Building and maintaining this blog brought about a mixture of feelings. On the one hand, it was stressful trying to prefect each blog post and find enough credible information to include promptly. On the other hand, I quite enjoy the stress.
Researching information for all the topics was quite enjoyable but it was extracting the right information and putting it all together that was frustrating. In fact, sometimes I found too much information and had so much to write about that it was difficult to keep within the given word limit.
Among all the other things I learnt by researching the topics in the blog posts, I have a new found respect for referencing. I realized how much time and effort it takes to pull together information and referencing is just a small form of appreciation for reproducing the work. Also, it demonstrates the authenticity of your information and enables your readers to locate your information sources (Why cite information sources? 2004).
If you didn’t know, Auto -Tune is a software program that alters singers' voices to achieve perfect pitch and when used too much it makes people sound electronic.
Usually a software that is used in the music industry and perhaps movies, it is now being used to present the news.
Auto-Tune the News, is a series of music videos on YouTube created and performed by the Gregory Brothers. The Gregory Brothers are Evan, Andrew, Michael, and Sarah Gregory (Gann 2009). They take real news broadcasts and edit them to make them funny and thus, more memorable.
Although the presentation of the news is hardly serious, it still projects the news and it is real news.
Mackey (2009) stated that they tried to mould speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Winston Churchill into contemporary pop songs, it can take a while for the lyrics to sink in, but once they do, it is hard to get these weirdly catchy songs out of your head.
That way, anyone watching the videos, whether they like politics or not, will retain some information of what is happening in the news or even in history.
As The Gregory Brothers once commented, “we’ve heard some very encouraging stories from teachers and other adults who have actually used the I Have a Dream video to refresh the speech for younger ears, with great outcomes.” (Gann 2009).
It may also a form of multimodal texts that students will encounter in their educational environment (Walsh 2006). As stated by Walsh (2006), there is an increased merging of communication within and outside educational environments.
I find Auto-Tune the News very intriguing as it helps to provide news to an audience that normally would show no real interest in it but through these videos they at least are aware of certain topics. Maybe even enough to fuel further discussions about it in the future.
According to Plotkin (2010) millennials are too busy watching videos on YouTube and they typically don’t care who made those videos, or if they have an agenda, as long as the video is entertaining. Therefore, viral videos do have a have significance in presenting news to their viewers no matter the form.
Featured below is a video from the “Auto-Tune the News” series.
Walsh, M 2006, ‘The 'textual shift': examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts,’ Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.
This is one of the many sexist ads that were published during the recent World Cup 2010.
Source: campaignme.com
The ads above is part a campaign that plays on women’s perceived cluelessness about football, which the agency hopes will help Le Mall avoid the usual World Cup advertising clutter (Akerman 2010). Another sports season that is full of sexist ads is the SuperBowl.
SuperBowl ads are the most expensive on television, costing millions of dollars (Fredrix 2010). It contains a flurry of sexist ads with themes that varies from the popular ‘women as sex symbols’ to ‘men are stupid’.
There is usually a lot of hype and objections about ads that put a bad image on women, but not a lot is given to the ads that demoralize men. The types of advertisements that are sexist towards men are usually the ones that depict men as stupid, lazy, incompetent, or even as sex symbols.
According to Peele (2010), the impact of these ads is to give license to people - including their children - to regard and treat adult males as imbeciles.
Sweney (2009) talks about a TV campaign, for an oven cleaner called Oven Pride that was accused of implying that cleaning is women's work and that men are "stupid and lazy" when it comes to housework. He explained that most argued that the ad suggested men were "stupid and lazy" and was therefore sexist and offensive. While, the ad also suggested that cleaning was "generally a woman's job" and was therefore offensive and demeaning to women. Therefore, it seem the ad had negative depictions of both the sexes.
Below is a video that seems to encompass sexist advertising for both parties:
The most popular type of sexist adverting against women always depicts sex. Why? This is simply because sex sells. And according to Origin (2010), because usually people don't care about the product or service at first, they only care about seeing more pictures of the beautiful model in the advertisement.
Perera (2010) says that, we've largely come to accept these images as part of the landscape of modern life, images women may resent or feel intimidated by in silence but which we also fear will leave us accused of over-reaction if we voice our concerns in public.
