Reflections

After 3 months of learning for this subejct: Issues in Publication and Design, I found it very interesting and actually learned a lot of things from it. Throughout the course, I learned about document design, which is about the correct and appropriate ways to design different documents, and I like this section very much. I have also learned about how images or visuals works with text. As according to Dwyer and Moore (1994, p. 164), visuals and verbal text are interdependent on each other and by knowing how they appear, and how vital it is to learn how to achieve a desired balance between the nymber of texts with the amount of visuals in order to be called a good publication design. An efficicient publication design is important but somehow, it is always overlooked. A document with a lousy document design is useless no matter how well written the content may be.

This subject is a very informative and valuable one as it taught me how to publish an effective and informative document, as well as producing different types of documents myself. I never know publication can be such an interesting topic, and I am very lucky to be given the chance to learn it. My lecturer is always so patient and knowledgeable in her field, it is imporrible not to gain much knowledge from this subject.

Issues in publication and design taught me many things and gave me a head start experience in the media field, and it is something I will definitely use in the near future.

Reference:

Dwyer, F & Moore, D 1994, Section IV: Visual Design, Visual Literacy: A spectrum of visual learning, Educational Technology, New Jersey, pp. 164.

Cyberbullying-Internet security issue

(Image source: Dreamcatchersforabusedchildren.com, 2009)

Cases of bully do not just happen in real life, but also in cyberspace. This shows that bullying issue is becoming more and more serious. According to Richard (2010), there are a few types of bully, which are pressure bullying, verbal bullying, cyberbullying, physical bullying and hazing. In this era full of technologies, cyberbullying is now becoming a famous issue that is often being discussed. The victims of cyber bullying cases may suffer both emotionally and physically, and this form of bully are nowadays very common in school.

Photo of Phoebe Prince who committed suicide after being bullied.
(Image source: The Boston Globe, 2010)

In Massachusetts, a girl, Phoebe Prince, was believed to commit suicide after being bullied by a group of her classmates online and also in real life(Owens, 2010). According to Owens (2010), Massachusetts has just drawn an anti-bullying legistlation after the death of Phobe, which aims to prevent bullying and cyberbullying cases especially in school, where the school officials are required to undergo training so they can tell and report it to the pricipals if they found out a bullying case is happening. There was a similar case about three years ago, where a girl hung herself to death after receiving harrassment from a cyber friend she knew from a famous social networking sites (FoxNews.com, 2007).

In my opinion, internet security is still relatively weak nowadays, and enforcement of laws can only prevent cyberbullying cases from happening but it is very hard to stop it entirely, because they came in many forms. The form of cyberbullying are usually by sending abusive and offensive languages or pictures to a person through short messages on handphone, emails, chat rooms and probably defame someone by posting some scandal on websites (Cainfield, 2010). However, it may be effective in reducing the risk of people being bullied. Young people should learn how to protect their privacy and identity online so to not have their social networking accounts be a prey to the criminals. Stricter laws should be impose to minimize the number of such cases and to teach the young people a lesson or two about cyberbullying. Parents and teachers should always monitor the online activities of a child whether the child likes it or not. Most of such cases happen because the criminals do not have enough parental attention and care, thus leading to a rebellion like this.

As a conclusion, internet security in cyberspace should be further enforced and improved in order to protect the internet users' rights and also prevent cyberbullying from spreading around. People from all aspects should work together in order to stop cyberbullying. Since the victims are mostly young teenagers, parents and educators should teach them ways to protect themselves and so as to prevent them from being bullied in real life and in cyberspace.


References:

1. Cainfield, A 2010, Cyber bullies Out of the Playground Into Your Home, BaseArticles.com, viewed 14th June 2010, http://www.basearticles.com/Art/44261/271/Cyber-bullies-Out-of-the-Playground-Into-Your-Home.html


2. FoxNews.com 2010, Mom: MySpace Hoax Led to Daughter's Suicide, FoxNews.com, viewed 14th June 2010, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,312018,00.html


3. Owens, L 2010, Phoebe Prince-Tragic case of (Cyber)bullying, Trendmicro.com, viewed 14th June 2010, http://internetsafety.trendmicro.com/phoebe-prince-tragic-case-of-cyberbullying


4. Richard, C. A. 2010, Types of Bullying, eHow.com, viewed 14th June 2010, http://www.ehow.com/facts_4965121_types-of-bullying.html

Facebook: Privacy Issue

(Image source: Wordpress.com, 2009)

Social networking websites can be seen becoming increasingly popular and is growing at a booming pace. According to statistics done by The Nielsen Company (2010), the overall amount of users visiting social networking sites has increased since 2007, and Facebook was the top among all the sites with approximately 207 million visiters and 67% social media users from all over the world in December 2009.

