Reflection

The process of creating and maintaining this blog has been a wonderful experience. It gives me a better understanding of the principles of document design as well as the issues related. First of all, when designing a document we ought to know that cultural context is important. As Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) states that the ‘the semiotic landscape’ as the meaning of document understood only by a given society.

Furthermore, combining various elements in creating an effective document is important for message to be delivered effectively (Bernhardt, 1986).  Reep (2006) also suggests that both visual and text complement each other for effectively drawing reader’s attention. Hence, the principles of document design serve as an important knowledge for me to design a document in the future.

In addition, the blog also taught me the proper way of using other’s material when publishing information online. I hope that the blog serve its purposes in providing information that are useful to the readers.

Reference list

1. Bernhardt, S 1986, Seeing the text, College Composition and Communication, vol.37, no.1,p.66-78, National Council of Teachers of English.
2. Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. 2006. Reading images. Chapter 1: The semiotic landscape: language and visual communication, 2nd edn, Routledge, NY, USA
3. Reep, D.C. 2006, ‘Chapter 4: Principles of Document Design,’ in Technical Writing, 6th ed., Pearson Edu, Inc., New York, p.173-190

Publishing issue #4 Racist Advertisement

Cultural understanding plays an important role in advertising. Walsh (2006) complies by stating that decoding text involves social-cultural recognition. Advertisers have to first understand the community’s norm and beliefs before publishing or broadcasting content in order to prevent misleading ideologies to be spread.

Ironically, a Malaysian advertisement produced locally that was to serve as public service announcement commercial caused a stir in Malaysia society as the content was deemed to be racist. Article titled ‘Media Prima pulls out ‘racist’ Ramadan ads’ featured on Themalaysianinsider.com published on August 2 2011 highlights the issue of cultural context in advertising.

Malaysia, being a multiracial country with diverse culture has different celebrations throughout the year. This time during the Muslim’s Ramadan month, Media Prima broadcasted an ad that portrays the Chinese race in a bad limelight causes the rage of public. An advertisement should be free from stereotyping to avoid controversies. Eventually, the commercial was forced to axe down as it is received heavy criticism.

O’Barr (2007) mentions that advertisement should not include misleading meanings. It is important for advertisers to produce commercials that are honest and objective to prevent wrong interpretations made by the consumers. Furthermore, Spence & Heekeren ( 2007) states that advertisements should avoid stereotyping by race, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, geography, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance or social status.. Clearly, the Media Prima advertisement failed to so as the content of the advertisement is highlighting the wrong doings of another race when in reality, the ad should be in a more positive manner to highlight the goods of the festivity. Also, the message of the advertisement could easily cause mislead foreigners by making them having a bad impression towards the Chinese race as they have no prior knowledge to the culture.

In conclusion, advertisements placement should be done carefully before it goes to the public. Producers have to understand the cultural context of a community as well as abide the ethics of advertising to prevent such issue to be repeated. It is never a good idea to damage other’s reputation publicly as it will cause controversies and receive heavy criticism to whoever it concern.

Reference List 

1. O'Barr, W 2007, Ethics and Advertising, viewed on 12th November 2011, <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/asr/v008/8.3unit13.html>
2. Spence, E & Heekeren, B 2005, Advertising Ethics, Pearson Publication, USA
3. Walsh, M 2006, ‘Textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol.29, no.1, p.24-37.
4. Yow, H.C 2011, Media Prima pulls out 'racist' Ramadan ads, viewed on 12th November 2011, <http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/print/malaysia/media-prima-pulls-out-racist-ramadan-ads/>

Publishing issue #3 Copyright issue

The use of internet has made the life of many easy, we could basically search any information that we want and it will appear onto our desktop almost instantly. Yet, the information available for public use on the internet is numerous. It causes the problem of online plagiarism whereby other take credits for other’s work.

The article titled ‘Copyrighted material: fair and unfair use’ by Pichon featured on Editorsweblog.org published on June 22 2011 highlights the issue of copyrighted materials being used by others. The repost of article without the author’s consent causes Righthaven, company that specializes in copyright litigation sue Wayne Hoehn, user of medjacksports.com for using their material. Although, Righthaven claims that such action leads to the loss of hits to their website. Yet, Righthaven does not have enough stakes to bring the case to court.

According to Waxer (2005) copyrighted materials are permitted to use in a fair manner. However, there are still those who copy works of others entirely without giving credits to the creator. There are many efforts being made to improve such situation by the government to prevent further content being stolen. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) (2007) mentions that embedding digital marks is one of the best measurements that creators could take to prevent information theft.  

Furthermore, it is important for journalists to ensure their content is not taken from other source. Posner (2007) states that the code of ethics prevents journalist to take other’s work credit for themselves in information publishing. However, it worries readers and also creators as mentioned in the article, plagiarism standards have now been lowered. News editor overlook minor plagiarism as works that are taken from others is done fast.

Being efficient does not give us any excuses to take other’s work without consent. It is unethical to take credit for other’s hard work while what we did was merely copy and paste just to ensure we get the job right. However, there are appropriate ways to use other’s material in publishing. As Fishman (2011) states that by getting extension license, users are able to make further copies of the original work.

