The social impact of zombies

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Since the first time the walking-dead body was  introduced cinematically in “White Zombie” (1932), zombies have infected more than just the horror genre. This particular figure is taking over a diversity of media both as tools and as allegory.

“The recent rapid growth in the number of zombie films has been matched by the emergence of a zombie culture which has seen a series of very public zombie walks and runs across North America and Europe…”

(Conrich et al, pg.15)

Zombie marches highly illustrate the strong interaction between zombies and their fans. From the first official march with just 6 participants in Toronto, Canada in Oct 2003, it becomes larger and larger every year.  People dressed and imitated zombies in these events to make social comment. Frankly speaking, zombie walks are a very effective way to raise money for charities because most people find it hilarious and are family- friendly events. For instance, Zombie Walk Houston has taken advantage of their event annually to raise funds and collect food for the Houston Food Bank and for Tillman Troops which is a group that supports US overseas military with packages. Sometimes, people dress up and act like zombies just for fun, not for any other purpose. I say, in general zombies have formed their own unique culture and community.

Reference:

Hubner, L. Leaning, M. Manning, P. (2014). The Zombie Renaissance in Popular Culture.  The Zombosium.

PB4-Shooting 1 (Me and Jen)

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I and Jen took turns to play the news reporter role. This was the 1st time of my life to be a news reporter although it’s a fake one. Fulfilling that kind of role is harder than I thought. I felt frustrating and awkward while staring at the camera and talking like there were thousands of audiences in front of me. Ridiculously, I had to tried so many times just finish some simple sentences on the script. Even for Jen, a local citizen, had to redo a sometimes to memorize them.

It took us over 2 hours  to finish a few lines news just to find out that we couldn’t use those takes. My forehead is cut because the lens are not wide enough. Jen’s is better but there is a big shadow on her shoulder which is very hard to get rid of. We weren’t aware off serious effects the lights in the green screen room.

At the end of the day, although we couldn’t use those footage, we got valuable experiences and had so much fun. I think working behind the scene isn’t boring at all.

Tweets: A new source of news media

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This article discusses the extensive use of social media, Twitter in particular, by protesters as well as journalists and media in the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Researchers also explore the strong interaction between the sentiments expressed by Twitter users and the actual tweets.

The article is well structured and logical. The findings are supported statistically by  the method of collecting tweets on specific days and presenting them in graphic forms using a table of top five most influential individuals and organisations tweeting on the revolution around the world. This report also pointed is that news and important updates on Egyptian protests were the most popular topic  attracting  followers.

A limitation of this study is that the researcher cannot separate tweets within Egypt to those from other countries since Twitter does not provide a geographical tracking function. As a result, it is hard to tell how successful the Twitter operation is worldwide

The paper does support my argument that social media platforms are not just for private use. If they are used at a right time correctly, they will provide an enormous valuable information resource.

Reference:

Choudhary, A., Hendrix, W., Lee, K., Palsetia, D., & Liao, W. 2012, ‘’Social Media Evolution of the Egyptian Revolution’, Communications Of The Acm, vol 55, no.6, pp. 74-80

PB4-Meeting 3

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We continued to work on the story about the missing girl. We had already got the time line for the story but we need more than that. Eventually, we had to come up with more specific details such as characters’details, channels’s names  as well as the radios’ to make our work more logical. Surprisingly, it took us a considerable amount of time just to get some names.

We also set up shooting and recording days for the project. Aisha will be in charge of writing article on news paper and websites. Jen and I will take care of the footage as well as the post production. I’m really looking forward to the shooting days because I believe I will be able to get lots of experiences from it.

Overall, our project is going quite well and we seem to be on top.

Week 9 – Career

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Frankly speaking, I’m not sure that my bet for this media course is the right decision, but still I’m going for it.  “A stable job” is always hanging in my mind. People are talking about how lame the Australian media industry is. From cinema to TV show, American products have been dominating Australian ones even though Australian have all he resources to make great ones. There’s about 1/10000 chance (may be more or less in the future) that  I can get a job after graduating, but still I’m going for it.

Flash back to the moment I decided to become a bartender in a big hotel, I was facing the same problem.  People said that ” There’s no way you can work at fancy hotels unless you have some kind of relationship with the management board.” Then when I finally got a casual position in a 5-star hotel, they said “It will take you years of working to get a permanent position there unless you have a good relationship with the board management”. After 8 months of hard working, I got a permanent contract and they said something which I did not care about.

