Power of Social Media

In the article ‘How Social Media, Internet Changed Experience of Japan Disaster’, by Dorian Benkoil (2011), he talks about how effective technology and multimedia is today, in comparison to the a few years back. Benkoil took the example of the earthquake and tsunami which hit Japan in the year 1995. He stated that it was hard to get information during that era, unlike now, which is just a click of a mouse away. Not to mention that, now we can get information about other countries, too, even though we are very far apart. We can also get to watch an event that is occuring live at that moment. Benkoll felt that media has change the way on how people share the event or disaster that happened.

As the world advanced in years, so does the technology as people invent more and more advance technology. Who would have thought that people can call another person who is thousand miles away without having to use fire and smoke as signal?

Figure 1.1: Example of Facebook page

Source: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/009189.html

Look at how advance we are now! We can surf the web without having to plug in the modern cable, we can still get to know the condition and living style of a person without having to see them face-to-face. We can communicate with other, group conference without having to meet up and a place. We can also read a book or search for information without having to go to library. However, people need to consider the multimodality of text when they published text on the Internet for readers to read. Despite the technology, there are certain type of multimodality text that is different between print-based text and also multimodal text. For example, print-based text rely on the way of ‘telling’ of the text based on the vocabulary, grammar, layout of text and chapter and so on; while multimodal text rely on ‘showing’ using graphics, layout, colour, angle of screen and so on.

Reference:

1. 1. Benkoil, D., 2011, How Social Media, Internet Changed Experience of Japan Disaster, Public Broadcasting Service, Available: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2011/03/how-social-media-internet-changed-experience-of-japan-disaster-074.html. Last accessed 11th June 2011.


2. 2. 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, pg. 24-37