*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.