There are several articles for this week as reading, of course, these all about the medium and technologies. After reading these articles, there is an article named Introduction: ‘Culture’ and ‘Technology’ that leaves me a deep impression.

This article, Introduction: ‘Culture’ and ‘Technology’, does not have a dominantly main idea to explain the cultural impact of technology, the appropriate goal is to understand and elaborate some questions, discussing a wide range of theoretical perspectives.

1. How things work technologically, as how they work culturally?
2. How do technologies from the printing press to the Internet function culturally?
3. How do they affect the manner in which we think about ourselves and the world?
4. From which cultural shifts do such new technological forms arise?
5. Do they bring new cultural possibilities into being?

(these questions have been mentioned in the lecture on Monday)

Anyway, this article does help me to understand the relations between culture and technology, extending to the relations between medium and technology. As the author of this article says that, ‘technology plays a crucial role as well in the large-scale and popular forms of culture’, technology also plays a significant role in medium that belongs to culture. Technology, as a form of productivity, is one of the basis of this modern society, sustain the working of the human society. People improve the productivity, in the contrast, the productivity also affect human life that we called culture broadly. This is bidirectional relation in this world.

To identify technology is positive or negative, this depends on everyone who live in contemporary world and times.

This class, at the beginning, talked about the work attachment that the email we students received from Paul Ritchard. As the saying goes, some important and necessary things and knowledge you can only learn from the society and social experience. Like us, as a university and adult, it is time to think over our future career and life. Extending to digital producers, there are many job related to this, such as programmer, online-video producer, social media manager, graphic artist and others.

Well, almost all the students in our class, or in this project, are interested in film and television so I suppose the best career for most of them is director. Me? I am still not sure about my future, but I like it. I do not want my future will be limited by my concrete goal, and I would like to challenge new things.

For the rest of the class, we edited our rough cut of our interview that we recorded few days before. When we were editing, I forget how to reduce noise so we study that again.

This week, we talked about the mediums and technologies, and this was separated in three parts that are medium theory, technology and culture, and communication ‘revolutions’.

To discuss medium, I think the first step is that identify the definition of medium. Just like the most influential and controversial medium theorist, Marshall Mccluhan, said that ‘the medium is a message.’ I agree with this idea, and the message here means the thing that just is a container, containing many information people will read and get.

In recent centuries, because of the developing technologies, medium is changing with times. From newspaper, magazine and radio to internet, Facebook and mobile phone, the changing medium inconspicuously affects people’s daily life and culture. In the lecture, there were some questions asked by professor.

Firstly, how do technologies from the printing press to the Internet function culturally?

Secondly, how do they affect the manner in which we think about ourselves and our world?

Thirdly, from which cultural shifts do such new technological forms arise?

Indeed, technology is changing our life and the world. In some other words, technology is the most obvious and necessary form of productivity, and human life is based on productivity from human. In my opinion, these three questions actually are asking about what changes of culture happen in modern society, and how it is changed by productivity that is human themselves.

For the last part that is communication revolution, there is only an important sentence we need to take care and concern, which is social revolution follows communications revolution. This means that the reason why the society changed is because of the communication revolution in the society and the world. The communication revolution here, I think it refers that depending on technologies, people in the world can communicate with others closely, and their minds, opinions, ideologies and any information could be passed. In this case, the productivity that is based on human develop, the society revolution happen.

This week, when I surfed on Weibo (Chinese popular social media), I was attracted and moved by some video advertising in Thailand.

Heartwarming Thai Commercial – Thai Good Stories By Linaloved

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zwh9dPyidA

A Mother, A Daughter and A Pineapple

These video advertising in Thailand are excellent, touching every audience. In these two video advertising, it is easy to find out that Thailand is one of the countries with the highest level of creative advertising in the Asia Pacific region. According to some surveys, 85.25% of commercial advertising use the populace to act, and there is only 3.12% use star, idol and public figure. In my opinion, the biggest advantage of the video advertising in Thailand is that they good at talking moving and familiar small story with the populace, making people to resonate the story and characters.

Learning from these video advertising, I understand that do not always want to make grandiloquent story and movie, sometimes just the story that happens around people is the most moving and captivating.

For this class, we work on video essay, and Professor Louis touch us students about how to make the video better and how to write a script that is the guide for the rest of our work. The video essay is different with normal video that we did for last few projects. According to Professor Louis, to make the video more completed and fluent, we need to add some pictures that are closely related to the topic, making the video more narrative. Because our video should be limited in five to six minutes, the word of script should be limited around night hundred.

Except this, we continued the topic that is institution, and the two reading also were talked over. Something interesting is that when we talked about the internet speed and broadband, Louis taught by some students about how to save money on the internet data using. Louis is a nice and lovely professor, I do think so.

In group class meeting, we planned to interview students in Rmit building 80 for our radio essay, and waited for the agreement from Kerri Ritchie who is a worker in ABC. Then, we discussed and decided the questions we will ask Kerri.

Following points:

1. How long have you been working for the ABC?
2. What initially drew you to public broadcasting?
3. What is a quality/value/affordance that ABC/public broadcasting has, that new media (social media etc) does not?
4. What is the biggest way you feel the digital revolution has changed or affected public broadcasting?
5. Do you think the new media could ever replaced public broadcasting?
6. As a reporter, where does this shift towards online and user-generated content leave you?
7. Do you think the changes new media imposes line-up with the values associated with the ABC and public broadcasting?
8. Do you think new media can promote the values held by the ABC and public broadcasting in general?

Expecting the interview in the next week.

For this week reading, there are two articles about institution. One is named Making Public Television Social? Public Service Broadcasting and Challenges of Social Media, the other one is named Asynchronous Speed: Disentangling The Discourse of ‘High Speed Broadband’ in Relation to Australia’s National Broadband Network.

