My Blogging Experience......

The blog post that I would like to be evaluated is "Participatory Culture*"

My blogging experience:

I think the blogging activity has provided me with a chance and platform to think critically on whatever information I received on the internet, especially the layout of a website and the hypertexts provided. This also raise my awareness on the collaboration work on the internet rather than just "facebooking".


Blogging even helps me to relate the concepts that I learnt in lesson to my own experience and apply them in my blogs. For example, I related the concept of participatory culture to my experience when making use of a forum. I learn to include hypertexts, videos and images to make my blog more interesting and comprehensible. It explains why I chose the "Participatory Culture" blog post  as it was my own experience and I made use of images and hypertexts to indicate what I was trying to express and analyze the forum. The most exciting moment is that other bloggers actually strike a chord with me! It was a collective memory among my classmates and me as they also used that forum for academic study.

I enjoyed seeing comments from my classmates as they would point out what's wrong in my blog and share their views. In one of my blog posts, a classmate found the collaborative work that I introduced is interesting which made me feel good! Below is the comment my classmate left:

"GIGISeptember 26, 2012 7:23 PM

Thank you for introducing "The Beauty Inside" to us! I like the idea of producing videos by collaboration of different people from different parts of the world as in the past, we simply couldn't do it in such a convenient way but now we do. And platforms like Youtube or Facebook has actually provided us a lot more to discover or even have fun with while we are becoming more and more creative now."

Here are the hyperlinks to the comments I have left on other blogs:

1. "Thanks for sharing filetube! I found it useful~ :D"

2. "I also think that the layout of youtube is very simple and convenient to follow. Users can find the videos they want and then watch the related ones easily which can expand our knowledge on a particular topic. :)"

3. "Not only originality, but character is also crucial in order to get attention, because your personality needs to appeal to what the audience want. Especially in a stressful life, people would want to have an outlet to vent out their feelings. I think watching him dance can be amusing and relieve their stress. :D"


4."I like that you mentioned about the technological transition from ICQ to MSN and to Whatsapp now. Who knows what will come next? To some extent the advanced technology is bringing people closer but it also means that we are less willing to face people in real life which may be a disadvantage."

*ReFlection: Be Critical!!*

What have I learnt in the course of Writing for New Media? 

Affordances and constraints of technology:

1. Doing
2. Being
3. Relating
4. Thinking
5. Meaning

Main Concepts:

1. Hypertext
2. Interactivity
3. Multimodality
4. Attention economy
5. Online identity
6. Participatory Culture
7. Affinity Spaces
8. Collaboration
9. Peer production

I am going to talk about a few concepts that I found really useful for me and they are layout of a website, hypertexts, affinity space and online identity.

I used to take the internet for granted, I use it to search information, talk with friends or listen to music etc, but I seldom look the new media texts from a critical point of view, not to say analyzing the text on the internet.
I have studied communication before. The key components in communication process include audience (receiver), purpose and genres which I need to bear in mind in order to communicate effectively. These components are also important in writing for new media.

How do we encode the message on the internet?

The affordances of new media (channel) allow us to achieve our purpose, for example, sharing, leaving comments, providing hyperlinks,using pics or videos. We can  reach a wider number of audience by sharing and also allow us to have more interaction with the author.

With the advancement of technology, using Photoshop, InDesign or other softwares can help us to encode our message in pictures.

 

 How do we decode the message on the internet? We need to read the message critically!!

The layout of a website is not only about designs, but it has implication which affect us subconsciously, especially for companies to affect our thinking and thus our behavior. For example, they tend to put the most popular and beautiful product at the center of the website to catch our attention and motivates us to buy them. 

I used to think that hypertexts only provide us with extra information on a certain topic, but I realized that what are linked or not linked to actually tell us a lot on what the author thinks, especially on some sensitive issues like national education/Diaoyu Island incident. Even though it is so convenient to find information on the internet, with the overload of information, we still need to read and analyze them in a critical way. Sometimes, the user/author may not give us the whole picture.

