Social Networking, Is it Safe?

According to Kang (in the article entitled ‘Is internet privacy dead? No, just more complicated: researchers), there are approximately 10 billion Tweets sent and 400 million Facebook users that are sharing their personal information through the internet. This shows that there are billions of people in the world who wants to be heard. However, are these people aware that they are consciously allowing their privacy to be invaded by others? Those who are aware may take precaution as to revealing information only to small circle of people, close friends and relatives while those who does not would just allow their information to be viewed publicly (Gross & Acquisti, 2005).

In addition, half the users on Facebook who accepts friend requests and adds people in this social networking site are anonymous. This means that they are taking a risk if they were to post something like, “Yay, will be leaving to Japan on vacation for a whole week with my whole family...”, in Facebook for example. When one posts this status, he or she is indirectly saying that they will be no one at home on guard. Hence, if one of his/her ‘Facebook friends’ who happens to be a robber sees this, will this person be tempted to rob this house where nobody is going to be home? On the other hand, Ahmed (2009), a CNN reporter reported that police used Facebook to stop crime where a security-camera video was posted showing images of a man trying to break into a safe.

An example of the security setting that is not customized for a normal user:

Based on this picture, it is seen that the user is allowing everyone (friends or strangers that was added into account) to view his status, hence risking the safety of his home.

According to Dwyer, Hiltz and Passerini (2007), people uses social networking sites for various purposes; to communicate and retain relationship with old friends, to update activities done by a group of friends via photo sharing, to meet new friends or to keep up with the trend. Hence, nobody would know what another’s motives are, whether or not they are a friend or a threat to you and your family. In my opinion, when joining a social networking site, the security and privacy of the site has to be strong as I would not want to risk losing anything in life just because of one particular website. Lastly, to cater to different types of users, social networking sites such as Facebook has to provide privacy settings that allows alteration on privacy level where they have and results shows that they did not lose any users but gain more as time passes.

Another example of that shows a customized security setting:

Based on this picture, the user is only telling his friends that he is leaving on vacation and not the whole public, which is safer.

References:

Ahmed, S 2009, ‘New Zealand police use Facebook to stop crime’, CNN.com/Technology, viewed 1st June 2010, http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/01/14/nz.facebook.arrest/index.html

Dwyer, C, Hiltz, SR & Passerini K 2007, Trust and privacy concern within social networking sites:

A comparison of Facebook and MySpace, Proceedings of the Thirteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, USA.

Gross, R & Acquisti, A 2005, Information Revelation and Privacy in Online Social Networks, Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, USA.

Good Design – Is there a Rule of Thumb that has to be followed?

According to Reep (2006), document principles are categorised into four parts; balance, proportion, sequence and consistency. On the other hand, Bernhardt (1986) argued that there are a handful of laws that needs to be followed; law of pragnanz (equilibrium), law of gestalt (good continuation) and the law of similarity. Who is right about a good document design? Authors have continued to wrestle on this topic but then again, they tend to come back to the basics where both these authors have portrayed in their articles.

Based on our group presentation 1, each student taking this course, Issues in Publication and Design were required to present of the shift of texts, multimodality, semiotic landscape and a few others. We were also required to prepare powerpoint slides to aid our presentation. As they were wrestling on their point of view versus the conventional approaches that were found from articles given to us, most of them have used visual aids (i.e pictures). As some were very interesting and helpful, some were not at all relevant. For example, if Student A’s topic was on multimodality where his view was print text should not be alone but should be presented with a visual aid as an enhancement but he uses a picture WITHOUT words and in black and white colour to explain his view, he is already contradicting his statement. Am I right to say this? Besides, this is an example of poor document design as no consistency.

On the other hand, if Student B, arguing on the same topic shows his image with a contrast of colour, as Reep (2006) states, ‘color weighs more than black and white’, with appropriate headlines and short sentence to elaborate the picture, he would have had consistency, balance and proportion.

Below are some examples of powerpoint slides from group presentation 1:

Example of slides that shows pictures but no words to explain what the image is all about.

An example where there are texts to accompany the image, given more consistency, less contradiction, more balance and proportion to one's presentation.

References:

Bernhardt, S, A, 1986, 'Seeing the text', College Composition and Communication, Vol. 37, No.1, pp.66-78

Reep, D, C, 2006, 'Chapter6: Document Design', Technical Writing, Pearson/Longman, 6th edn, pp. 133-172

Media Publishing in the World of Today

How would you choose to keep in touch with the world’s happenings today? Do you read newspapers? Watch live news on television? Or simply turn on your computer and click on any online news provider and read? It seems that the media today has evolved so much, so many varieties for us to choose from. Well, to be honest, given a choice on which to choose, I myself cannot confirm which media I will choose. I guess it all depends on our convenience, what do you say?

According to Naughton (2006), he stated that the existence of television was ought to ‘wipe out’ the existing media such as radio, movies and newspaper. Also, when blogs started, journalism never did perish did it? Instead, the evolvement of technology has provided us with more options. Naughton (2006) agreed to this as he stated in a scientific term that a new organism has arrived in the media ecosystem where the existing organisms will have to accommodate to the newcomer.

An example of newcomers in our media ecosystem would be social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter and video streaming sites such as Youtube. These websites have in time, gain high popularity. Pardon me but hey, how many of you don’t log in at least ONCE a day to your facebook? Youtube on the other hand is arguably the fastest site in which we can view a breaking news, rather than waiting for News on TV2 at 8pm tomorrow. The best part of these sites is they actually link to each other. For example, if you’re not a Youtube user, but you have a friend in United States who has posted a video of earthquake in Haiti on Youtube and shared it in Facebook and tagged you in it, automatically you would be updated and start spreading the news, wouldn’t you?

Here’s an example of different media publishing on an ordinary football game:

Print-text (eg: newspaper article):

In yesterday’s crucial Champions League match, Manchester United managed to beat AC Milan flat. Although Milan scored first, a great fighting spirit was shown where Paul Scholes equalised. Upon Scholes’ goal, we saw the whole game lifted up a notch where United took the game to themselves, playing in an extraordinary tempo and in the end holding on to the lead they established.

Image based:

Video based:

In short, these varieties of media publishing have allowed more essence to be added to reports or reviews of a football match. This also means that these are all added values and not ‘wipe out’ against each media.

References:

Naughton, J 2006, ‘Blogging and the emerging media ecosystem’.

Nonownonos 2010, Manchester United vs AC Milan 3-2 Goals and Highlights, Youtube.com, viewed 13 April 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQLT2bSH3EM