My group prefers to focus on the first article, talking about the public broadcasting system and the new media such as social media. Somebody thinks that traditional media, especially the public broadcast, will die in digital age. In the contrast, my group mates and I want to argue that traditional media will not die, and they are facing a big challenge that is to live with new media.

This article, Making Public Television Social? Public Service Broadcasting and Challenges of Social Media, investigates how the rising social media affects European public service broadcast (PSB). Also this article explores the encounter of “social” and “public” on three levels: the level of institution, professional practice, and content. Moreover, authors still focus on how the public service broadcast faces the coming challenges of social media. Finally, there is another important problem that is what the public broadcast can learn from social media for attracting young audience and makers.

All in all, this article and the author just want to indicate that public television will not die, surviving together with social media is the coming future.

The lecture of this week could be separated into two parts, one is institution and the other one is the video essay for PB4.

To identify the institution, there are four explanations.

1. Term from sociology.
2. Organizing structures of society.
3. Social, political, cultural and economic relations
4. Principles, values, rules

Also, marriage was discussed as an example in class. In the lecture, we discussed it in six areas that are social, political, cultural, economic, legal and symbolic. Before the marriage came into the world, long time ago, love is the only one proof and thing that gather a man and a woman. Marriage, as other institutions, based on something is already existent. In my opinion, institution exists as a protection that protect early existent thing. For example, there are two kinds of social system that are socialist system and capitalist system, although they stand for different positions, the functions and purpose of them are same, to make the society better than before.

Then, turn to the media institutions in Australia, there are some main media institutions that are Facebook, community media, ABC and HBO. Professor required students to discuss with the people who set on their sides, trying to think about the media institutions in different and influential ways. Because I am not familiar with the media institutions in Australia, I talked over some Chinese media institutions with my friends. In China, the most famous and powerful one is the CCTV, the China Central Television. All the news broadcasted by this television station is almost 100% believable because it is not only a television station but a propaganda sign of China, and the head of the rest of the television station in China. In this case, we could find out that sometimes the media institution is complex than what people think.

This weekend, I saw the movie that is the captain America: Civil War. This movie, I could say, is very popular in the United State and other places, attracting many people. Then, I feel curious about this situation that why this kind of movie that talks about heroism is so popular.

Now, I think this situation is closely related to public psychology, including the sense of security, and desire for success.

Talking about the sense of security, this is a serious and precious thing that people lack and want, especially in recent decades. Comparing to the twice World War, the times we live in now is more peaceful. However, actually, everyone knows that this peaceful scene is faked. Overall, in some special areas such as Afghanistan, Syria, and Israel, people who live in there are still in wars. Moreover, terrorist organization is a new threaten to the world. In this case, people lack sense of security, and they need protection to live peacefully. There was a comment of the movie named Spiderman 1, which is the reason why this movie grossed so many money is that the spiderman soothed the broken heart of people. After the 911 event in 2001, people always anxious about the terrorism.

For the next psychology, the desire for success, it is simple to explain. Normal people have completed emotion that includes positive and negative emotion. This means everyone has ambition that is one of the sources for people to succeed. Super hero almost can do every impossible thing, and acquire honor from people. Although most people know that human could not be a superman, they still like to enjoy seeing the success of superman. In a normal person life, unaccountable effort needs to be spent for a long time.

As a media people, I believe that movie is from public, and back to public.

Continuing the topic we have discussed on lecture, the audience, in this workshop, we still talked about it. Not only the professor Louis but also every student in my class agrees that audience is a kind of power to media. If we pretend the media as a society, then the audience could be public. This means that for media, audience is as important as public to society.

Sometimes, people would feel that they always follow power, actually, every powerful institution such as government do everything on the basis of public. For example, if society is a huge tree, then public is the foundation of that tree.

However, this theory is only aimed at everyone in this world, not for individual.

After the deeper discussion on audience, we started our annotated bibliography. Last weekend, I have found out six articles, and these articles all about some relationship between media and institution that includes politics, economy and culture. Other group mates found out some news and articles that focus on the relations between new media and traditional media, this kind of area. Really different with mine so at that time I thought I did wrong things that I concern with different area. Finally, I thought that their information are better than mine because my articles are too large-scale, it is hard to make audio and video essay. In the last an hour, we all had a presentation to introduce our annotated bibliography. I remember that at that time I was so tired because I stayed up night yesterday evening, and I almost said nothing. Really appreciate to my group mates, they are so nice.

Audience generally refers to people who hear and watch something such as movie, TV serial, and competition. However, in a broad sense, it refers to people who accept and receive something are public. For example, general consumer could be called as audience.

There are three articles for this week, and each article focus on different areas. For me, I interest in an article called rethinking ‘rethinking convergence/culture’. This talks about the relationship between politics, economy and media. Especially the writer supports that the cultural theory of the Neo liberal capitalism. At the head of the article, the author put forward that do not discuss interaction techniques but record media consumer, interactive relationship between media and its consumer.

Deeper, the author thinks that because of the developing technology and tools, more and more people would enjoy the large-scale and public participation, which makes people feel like this is a new freedom and interest. However, actually, the freedom and interest are illusory. The politics and enterprises are still the barrier for public to aspire after new democracy by social revolution.

This makes me remember a TV serial named Our Democracy has been Hacked, the hero says that no one in this world is free, many choices people are making everyday makes people misunderstand they are free. Actually, you do not have power to choose your life, and change some situations.

Indeed, in my opinion, either social media or traditional media, they are just a method to get deeper connection in society. In the contrast, I have to admit that media does help people to strive for their democracy and right. Moreover, I believe that we could not repose our democracy on developing technology and tools, because the core to realize new democracy is still public.