(Image source: Nielsen Wire, 2010)

However, Facebook has came up with privacy issue lately. According to an article "Why Facebook is Wrong: Privacy is still important" on Read Write Web written by Marshall Kirkpatrcik (2010), the default setting of privacy of Facebook was primarily set to only viewable by other users if their friend requests are approved by a user, but later, the user's information was no longer kept secret and is visible to the public even if they are not friends to the user. This is due to the new default privacy setting of Facebook, which set all the information public to the others, while the only way to avoid the information of the users being exposed to the public is to change the privacy settings by themselves, and this action does not receive positive response from the users (Kirkpatrick, 2010).

The implication brought by this issue is that many users are starting to leave or close down their Facebook account. According to Paul (2010), those users who are not happy with the privacy issues of Facebook launched a "Quit Facebook Day", where many users responsed to it and decided to delete their account, because they felt that Facebook's authorities show no respect to the users' privileges and their information, and they made the privacy settings too complicated.

Facebook has already gone against the California privacy and and online privacy laws for exposing users information to the public (Musil, 2009). Once, I updated a status which stated the name of my favorite actor , and five minutes later a stranger, who has the same name as the actor I mentioned, with a disturbing display picture added me. I immediately ignored his request and changed my privacy setting to all private and only viewable by my friends. Peter Marks, the technology editor of ABC website, stated that people may not aware that when they are uploading pictures to Facebook, the photos may be visible to the public or even stalkers, because the photos may be searched through Google Images (Breen, 2010).

In my opinion, it is hard for privacy to exist in cyberspace. However, user's right and privacy should be protected, and drawing a law for it may not help much, but it can at least protect the user's right. However, I will still continue to use Facebook, because it is convenient for me to keep in contact with my friends and relatives, despite the privacy issues.


References:

1. Breen, G., 2010, Teen's murder sparks Facebook privacy plea, ABC News, viewed 9 June 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/05/17/2901537.htm


2. Kirkpatrick, M., 2010, Why Facebook is Wrong: Privacy is still important, Read Write Web, viewed 9 June 2010, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_facebook_is_wrong_about_privacy.php


3. Musil, S., 2008, Users file privacy lawsuit against Facebook, Cnet News, viewed 9 June 2010, from http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10311625-93.html


4. Nielsen, 2010, Led by Facebook, Twitter, Global Time Spent on Social Media Sites up 82% Year over Year,viewed 9 June 2010, http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/led-by-facebook-twitter-global-time-spent-on-social-media-sites-up-82-year-over-year/


5. Paul, I., 2010, It's quit Facebook Day, are you leaving?, PC World, viewed 9 June 2010, http://www.pcworld.com/article/197621/its_quit_facebook_day_are_you_leaving.html

The Power of Blogging

Blog is an online platform which allows users to write whatever they want, such as expressing feeling, or simply blog about something interesting that happened on certain day. I have my own personal blog, which is mostly used to express my feelings rather than blog about serious issue. Blogger, Wordpress and Live Journal are among the well-known blog service providers. Blog has provided freedom for people to write like a journalist online. However, what impact and benefits does blogging phenomenon brings?

(Image source: Wordpress.com, 2009)

According to Loewenstein, in country like China, the implication brought by the blogging is that the bloggers are making use of the freedom of speech online to reveal the scandals and corruption which is less or not covered at all by the mainstream media, such as the public protests about the the weak construction of building which causes many building to collapse during the occurance of earthquake in Sichuan (Funnell, 2008). The truth that are buried by the media, are revealed online through blogging. Therefore, blogging phenomenon brings freedom of speech in the internet.

(Image source: Problogger.net, 2009)

In my opinion, blogging has, in fact, impacts in many other fields, such as educational, business, entertainment and even political fields. For example, in Malaysia, many politicians such as our Prime Minister Dato' Sri Najib Tun Razak and Lim Kit Siang are using blogs to spread their inflence and also communicate and interact with people. By making good and correct use of blogging as a tool for marketing purpose, it may helps in increasing the product sale, get additional income by advertising on the blog, and can even use it as a customer service tool to interact and communicate with clients (Gehl, 2006). Undoubtly, good marketing skills, good relationships with customers, excellent sales force and support customers are crucial in making a marketing blog goes success, but if one has an excellent idea about a product that is worth selling, strong support at the back and has targeted the potential customers, the process will be smoother (Wright, 2006 ).