The affinity space I introduced in the last post (Little soldier forum) reminds some of my classmates of their memory back in secondary school. I can see how an affinity space can connect people with similar background and provide a common space to share their resources and ask for advice for their study. This kind of space also let us know that there are people out there who share the same interest/problem with us and we can help each other.

How do we speak on the internet? "Netspeak"

The kind of words, sentence structure (Linguistic features) and emoticons adopted by the author reflect their personality and how they want to be perceived. This actually construct your online identity. You can have more than one identities online. Sometimes, if you want to be close to your friends, you will use informal language and more emoticons ( =,=; ><;XD...) to communicate with them. If you want to maintain your image as a professional or serious person, you will use formal language and more complex sentence structures to communicate your message. 

The above concepts help me to remain critical and analytical and not just accept everything we receive on the internet. They also help me with my writing for new media in terms of what links I provide, the language I use or how I design the layout of a website. Most importantly, I have to bear in mind who I am writing to, the purpose I write the text and the kind of text I am writing.

Participatory Culture*

The affinity space that I'm going to write is called the littlesoldier, a local forum for local students to share resources on exercises and past papers. There are also sections for sharing tips on how to solve academic problems. The common interest among them is to get good results in public exams and help with each other with their homework. 

Most of the participants are similar in age and ethnic background. They are Hong Kong students and with Cantonese as their mother tongue as the language used in this forum is Cantonese. Some of them may be tutors like me to download those exercises for my students.

Helping each other to solve problems is also one of the interests that the users share.Some of them even adopt the role of teachers or experts on the internet. They are able to contribute their knowledge and skills on topics ranging from academic ones like quadratic equations in Maths and  English grammar to interview techniques.

This community of members has a set of conventions that they need to follow to maintain order of this affinity space. Each category would have a board monitor to manage different discussion pages, the rules are:

no foul language & personal insult, a must to thank the person who

shares the resources so that I can download the files. 

Sometimes, you need to accumulate a certain amount of points by replying to different posts and contribute your own information to different topics.

The point system allows the forum to distinguish if the users are regular contributors, one-off participants, experts or a novice and decide whether they can get those resources. 

One  interesting rule is that users can't post messages non-stop trying to get more points. It would be treated as "abuse of posts" -- for example, if you reply "Thank you"  within 30 seconds, you'd be banned from commenting for 5 minutes. In serious cases, the board monitor may even ban your account.

However, if you post something meaningful/useful to the forum, the board

monitor may give you more points as an award! 

All these rules and conventions are described in detail at the top of the

forum so that the novice can learn them in advance.

 

I consider myself as a one-off participant as I use this forum for practical purpose. I usually say "thank you for sharing the info! :D" to get what I want and then left.

LayOut & Implication of HyperTexts in Wikiiii

A layout of a website affects how a reader receive information. A good layout should be easy for people to follow and get information.

The target audience of Wikipedia is the general public and the purpose of the web site is to provide information. How effective is the layout of Wikipedia in achieving the purpose and reaching its target audience? Wiki homepage adopts a left-right clear division. On the left, there are various categories for people to choose from. This is the given information.

On the right, different sections are used to divide the topics with the relative pictures to attract attention.  You can see the feature articles, history of the day and current news. On the top right-hand corner, there is a search bar.  These are the new information.

At the top ,you can spot the search bar immediately. There are also the main categories like discussion (Talk) and history (View history). These are also the given-information.

 
At the bottom, the less important information are shown such as "Privacy", "Disclaimers" and "About Wikipedia". This is because the target audience usually are not interested in these boring information. They think that these may not be related to them.These are the real-information.

 

According to Nielsen Norman (2006), when we are reading a web page, we tend to follow F-shaped reading pattern. I find it true as I'm reading the wiki page. I looked at the center part which has the new information first and then moved to the left-hand column for given information. This pattern conforms to the given-new style.

