Reflection

"Thank You for Reading my Blog"
-Pooi Yee-

I have finally come to the end of my blog posting. Throughout the postings, I have discussed many issues regarding to media and publishing. Frankly, it really changes my perspective on blogging. Who knew that blogging actually involved so much more than just words.

According to Schriver (1997), there are two ways that audiences interpret text, knowledge-driven and text driven. I think this is one of the most important things blogger need to consider, as they will need to think whether the picture and prose are relevant to their target audience.

Besides that, Kress and van Leeuwen(1998) had claims that a good document involves three signifying systems- Information value, salience and framing. In one of my previous posting, I stated that all blogs basically shared the same goal as KVL’s claims. For instance, the information I posted are all cited with reference, pictures and videos were uploaded to attract the reader’s attention. Lastly, there is spacing between one paragraph to another paragraph, so that the words are easier to be read.



References:

• Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T 1998, ‘Front page : (the critical) analysis of newspaper layout’ , Approaches to Media Discourse, Blackwell, Oxford.

• Schriver, KA 1997, ‘The Interplay of Words and Pictures’, Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Text for Readers, Wiley Computer Pub, New York.

iVote for iObama

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. "


-Barack Obama-


The day iPhone was ‘born’, who knew that the American would put their faith and elected the first
African-American to be the President of United States. He himself probably never have thought that this little communication gadget will help him to win the 2008 Presidential election, and changes the history of American forever.
iPhone became the political recruiting tool for Obama on 2nd of October 2008. The Obama election campaign team launched an application for the Apple Iphone intended to attract more voters and turning its supporters to active campaigners via the feature of iPhone (Information Policy, 2008). The ‘Obama 08 ‘[ iObama ] combines interactive networking tools with the latest updates and information regarding to the Obama election campaign.

iObama


The Audience: When Obama election campaign team first launched and planned Obama’s election campaign, three types of audience were targeted. There were the young voters; the non-white as well as the women in America, and according to National Election Pool (Schiffers, 2008) shows that majority of his targeted audience had voted for him.

The Purpose: As cited by Bear (2006), every thing has its own function whether it is to sell, to inform, to educate, to impress and to entertain.

Obama uses Iphone:

• To ‘SELL’ and promote himself as the potential leader for the citizen of United State.
• To ‘INFORM’ and update his supporters on his movement with the iObama features such as ‘call stat’ , ‘local event’ and ‘News’
• To ‘EDUCATE’ the Americans that it is time for a change.
• To ‘IMPRESS’ and ‘ENTERTAIN’ the supporters via Iphone features- downloadable wallpaper, video and photo from the campaign.
  

For all the iObama features, visit < http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/iphone >

The Context: According to Paltridge (2000), context of situation are the combination of field, tenor and mode. Obama uses informal conversation throughout the whole iObama campaign as to strengthen the relationship with his voters. The subject matter (field) here is the 2008 Presidential election campaign, the affiliation between the encoder and the decoder (tenor) for iObama is between Barack Obama and his potential voters. The channel of communication (mode) uses by Obama is inspiring speeches that can motivate the people of U.S.
Thus, the marriage between Obama and Iphone has successfully made him the President of United States and won over majority of the votes.

References:

1. Bear,JH 2006, Your Guide to Desktop Publishing, online, retrieved 15th June 2009. From < http://desktoppub.about.com/mbiopage.htm >
2. Information Policy: Obama Becomes Second Politician to Use iPhone 'App' 2008, online, retrieved 15th June 2009, from < http://www.i-policy.org/2008/10/obama-becomes-second-politician-to-use-iphone-app.html >
3. Paltridge,B 2000, ‘Genre Analysis’, Making Sense of Discourse Analysis, Antipodean Educational Enterprise, Gold Coast
4. Schiffers,S 2008, Who Voted for Obama, online, retrieved on 15th June 2009, from < http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/us_elections_2008/7709852.stm >

“Harry Potter, The boy who survived.”

"I think copyright is moral, proper. I think a creator has the right to control the disposition of his or her works - I actually believe that the financial issue is less important than the integrity of the work, the attribution, that kind of stuff. "

-Esther Dyson-

Harry Potter is a series of fictional novel. Every Potter fans know that Harry Potter survived from the attack of the most evil wizard, Voldemort. So, what happen if Harry was involved in a ‘muggle’( reality) world lawsuit? Will he survive?

The Harry Potter copyright case attracts high level of media interest. The high-profile court case involved the author of Harry Potter, JK Rowling and the publisher of Harry Potter Lexicon (HPL), Steven Vander Ark, a 50 year old librarian. Many people might have heard of HPL as it was originated from the Harry Potter Lexicon Website that has more than 250 million hit a year as well as an encyclopedia of every spells that appear in the novel, it was an absolute Harry Potter fan guide. In 2004, JK Rowling even gave the HPL website one of her ‘fan site awards’ (Telegraph UK, 2008).


However, Ark wanted to transcript the content from the website to prints, publishes it in a form of book, and make money out of it. The transduction from Website to Prints made JK Rowling turned on one of her greatest supporter and put it on court. The lawsuit was arisen from two copyright and legal issues. Firstly, Rowling claimed that there was too many lexicons’ text taken directly from the Harry Potter novel without quotation marks. She also states that the book was “nothing more than a rearrangement of her own material”. Second, Rowling intended to produce a Harry Potter glossary of her own for charity purposes, and the HPL book will definitely undermine that exercise (Fong & Elliot, 2008) because the ‘context of situation’ (Paltridge, 2000, p.121,122) for the two books are just too similar.

In September 2008, the high-profile Harry Potter case was put to an end when the New York Court put a ban on publishing the Harry Potter Lexicon book to protect the author’s right to defend their original work (BBC news, 2008). Steven Vander Ark was found guilty under the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act (1988). Although he tried to oppose with ‘fair-use’ principle, which will allows reproducing some of the original work and achieve one’s purposes (Stanford, 2007), but the portion of direct quote texts used in his Lexicon book were just too much.

Therefore, I think that we should always do research before we want to publish anything. Citations are only to support our ideas; we should never ‘borrow’ other authors’ original work without their permission.

References :

• BBC News: Rowling Wins Book Copyright Claim 2008, online, retrieved on 14th June 2009, from <¸http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7605142.stm >
  
• Fong,K & Elliot,J 2008, Harry Potter Copyright Case: Fair Use or Foul , online, retrieved on 14th June 2009, from < http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article3834611.ece
  
• Paltridge,B 2000, ‘Genre Analysis’, Making Sense of Discourse Analysis, Antipodean Educational Enterprise, Gold Coast.
  
• Stanford: Copyright &Fair Use 2007, online , retrieved on 14th June 2009, from < http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-a.html >
  
• TelegraphUK : Facts about the Harry Potter Lexicon Website 2008, online, retrieved on 14th June 2009, from < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1895676/Facts-about-the-Harry-Potter-Lexicon-website.html >