Anywhere, Everywhere.Change can Happen.

Change can really happen in anywhere, everywhere of this world, as we strongly hold on and believe in it. We have just witnessed a compelling change in United State of America when Barack Obama becomes the first African-American to win the US presidency.

  Barack Obama going Web 2.0 to seek for changes

(image source: http://www.barackobama.com)

Web 2.0 has changed the interface of media publishing when even political campaign candidates are going online to get supports from voters. Carr and Steller (2008) has written an online media article regarding the use of social networking websites, blogs to publish events and activities of US Presidential Campaign recently. Video sharing website YouTube is making the most out of it as it is one of the most commonly use media publishing in the Web 2.0. 

The ability of multimodal text to combine words, images, videos in a complex structure enable readers to be the navigators of the websites to decide on what kind of information they wanted to find (Walsh, 2006). Looking at Barack Obama’s political campaign website, the new media has formed a fresh look for publication as the website is a platform that can connect to other websites through hyperlinking and tagging. Graphics and colors in the screen are also well organized to ease the eye movement of internet users to scan for information (Lynch & Horton, 2002).

Other than the politicians, global citizens are also shifting towards new media to retrieve and submit information when it comes to general election. Blogging has become a good platform for everyone to practice the freedom of expression. In media term, Gilmor(2006) has categorized this as “citizen media”, whereby the content of media is distributed for the people from the people, compared to the old media which information is come from a single main source only.

A very good example will be a ground research done  by Malaysia mainstream newspaper and published it in their newspaper website. The Star Online Television (2008) found out that majority of them are also alerted in different ways such as internet, mobile phones about political campaign for poll results and more. 

Apparently, old media have to buck up and learn new tricks in order to stay in the publishing and design field as Web 2.0 is slowly moving towards main stream media to be the centre of information for global citizens.

Reference: 

Carr, D & Steller, B 2008, Campaigns in a Web 2.0 World, media article, viewed 7th November 2008, <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/03/business/media/03media.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss>

Gilmor, D 2006, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, O'Reilly, USA.

Lynch, P & Horton, S 2002, Web Style Guide, 2nd edn, viewed 7th November 2008, <http://www.webstyleguide.com/>.

Sms, Internet Access to Election News 2008, Online Television, the Star Online, Malaysia, 9th May. 

Walsh, M 2006, ‘”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.