As a conclusion, blogging phenomenon has brings a lot of benefits and impact in today's world. There may be an increase in freedom of speech, but we should be careful and resposible about what we wrote and published. There was once a person, Jeffery Gargaro, was arrested after posting his opinion about the shooting rampage in Washington, because his post was seen as a threat by the police (Chang, 2008). Therefore, there are still some regulations and rules while blogging online that we need to obey.

References:

1. Chang, B 2008, Man arrested for writing blog on a newspaper website, Kare11.com, viewed 7th June 2010, http://www.kare11.com/news/whatsup/whatsup_article.aspx?storyid=525761&catid=333


2. Funnell, A 2008, The Blogging Revolution, ABC, viewed 7 June 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2351985.htm


3. Gehl, D 2006, How to Harness the Marketing Power of Blogs, Entrepreneur, viewed 7 June 2010, http://www.entrepreneur.com/ebusiness/ebusinesscolumnist/article84232.html


4. Wright, J 2006, The Power of Blogs for Business (Chapter 3), viewed 7 June 2010, http://www.blogmarketingbook.com/

Emoticons and Email Etiquette

(Image source: bestfreeicons.com, 2008)

Using emoticons while chatting through instant messaging tools or writing an email brings benefits and effectiveness in communication. I often use emoticons while chatting with my friends, not to only make my sentences looks more interesting, but also to make my friends understand or interpret my feeling or mood at the moment when I am talking about a certain topic. Below is an example when I am chatting with my friend.


The beginning of use of emoticons is about twenty five years ago, when Professor Fahlman came up with an idea where the told his colleagues to add a smiley face, which is simply made up of a few punctuation marks, to the end of a sentence when they were making jokes on the internet, and later, emoticons goes universal and evolves into images of graphis with animation, but there are still a lot of people prefer to use the old emoticons made up by three characters combining punctuation marks and alphabets (Funnell, 2007). In order not to make my friends misinterpret that I am angry or sad, I always add funny emoticons to the sentence to indicate that I am just joking, such as "XD" which means laughing, or ":P" which means sticking the tounge out, and it never fails to brighten up the situation while chatting or sending email. According to Prontes (2010), adding a lauging face to a sentence may help others to understand that a person is trying to tell a joke, because emoticons can help express feelings and emotions that cannot be shown through written words.

However, emoticons are not suitable to be used in all context, especially when we are talking about something serious. For example, I cannot use emoticons in a resumé when I am trying to apply for a job, it may give bad impression to the employer. Prontes (2010) stated that emoticons are informal and not serious which is not suitable to be use for professional context, but it is appropriate to be used between peers, lovers or family members. According to an article from New York Times witten by Williams (2007), Alexis Feldman, a director from a commercial real estate company, once got an email from her broker to inform her that their deal has been called off, and a frown face was added to the email, and she felt worse not only because she lost a deal but she felt that adding an emoticon to a serious email shows no sincerity and naive.

In my opinion, the are difference between the usage of emoticons between female and male. According to Williams (2007), the result obtained from Yahoo poll shows that 82 percent of respondents agreed that female are more likely to use emoticons than man. I think that women tend to use emoticons because they are more likely to express their feelings than men.

As a conclusion, using emoticons do improve the effectiveness in communication, but we have to be careful about the appropriateness of using them.

References:

1. Funnell, A 2007, Emoticons and email etiquette, ABC, viewed 5 June 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2007/2064342.htm


2. Williams, A., 2007, (-: Just Between You and Me ;-), NY Timesm viewed 7 June 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/fashion/29emoticon.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2


3. Prontes, I., 2010, About emoticons, ehow.com, viewed 7 June 2010, http://www.ehow.com/about_4587652_emoticons.html

Good design for screen genre

A good design is very crucial for a document. According to Reep (2006 p. 134), readers do not only read the printed words but they also "reads" the visual presentation of a document. Therefore, there are some basic design principles that should be take note of in the process of designing a document (Reep, 2006 p.135), such as balance, proportion, sequence and consistency.

Whereas Bernhardt's (1986) laws of gestalt is also important in document design and it is somehow similar to Reep's basic design principles, which emphasises on balance and equilibrium, good continuation, clousure and similarty (Bernhardt, 1986). We can see that both principles are very concern about the importance of balance in a document.

