Personal Reflection on Media Culture - Week 8

The class today is the first after the mid-term break ended. Sadly enough, most of the students present had to wait for almost half an hour before the lecturer came in, announcing that today's class was canceled. Luckily enough, the attendances will be taken along during the other class. I was surprised that we (FCM students) received another assignment suddenly. Well, that's all I got for this week then.

Differences in 3 terms?

After a week-long holiday, I'm back at MMU (Multimedia University) again. For starters, the topic given for this week seem to be related to genres in multimedia.

What are the differences between the terms obscenity, pornography and indecency?

1. Well then, I will just put in some brief meanings about these terms first then.

• Obscenity - means the state or quality of being obscene (offensiveness to the standards of sexual morality). It is also used to describe expressions that are sexually offensive.
• Pornography - an explicit sexual depiction with the purpose to sexually arouse the viewer of the material ( books, magazines, videos, etc )
• Indecency - it means the state or quality of being unseemly, immodest and/or vulgar. This term can also refer to the indecent acts.
  

2.Now, with the terms explained above, time to have a look at what's different between them.

First off, pornography is usually associated to nudity, while obscenity and indecency are not always like that.
As for indecency, it can be considered (in my own opinion) as this term does not need to be related to sexual indecency all the time. It can be other things such as the act of showing rude gestures and speaking foul languages to people, or even wearing attires that are offensive in the eyes of the public community.
Finally, the term obscenity is often portrayed as improper depiction that sparks disgust to communities. Obscenity can differ according to different societies and even individuals. Yet somehow this term is somewhat similar to indecency, only on things. (I do not know why though)

This is all I can do for the topic of this week. In case if I found out new informations regarding these terms, then I would try to update this post.

Personal Reflection on Media Culture - Week 7

Week 7 ~ There's something new, or to be precise, improvement, in the Media Culture lecture class this week. When I mentioned improvement, I meant the improvement in the interaction between the lecturers in the class. Using the method of choosing ( in a simple but interesting way) students to discuss topic given, basically the entire class was paying attention. From what I saw, they were all entertained, yet receiving knowledge and opinion from fellow classmates at the same time. I'm looking forward to more of this kind of interaction in future classes.

Media Literacy - its importance in FCM

For this week, there's a new term in the Media Culture topic.

Media Literacy

What exactly is this thing?
Media literacy basically involve three processes;

• accessing,
• analyzing,
• evaluating,
• and creating messages.

These processes are crucial and encourages people to question about the things that they see, read and watch. Incidentally, through media literacy, messages presented by various media can be analyzed in order to identify other things such as censorship and bias. It can also point out the information that are manipulated or wrongly presented.

But why is media literacy important to us, the Faculty of Creative Multimedia (FCM) students?
The answer is that, through media literacy, we can increase our understanding in several matters regarding mass media. For example;

• Understand how to identify misconceptions in information given.
• Prevent the influence of manipulated information.

That is all I could say for this week's topic. Overall, the term media literacy is important to those that seek to understand mass media.

Personal Reflection on Media Culture - Week 6

Since there was no lecture class this week, I had nothing to say about it. But anyway, I'll be looking forward to next week's lecture class.That is all I got for this week's post.

Media Stereotype

What is 'media stereotype'?

This is the question for this week. We all see stereotypes everywhere, in any form available. But what exactly is it?
First of all, stereotype is basically an overall impression or general idea of something.

Therefore, here's an explanation about this week's topic.
Media stereotype is a general impression given to the audiences regarding certain things portrayed by the media. This can't be avoided since it is important to make the audience easily and quickly understand something presented to them. Yet still, media stereotype can be misleading and can cause misconception.

If you need to find out more about what media stereotype is all about, please feel free to visit this link: http://web.media.mit.edu/~ayah/MediaTheories/

Personal Reflection on Media Culture - Week 5

Week 5 ~ Same as usual. The class holds many new knowledges to the students, yet the attendance sheet was passed around only when the class is over. This is quite an inconvenience to students who had to rush to other classes right after the Media Culture class. That's all could say for this week.

True or False - are everything on Internet are authentic?

Here's a question;

Do you often take what is on the Internet as truth without thinking much about it?

There are those who does not care much about informations on the Net as long as they sound real enough. But there are also those that does care and double-check on the informations that they got.
Here's what I think about this matter;

• The Internet provides open access for everyone, from news to informations. Yet still, due to the limitless access, the informations can also be tampered by anyone. This will cause the informations released on the Net to be false without anybody realizing it. Therefore, I don't take things on the Internet as truth.
• Not everything on the Net are fake, yet not all are true as well. In my opinion regarding this topic, I think it would be proper to ensure that the information is real before accepting it. One of the ways is to refer to other sources and compare the same thing in order to make sure it is not merely fake informations given by other Internet users.