When you get into a typical Wiki page, you can see that it uses a hypertextual structure in which associations are made so that readers can link to other information.  In this way, when people don't understand certain ideas or terms in an article, readers can construct their knowledge on them instantly by clicking on the hypertexts. In the example below, if readers want to have further information on the authors, they can click on the names (in green box). If they don't understand certain terms (in orange box), they can also get access to other pages explaining those terms. 

 
The convenience actually motivates us to expand our knowledge. Readers now take a more active role and they are not passively receiving information anymore. They can edit the information or create a wiki page to share information. They can even start a discussion. The relationship between readers and authors are more interactive. Wikipedia also affects our "being" as we tend to acquire knowledge from Wiki or other websites rather than going to the library.

However, when it comes to politically sensitive events, the hypertexts can imply something else. Take the controversy of implementation of Moral and National Education (MNE) as an example, all the associations are local ones. No foreign associations related to  MNE from around the world are provided in this wiki page.  Readers can't compare MNE in HK with those in other countries. It implies that they can't see the whole picture and analyze the issue in deep.

How useful or reliable is the information provided in Wiki? At the bottom of a wiki page, you can find the "Rating". I think it is very useful as  the statistics can be used as a guideline to evaluate whether the article is trustworthy, objective, complete and well-written.

ATTENTION!!!!!!!!

With the flooding of information online, how can we gain people's attention to what we do??

ORIGINALITY!  

You need to have a sharp personality and are able to do something bold. Most importantly, what you do should be inspiring and brings a NEW ANGLE to the vast number of internet users.

GANGNAM STYLE is a great example of attention economy which means that if you want to get attention then you need to give attention first. This is a music video by a South Korean pop singer Park Jae Sung. He's now famous with his "Horse-Riding dance".

 

Not only does the video itself popular, it also inspires a lot of covers and parodies. This phenomenon is actually connecting people who share the same interest in his music.

 

The video also consists of 2 important practices:

1. ‘transferring’ - The singer has a unique characteristic which is appealing to people. He isn't shy and is willing to amuse people by doing some weird movements. People find it interesting and share it in facebook so that it becomes viral instantly. This is like a free advertisement and explains how he gained so much ATTENTION on the internet.

2. ‘framing and encapsulating’- How does this MV develop an attractive angle? The singer is not a typical pop star with cool appearance and handsome face. Still, he can succeed in getting worldwide attention by doing something that others can't do/wouldn't do. It's actually inspiring and encouraging to those people who are like him out there. It provides a new perspective on the entertainment industry which is if you are brave and creative, you can showcase your talent through different media no matter how you look!

Here is a funny remix of Gangnam Style by Hitler :p
ENJOY!

PHOTO SOURCE: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/gangnam-style

WHO AM I on the Internet???

This is an email from one of my tutors. As you can see from the layout, there are subject line (in green box), salutation (in orange box), message (in brown box) and a complimentary close (in red box). The purpose is to inform us about next class's schedule. The audience is his students. Since the relationship between the sender and receiver is a teacher-student one, the register is better to be formal. This explains why, in the main message, my tutor used complete and complex sentences.He wants to be perceived as a professional and serious tutor.

This is a face book conversation from my friends. A number of emoticons such as ><, ==, XD (in green boxes) are used. Code-mixing can also be seen (words with blue line), they are English mixing Chinese and the use of "D" meaning "a bit of". The use of informal languages suggest that they are friends and they want to show their solidarity to each other. Especially they want to be identified as in-group friend rather than an outsider.

They use informal language is also because of media effects. Most people now use smart phones to get access to facebook, they may not be willing to put too much efforts into typing long sentences. Rather, they use a combination of emoticons and code-mixing to express their messages as quick as possible.

The language used online depends largely on the purpose, audience and how the senders want to be perceived or how they build up their image through using different kinds of words. Every one can be a totally different person when they go online.