First Slide (Front Cover)

The picture above shows the cover page of my group presentation. It is simple and clear enough to brief the audience what topic we have chosen and the list of presenters tells the audience who is going to present. The pictures and color used are quite relevant and appropriate to the topic.

Second Slide

The second pictures shows an example of a bad designed document. The slides if fully packed with words and no pictures are shown to help in explaining the points. According to Nielson (1997), users do not read words by words on the web page, but rather scan through and pick out the points that they think are important. This slides is surely not a good choice for the readers as there are too many words and seems confusing. Furthermore, the last three words are out of margin, and is not readable by the readers because the of the colour of the words and the background is too close.

Third Slide

Fourth Slide

The third and fourth pictures shows nicely designed slides of the document. The sentences in the third slide are short and are clearly listed out. Just as Reynolds (2005) mentioned,the idea of simplicity is an crucial precept that is worth following because the best visuals are often ones designed with an eye toward simplicity (Reynolds, 2005). The design of the third slide is considered as simple yet understandable. As for the fourth slide, the sentences are short and straight to the point. The important keywords are bolded or highlighted, the points are shown in bullted list, and it is half the word count of the conventional writing (Nielson, 1997). Moreover, the design of the fourth slide is considered a formal balance (Reep, 2006 p.135). Hence, this is a simple slide which enables the reader to understand and remember the points easily.


References:

1. Bernhardt, SA 1986, 'Seeing the Text', College Composition and Communication, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 66 - 78.


2. Nielsen, J 1997, How Users Read on the Web, useit.com, viewed 19 April 2010, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html


3. Reep, DC 2006, 'Chapter 6: Document design', Technical writing, 6th edn, Pearson/Longman, New York.


4. Reynolds, G 2005, What is good PowerPoint design?, Presentation Zen, viewed 19 April 2010, http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/09/whats_good_powe.html

New Forms of Media Publishing

(Source: Conversation Agent, 2007)

Due to the development of advanced science and technologies, the ways of communications have changed. The mixture of digital covergance, personal computing and global networking, these new forms of media is booming and is giving rise to great changes in the communication environment (Naughton, 2006). Blogs, video websites, Twitter, forums and social networking websites have become the latest trend in the field of communication.

The online publishing materials have changed the ways people used to contact with each other and the way people read. In Malaysia, online journalism only came into attention around 1997 - 1998 and is growing rapidly until today (Ghazali, 2009). The existence of blogs enabled us to share news and information easier and faster. Social networking websites provide a more convinient way for us to contact and keep in touch with families and friends. Youtube has made watching movies online possible. Based on the information from the measurement firm Nielsen, almost two over three of all video views in the United State happen on Youtube (The New York Times, 2009). In the past, people can only from a printed newspaper and books, but nowadays, they can read from the websites that provide online news or download ebooks which is more convinient and faster. For example, news articles and news clips regarding the Poland plane crash can be found on Times Online website and Youtube respectively.

One of the issues that surfaced after the existence of new media the politicians are following the trends, as we can see from the 1 Malaysia campaign introduced by our current Prime Minister. Other than posters and advertisements in the traditional newspaper and magazines, The 1 Malaysia Website serves as a platform for Prime Minister to post his opinions about the development of Malaysia and he also collects suggestion from the feedbacks and comments of the readers, so as to interact with them and bring him closer to them. Video recording method is also used by Prime Minister to deliver his messages to the readers.

(Source: Youtube.com, 2010)

Therefore, new media works together with old media can make the dedication of the intended message more effective, because more and more people knows about 1 Malaysia Concept. As said by Walker (2004), new media and old media complemented each other and they were the part of the same ecosystem (Walker, J 2004).

References:

1. Ghazali, R 2009, Online Journalism: The Malaysian Scene, Agenda Daily, viewed 15 April 2010, http://www.agendadaily.com/cmspreview/content.jsp?id=com.tms.cms.article.Article_a64ff57d-ca9db1d0-13cd05a0-11d95ab0


2. Naughton, John 2006, Blogging and the emerging media ecosystem, reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk, viewed 15 April 2010, http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/discussion/blogging.pdf


3. The New York Times 2009, Youtube, The New York Times, viewed 15 April 2010, http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/youtube/index.html


4. Walker, J 2004, Old Media and New Media - Like it or not, they're partners, Reason Magazine, viewed 15 April 2010, http://reason.com/archives/2004/09/15/old-media-and-new-media