Therefore, if we want to these types of advertisements to stop, then we simply need to make our opinion known.
The appeal of apps is obvious to anyone with an iPhone, or even one of the other smart phones (Gray 2009). Although, most who have simply held a smart phone or android have been infected with the unexplainable addiction to apps.
According to a study by Knowledge Networks, nearly 60 percent of mobile phone users carry their phones with them at all time, including at home, and a growing number say their device plays an integral part of their daily lives (Dadwal 2009). So basically an app is like a walking advertisement that is always with its target market, hence, the success rate.
In order for an app to be successful, it needs to be useful. Lardinois (2001) states that users will not be loyal to an app that is just a marketing vehicle, it need to be useful and interesting as well. Statistics say that majority of respondents (57%) noted that apps should be well designed and 74% said that they want apps to be easy to use (Lardinois 2010).
“Movie studios fully understand the influence that word-of-mouth reviews, whether positive or negative, have on box office receipts.” (Mendoza 2009).
For example, Disney Interactive Studios launched the “Alice in Wonderland – An Adventure Beyond the Mirror,” app in conjunction with the movie release.
Screenshots from Alice in Wonderland app. Source: Mobile Marketer
Stephen Saiz, director of marketing at Disney Interactive Studios, the app was “... to drive buzz and momentum for the movie by letting users watch the full trailer, download wallpapers and discover other hidden items, all within the app.”(Kats 2010).
Creating good and memorable apps will help create a relationship between the user and the brand and therefore create brand loyalty. Even if the company creates a silly and simply humorous app, it still manages to get attention and get the brand noticed (Gray 2009).
However, if these apps are too appealing, they very well could contribute to the iPhone addiction that is becoming more and more noticeable. A study by Stanford University indicates that iPhone addiction is real.
In the survey, when asked to rank their dependence on the iPhone on a scale of one to five (five being addicted and one being not at all addicted), 10 percent of the students acknowledged full addiction to the device, 34 percent ranked themselves as a four on the scale, and only 6 percent said they weren't addicted at all (Hope 2010).
Media historian Frank Luther Mott defines sensationalism as: "crime news, scandal and gossip, divorces and sex, and stress upon the reporting of disasters and sports” (Campbell 2003).
One of most sensationalized piece news this year was the WikiLeaks controversy. As posted on their website, at 5pm EST Friday 22nd October 2010 WikiLeaks released the largest classified military leak in history.
Jacinda Woodhead (2010) states that, “With the media's addiction to sensationalism... we have seemingly descended into the world of yellow journalism, so popular at the turn of the last century.”
WikiLeaks claims to be an anonymous online database designed to allow the ‘leaks’ of otherwise unavailable documents into the public arena (Nart 2010).
If this is true then I assume that the website wants to provide information to the public because they feel that they have a right to know. However, there are others besides government officials that are not happy with the leak.
A poll carried out by YouGov show that more than 40% thought that it was wrong to publish the Iraq documents, while only 34% thought that it was right.
Source: yougov.co.uk
Normally the website’s credibility would have been its main downfall, considering that it was anonymous, if it wasn’t for the fact that they collaborated with The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian when releasing the documents (The Listening Post : WikiLeaks and the media 2010).
There is another story of how Bradley Manning, had been detained after he "boasted" in an Internet chat of leaking to WikiLeaks the now famous Apache Helicopter attack video (Greenwald 2010). Greenwald says that “...isn't it easy to see how these screeching media reports - WikiLeaks source arrested; worldwide manhunt for WikiLeaks; major national security threat - would cause a prospective leaker to WikiLeaks to think twice...”
It is hard to determine whether or not to demand that all journalistic sources be revealed or to have websites like WikiLeak continue in their quest to “reveal the truth” and “protecting their sources. As Richard (2005) states, social responsibility theory poses a number of practical dilemmas for a journalist who attempts to act in a socially responsible manner.
I personally think that any single piece information, whether anonymous or credited, should not be swallowed as a whole but instead, taken into consideration. Then that information should be compared to other sources and other viewpoint before fully believing in it.
For more on WikiLeaks:
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References
Campbell, WJ 2003, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, Greenwood Publishing Group, USA.