Reference list

1. Waxer, B 2005, Internet Surf and Turf-Revealed: The Essential Guide to Copyright, Fair Use, and Finding, Media Course Technology, USA
2. International Organization for Standardization 2007, Copyright, standards and the internet, viewed on 12th November 2011, <http://www.iso.org/iso/copyright_information_brochure.pdf>
3. Posner, R 2007, The little book of plagiarism, Pantheon Books, USA
4. Fishman, S 2011, The Copyright Handbook: What Every Writer Needs to Know, NOLO, USA
5. Pichon, F 2011, Copyrighted material: fair and unfair use, viewed on 12th November 2011, <http://www.editorsweblog.org/newsrooms_and_journalism/2011/06/copyrighted_material_fair_and_unfair_use.php>

Publishing issue #2 Social Media for Democracy

Today, technology is a part of our life that is always within our reach and it able users to be producers. With the integration of technology, social media have been use on a widespread for promoting democracy as mainstream media that is controlled by government no longer take control. Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube among others have been the backbone of the protests spanning across the Middle East, North Africa and Asia (Krishnappa, 2011).

As reported by Mediashift (2011), Egypt has fully utilized social media to push revolution a step further by using user generated features of the web to help a campaign against military trials for civilian. The closing of Tahrir Square from demonstration by the military is the main catalyst as to why citizens of Cairo are using social media to voice out and protest.

Activists created a Facebook page, Khaleed Said as a platform for everyone to post information to keep the social movement on-going. It causes crowdsourcing to happen whereby it helps to people achieve a shared, usually significant, and large goal by working collaboratively together as a group (Churco, 2011). Furthermore, online event was used for crowd funding for humanitarian projects in Cairo.

Citizen journalism is now playing a part as a watchdog role as it uses transparency as a key against corruption. What could not achieve in the past could be done now through social media. Over the past six decades, citizens are forbidden to criticize Egypt’s military causing people to have no knowledge of their wrong-doings. However, with the introduction of social media it is all now achievable for the betterment of the citizen. The campaign ended in success in 18 days.

The movement in Egypt have set an example for many other countries proving that social media can make a change in democracy. According to Sedra (2011) there are 500 million Facebook and 200 million Twitter members in the world today. There will be more demonstration across the globe in effort to strive democracy due to mainstream media control rest assured with the features of social web to make it a success.

Reference list

1. Krishnappa, S 201, Social Media sites like Twitter deserve Nobel for pro-democracy protests in Egypt, Libya & China?, viewed on 12th November 2011, <http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/114814/20110222/social-media-nobel-peace-prize-internet-pro-democracy-protests-iran-egypt-tunisia-china-government-j.htm>
2. Sedra, M 2011, Revolution 2.0: democracy promotion in the age of social media, viewed on 12th November 2011, <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/revolution-20-democracy-promotion-in-the-age-of-social-media/article1891015/>
3. Churco, E 2011, Crowdsourcing: creating information and knowledge resources by members of a community, viewed on 12th November 2011, <http://www.crowdsourcing.org/document/crowdsourcing-creating-information-and-knowledge-resources-by-members-of-a-community/5216>
4.  Aitamurto, T 2011, How Social Media is Keeping the Egyptian Revolution Alive, viewed on 12th November 2011, <http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2011/09/how-social-media-is-keeping-the-egyptian-revolution-alive256.html>

Publishing issue #1 Image Manipulation

Newspaper is always deemed credible by the public as there are guidelines for newspaper publisher to follow. However, MacKinnon (2005) says that mainstream journalism has lost credibility in the past decades and journalists are trying to get it back. Yet, given the effort it is still a shock to know that news manipulation still happens.

Despite having rules to abide, there are still articles who failed to do so in news publishing. The article ‘Orthodox Jewish paper apologises for Hillary Clinton deletion’ which was published on TheGuardian on 10 May 2011 reports on the digital deleting of Hillary Clinton and Audrey Tomason from an image released by the White House by an orthodox Jewish newspaper.  The image was originally an image showing the situation in the White House room while Predident Barack Obama and his subordinates monitor the raid by navy Seals that killed Osama bin Laden.

The Brooklyn weekly Yiddish newspaper, Di Tzeitung states that the photo editor failed to read the fine print accompanying the photograph that forbids any changes to be made. Furthermore, the publication has a long term editorial policy of not publishing women’s image mentioning that Jewish law sees such action as a courtesy to not judge women based on their position.

Even though apologetic and sincere, the question raised by Di Tzeitung is whether news publishing has to alter based on the customs and norms to fit the reader’s belief. Regardless of traditions of a community, it is a must for newspaper to follow the guidelines set to them in news publishing. The SPJ (2011) code of ethics clearly stated that newspaper should never distort the contents of news photo and video. Thus, the action taken by the photo editor of Di Tzeitung is wrong as it will mislead the readers.

Lastly, even with an apology issued to the victims, Yiddih newspaper, Di Tzeitung’s credibility will still crumble as the fear of news manipulation might happen again in future news coverage. Also, in Malaysia, as reported by Centre of Independent Journalism (CIJ) statistics on BERSIH’s news coverage, Utusan had the highest number of negative articles (93.56%), followed by NST (74.83%), Star (65.79%) and Sun (62.16%) (Yam, 2011). The biggest issue raised here is should we as readers believe anything that mainstream newspaper publishs anymore?

Reference list

1. MacKinnon, R 2005, Ethics of Journalism and Blogging, in BLOGGING, JOURNALISM & CREDIBILITY: Battleground and Common Ground conference at Harvard University, American Library Association 
2. SPJ 2011, SPJ Code of Ethics, viewed on 12th Novermber 2011, <http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp>
3. Yam, Y 2011, Mainstream media didn't play their role on Bersih, viewed on 10^th November 2011, <http://goodtimes.my/index.php/News/mainstream-media-missed-the-boat-on-bersi-says-cij.html>
4. The Guardian, 2011, Orthodox Jewish paper apologizes for Hillary Clinton deletion, Associated Press, viewed on 12th November 2011, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/10/jewish-paper-apologises-hillary-clinton>