Preliminary Exercise

Using DTP and an image manipulation program, produce the front page of a new school/college magazine, featuring a photograph of a student in medium close-up plus some appropriately laid-out text and a masthead. Additionally candidates must produce a mock-up of the layout of the contents page to demonstrate their grasp of the DTP.

First blog entry - role of media in our lives.

1. Web 2.0 describes the way in which the World Wide Web (WWW) is developing. Some examples include: social networking sites, weblogs, wikis, RSS and podcasts. Web 2.0 encourages sharing between users and encourages peer-to-peer activity (P2P). The growth of this means that web is no longer a static source of data, and it’s mainly due to the sharing that take place over the web which help the WWW expand. 

2. ‘Mediation’ is our experience, knowledge and ideas about the world’s media. Our ideas of media don’t just come from individual experience, it mainly comes from the modern media that everyone contributes to and consumes as part of our their lives. ‘Proliferate’ is the word to describe how quickly the media get around the world in just a matter of seconds. This has given us the ability to become producers as well as consumers of media products. ‘Saturation’ is the term used to describe the way in which media today ‘saturates’ all aspects of our everyday life. Because of the increase in media saturation, the world is dominated by the media.                                                                                                                                                                                              

3. ‘The media’ is very difficult to define as it is continuously changing. However some main factors of media are; that it reaches a large number of people, the media ‘products’ are shared, it relies on good technology, are usually privately owned, fairly expensive to produce and are always very ‘modern’.                                                                                         

4.The phrase ‘media products are shared’ means that the media becomes part of a common culture. Everyone experiences the media every single day, phrases used of tv programmes become part of people’s daily vocabulary and media images have grew to become common ‘language’. The ‘sharing’ of media shows it power and universality of its image.                                                                                                                                                                                                          

5. In countries like Burma, China and Ethiopia, the media is very strictly regulated/controlled. They create rules of access and alter what is available for different groups of people. The internet could be seen as being dangerous and because of the large audience it attracts some countries ‘control’ the circulation of idea and criticisms more harshly to prevent the internet being a dangerous place for its users.                                                                                                     

6.Media convergence is the combining of mass media and communications. It is the things we take for granted in our lives nowadays, for example, phones, computers/laptops and tv’s etc.                                                                                    

7.In today’s society the media is extremely important, it has become a central part of our lives, for our entertainment and for information. The media tells us what is happening in the world around us, this could be large scale and include things like wars and natural disasters or could be smaller scale and include celeb gossip and different sporting events. The media has undoubtedly became a part of everyone’s lives and it is said that today, 99% of homes have at least one TV. However the media is seen to be very influential and therefore could be blamed for problems like violence and sex. Despite this the media does influence good things like family, religion, education and behaviour.