Forget about Pens and Pencils

Living in the virtual community of internet, we are certainly losing the common touch with pens and pencils. Diaries and notebooks are so yesterday as people have different experiences when they are reading from a print based text and a multimodal text (Schriver,1997). Schriver also further explain on the potential of internet as multimodal text to be able to combine words and images, hence creating a whole new approach towards the reading process of a reader. 

Technorati (2008) has done a study on bloggers and it shows that there are a total number of 188.9 million internet users while 77% of them are users are blog readers.To further acknowledge the trend of blogging in the modern society, it is also interesting to find out that there are move male bloggers in Europe countries compared to Asian countries. Asian bloggers are also more prompt to use their blog as a money maker tool, as stated in a survey by Technorati (2008).

As we look into the blogging trend of Malaysia, it has somehow become the main highlight of discussion as there is a significant growth of political blogs in the country. 

Ooi (2007) has written the journal of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) to illustrate the blogosphere in Malaysia whereby Malaysians are heading towards the way to embrace blogging as a social media.  Blogging has enabled Malaysian to have the freedom to express themselves in the internet as Malaysia's censorship mechanism has tightly restricted the freedom of speech in Malaysia. 

Malaysian's hero - Raja Petra Kamaruddin, when he is freed from jail 

(image source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/)

One of the well known political activists, Raja Petra Kamaruddin is the hero of Malaysia as he opens a blog to give critical comment on Malaysia’s government policy, resulting himself to be caught under the injustice law of Internal Security Act (ISA). Ooi (2007) also stressed that political blog is just a small part of blogging landscape as there are other blogs that share about their opinions from food to religion and more to go. 

Therefore as a media observer, it is crucial to notice and never underestimate the power of blogging to be a global phenomenon as it is slowly replacing the old media and going main stream in the 21st century.

Reference:

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.

Technorati.com 2008, State of blogosphere 2008, viewed 31st October 2008, <http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/>

Ooi, YM 2007, ‘Blogging Thrives in Malaysia’, International Association of Business Communicators, pp37-39, special report, viewed 31st October 2008, <http://www.iabc.com/>