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The postings that I’ve done for this academic blog have helped me in many, many ways. The whole process of creating a weblog has taught me many things, including:
- learning how important multimodality is in webpages (Walsh 2006).
And many more.
ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY MARK MATCHO
Reality TV is becoming ever more popular today and have come a long way, from the days of Survivor and Big Brother.
Today we can find different types of reality TV programmes, such as eliminatory competition like American Idol, The Apprentice, The Amazing Race, America’s Next Top Model and makeover programs like Extreme makeover, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (O’ Shaugnessy & Stadler 2006).
Reality TV is characterised by the following:
- Originality and unpredictability
- Authenticity
- Economics
- Escapism
- Cultural dumbing down
(O’ Shaugnessy & Stadler 2006)
Fans of reality television watch these programs for their spontaneity, unpredictability, and authenticity. They watch reality shows because they find that it is a lot more fun to live vicariously through the seemingly real lives of other people.
What they don’t realise is that these reality TV stars, once put in front of a camera, are no more authentic than movie stars portraying a role.
The media do not present to us reality, but instead a selected, polished and edited version of reality (Matheson 2005, p. 103).
According to James Poniewozik (2006) in his article for TIME magazine, “Quotes are manufactured, crushes and feuds constructed out of whole cloth, episodes planned in multiact "storyboards" before taping, scenes stitched together out of footage shot days apart.”
Baudrillard (cited in Matheson 2005, p. 104) termed this as the ‘hyper-real’. Reality TV is a virtual world created by the media, where the events happen only because a camera is there waiting to record them (Matheson 2005).
Reality TV is therefore no more real than a TV series with a script and plot.
References:
Matheson, D 2005, Media discourses: analysing media texts, pp.103 - 104, Open University Press, England.
The series may have ended with its 7th and final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but the characters and work of J K Rowling will live on for a long, long time.
The movies, the merchandise, and the undying love of the multitudes of fans are the basis for that statement. And then there’s fan fiction (fanfic).
Fan fiction, according to Bill Tancer (2007), general manager of global research at online competitive intelligence service Hitwise, is a comparatively recent Internet phenomenon which allows just about anyone with a computer and a connection to create and post stories or whole novels, chapter by chapter, based on existing fiction, television sitcoms, movies and their characters as the basis for their creations.
With the Internet being a great place for distributing material to the world, along with content-hungry fans and amateur and professional writers alike with too much time and a fixation that may very well lead them to be classified as extremists, fan fiction is born.
There are currently 327, 446 creations based on Harry Potter on fan fiction site FanFiction.net alone (Fanfiction.net 2007).
Other popular fan fiction sites include Livejournal and Fictionalley.org, with both sites containing Harry Potter fan fiction as their most popular and regularly posted subject.
A lot of people use fan fiction as a channel to create and obtain the alternate ending that they’d like to see happen to the characters in their beloved fantasy world of Harry Potter.
By reading fan fiction, or any sort of fiction at all, we go through a surrogate experience based on an intense form of human experience, “a part of real life that yields profound pleasures” (Stadler 2006m p. 302).
“The ‘fiction experience’ invites us into an altered state of consciousness, a different way of being. This can be more intense than many real-life experiences. It may be deeply spiritual, filling us with wonder and revelation…stimulate our hearts, minds and emotions in extraordinary fulfilling ways.” (Stadler 2006, p. 302)
Reading Harry Potter fan fiction, quality and beautifully written ones,(like Quiet Revolution by streetscribbles) is one of my favourite pastimes. Like Stadler (2006) says, “as we consume fictions, we leave behind the mundane practicalities of everyday life to travel deep into the heart of ourselves, discovering our core beliefs, feelings and desires.”
It’s like reading a good book; certain fan fiction writers have that ability to write publishing-quality stories. Now it’s just the matter of picking one to read out of the 327, 446 and more.
Online networks in today’s electronic age are just as, if not more, important as real life networks to the socially-conscious person. Social networking through the internet has taken over face-to-face meetings; more people are choosing to get involved in communities and organizations online over actual, good old fashioned gatherings.
In his article, Joel Stein expresses that social networks – such as Facebook, MySpace and Friendster– have become a sort of metric for popularity and a platform for self-branding.
“We’ve gone 40 years back, to sales tactics predating irony, self-deprecation and actual modesty.”
But these communities are so easy to access, and they’re free! This is the exclamation that many would make in disagreement to Stein’s statements.
The truth is, 9 out of 10 teenagers and young adults (in
The 21st Century has brought about the ability of electronic media to outdo former limitations of communication (Meyrowitz 1986).
Situationist Erving Goffman describes social life as a drama. He sees people as playing an array of roles on different social stages; for each “audience” we put on a different version of ourselves (Goffman 1974). Because most social interactions today call for instant judgments, alignments, and actions, people are constantly striving to create socially meaningful impressions (Goffman 1971).
Online communities are an outlet for young people, and old people alike, to present themselves the way they want to be perceived. Through online networks, they can re-write their “scripts” and show to the world a better version of themselves.
References
What is it?
Blogging is a relatively recent online trend where people, organisations, politicians and personalities type out their day’s events and their feelings.
Blogs are known as web diaries based on simple and usually free software.
e.g.
Some Statistics
23,000 new blogs are created every single day
— about one every three seconds (source: Technorati)
400,000 blog posts are created every day
— over 16,000 posts per hour (source: Technorati)
92% of bloggers are under the age of 30 (source: Perseus)
The Purpose of Blogging
People blog for a number of reasons, including:
- for business
- for interest
- for communicating with friends and family
- as an outlet to rant, replacing the traditional hand-written diary/journal
The ‘blogger’ simply has to log onto his/her account on his/her chosen blog site, type an entry or two, click the ‘POST’ button and sit back while the entry uploads onto the site (Matheson 2005, p. 171).
Is blogging a waste of time?
This is the issue at hand.
Many claim that blogging is another excuse for people to sit in front of their PCs and conduct their social networking online. The phenomenon, along with online communities like MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook, is a social revolution.
While some may think of blogging as a waste of time, others may beg to differ.
For some, blogging is a great way of communicating with other. It keeps them in touch with the rest of the world and lets them spill their hearts out about certain issues without having to go through the whole ordeal of dealing with people face-to-face.
Classification of Blogs
- Subject matters of blogs include:
Different types of blogs include:
- vlog(containing videos)
- linklog (comprising of links)
- photoblog (containing picture posts)
- moblog (posts through mobile device)
- political blogs
- travel blogs
- project blogs
- Splogs (spam blogs)
(source: wikipedia)
Although there are many different ‘specialty’ blogs out there, a lot of them are a blend of different categories and styles. Specialty blogs usually have a specific target audience and purpose. The writers of specific blogs which concentrate on certain things look at their topics, style and format very closely.
Blogging Community
A blogging community is one where people who share a certain interest(s) form a community where they can communicate and exchange ideas and talk amongst each other about the particular interest.
Some blogging communities include:
Designing for online vs. designing for print
Jakob Nielsen (1999) states that a majority of web users do not know how to design functional web sites. He says that blogs are “often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author” (1999).
Designing materials to be uploaded online therefore has to be practical and usable. Designing for print is the ‘traditional’ way.
New forms of media publishing
With technology improving every time we turn around, new forms of media publishing are cropping up more than ever before, and at a much faster rate.
Moblogs (blogs that can be posted through mobile devices) and widgets are some of the new forms of media publishing.
Example of widget:
stressed
bouncy
contemplative