There are always people who will tell you difficult things are impossible. On the contrary, There are a lot of people who will definitely tell you to go for your passion, for your dream. May be I’m still waging because I lacks something burning for this career, but still I’m going for it. I’ll will stick  with media for a while to see how things will go on.digital-media-tree

News Hyperlinks

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Himelboim I focuses on studying the structure of the international communication network built by news media organisations as well as the use of external hyperlinks. The article also discusses the use of news media via internet and its capable contribution in the social context despite the geographic and political barriers for international information streams . Moreover, the network access, the preferential attachment and the world system theories are also covered.

This article is easily readable and informative because of its logical structure. Besides, the key findings are solidified by statistics and figures. The author also expands his findings to different aspects based on network theories and identifies barriers to this type of information sharing.

However, there’s still no answer to the reason why there are so many countries still not trying to tap into this beneficial and resourceful communication network. A limitation within this paper is that some countries attracted more hyperlinks because major stories were broken during the collecting data period.

 Reference

Himelboim, I 2010, ‘The International Network Structure of News Media: An Analysis of Hyperlinks Usage in News Web sites’, Journal Of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 54, no.3,pp. 373-390

Sharing information on social media

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The paper “Information sharing on social media sites: Computers in Human Behavior” conducted by Babajide Oyatuyi explores the issue of using and sharing information in social media as well as its credibility. The author also reveals how social network users share their information differently on diverse social media platforms.

This study includes an in depth exploratory analysis and evaluation choosing four categories of information across five popular social media sites. The analysed results are supported by data collected from an online survey instrument. The findings have potential to contribute to future development of the media industry in terms of shared information credibility.

However, the research findings may be biased because there are only 114 participants  out of 200 random invitations in this research.  Furthermore, the reliability of feedbacks using online survey method and the unbalanced genders among the participants can affect the results.

The study covers a wide range of aspects, so it helps me observe social media information sharing from different angles. This study will fit neatly into my research on news media because it also points out that private information seems to be the most attractive topic for information seekers.

Reference:
Osatuyi, B. 2013, ‘Information sharing on social media sites. Computers in Human Behavior’, vol. 29, no.6, pp. 2622-2631

PB4-Meeting 2

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As we planed from the last minute, our group brought up all the annotated bibliographies that are relevant to news media. We discussed about the credibility of the news and its interaction with the audiences as well as how it is spread from one platform to another. Our major question is that whether the messages of the news still remain the same when they are used in many platforms or not. Apparently, how the news is presented does affect the interpreting process of the audiences. Just take an carnival as an example. Most of the time, the news on TV will provide audiences both visual and audio. Meanwhile, the radio just gives audiences the audio and they have to imagine themselves so it might lead to different interpretation.

As we dug deep into the media news, Aisha gave us more hot media affairs which involved in credibility. Finally, we made the decision to focus on how the same news is spread around media platforms and the responsibility of news practitioners. Our plan will be making a fake news about a missing girl who actually just enjoy a camping trip with her father. Her mother states that her divorced husband kidnapped the child. However, the one to blame this false news is the media staffs who do not investigate the sincerity of the story. Following up, we made a brief plan how we are gonna present the whole story in many types of media”text”.

Week 8 – Narrative/Non-narrative

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Is this work narrative or non-narrative? It depends on how an audience interpret it. From my point of view. It’s more likely a narrative one than a non-narrative one. The background music is mostly intense, no presentation, no dialog, half-way resolution. However,from my point of view, it’s more likely a narrative one than a non-narrative one. It’s chaos but it does have a unite sequence. From the headings: birth-between-rebirth to the plots, they are paralleled. The 3 characters  begin at a low emotional stage; then they go through a struggling stage to  a extreme emotional stage to reach their resolution. The same idea or meaning is transmitted via 3 separate rituals: one must overcome  his obstacle even though it is harsh before reaching a new stage of his life circle.

Further thought:
This artistic work is brilliant for studying, but it is kind of boring for most of common audiences. There is a heaps of negative comments for this one: boring, weird or even crap etc. I myself can interpret the content but also find it really boring. If I accidentally  brows this one on Youtube, I will not have enough patience to watch all of the 3 rituals. May be just the 1st one and I’ll hit the fast forward button. Is this type of product worth to invest when the majority of audiences will turn their back on it?

PB4-Meeting 1

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On the 1st meeting, we mainly focused on comparing all the materials that we had collected for PB4 so far. Our topic is “text”, so our materials covered the whole media “text”: from TV, newspapers, radio, websites to social networks. We also came up with a temporary and simpler meaning of our topic: “text” is what we capture with our eyes and ears, then we interpret it with our brain and experiences.

We broke down our topic because it is too general. Then, Aisha brought up some of the latest affairs of news reporter and those were really  interesting. After discussing about those affairs, we chose news media as our key media “text”. However, news media is still too big, so we decided to gathered more academic materials relating to news media and to write annotation of those ones. I think we are going on a right track.