-learning" (About The Knowledge Tree, 2008). This community makes use of archives and RSS feeds to foster discourse.

(OnlineDatingMagazine.com, 2006.)

In A Taxonomy of Blogs (The Media Report: ABC Radio National); the author and analyst Margaret Simons attempts to dissect and define the different types of blogs that inhabit the World Wide Web. After reading the article, I felt that her classifications were far too inhibiting to be competently applied to today's blogosphere. She divides blogs into diaries, advertisements, pamphlets, news, gatewatchers, exhibitions, popular mechanics (i.e. How To's), digests, and advocacy blogs. While her categories were well thought out and concise, they did not fully encompass the scope of blogging today: is categorizing blogs even important (Chaney, 2005)? They could look at topic, style, format, or maybe their target audience. The most effective method would be to "categorize blogs by the type of content they consistently produce" (Rowse, 2008).

In my opinion, because blogs are part of Web 2.0, and not at all easy to categorize, readers must choose their own identification keys based on what they most need.

References

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Monday, November 10, 2008

The Blogging Phenomenon: Pitfalls & Benefits.

Dear readers,

Did you know that close to 113 million people own a blog, according to http://www.technorati.com/ (2008). There is an update posted every eight seconds. That's a lot of blogs.

Europe
Blogging remains relatively low on the to-do list, with a paltry four million active bloggers (Bouquet & Favier, 2006). However, these bloggers are "young, early adopters of new technologies" and therefore very attractive to marketers, being "more open-minded than the average online consumer" (Bouquet & Favier, 2006). European bloggers, according to Mackenzie (2006) gravitate towards everyday, journalistic blogs.

Asia
According to IT News Online (2006), nearly half of 'Net users in Asia own a blog. When broken down by gender, "fifty-five per cent of bloggers in Asia were found to be female and forty-five per cent male" (Jacques, 2006). As IT News states, blogs of interest are the most popular (with the exception of India, where business-themed blogs are most read).

Locally
Fifty-six per cent of Malaysian bloggers do so to express their opinions (Ooi, 2006). According to Gaman (2007), thirty-two per cent of the Malaysian blogosphere write about politics or technology. Another type of blog that is on the rise would be "boutique blogs", where people sell clothing, for examples, An Untitled Affair.

The Healing Power of Words
Blogging holds many benefits for the community. According to Wapner (2008), blogging holds "therapeutic effects". Research shows that writing about your experiences "improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery". Blogging helps educate the public, being an invaluable tool of citizen journalism (Dvorak, 2002), which is when the public collect, report, analyze and disseminate news and information - highly fundamental in Malaysia, where freedom of the press is tenuous, at best.

References
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