The Final - Ten Revelations

1.)

I never really thought about the Internet in this way until I read this quote from the book: "The television, radio, or Internet audience can press a button, turn a dial, hit a key, or click an icon to move to something else if it doesn't like what it sees or hears” (Hilliard, 2). Hilliard’s point here is that people who consume media on the Internet platform have the control. On the Internet, it is the consumer that decides what to read or watch and how it affects them. When you watch T.V., sure, you get to change the channel if you don’t like a program, but when you’ve gone through a hundred channels and you’re back where you started, you really only have the ability to watch what networks want you to watch. That being the case, Internet viewers can shut you off whenever they want; if what you say bores or offends them, they are just a hyperlink away from a more captivating page. This means you have to be extra conscious about what you say and how you say it on the Internet because you want visitors to your site to stay interested in your content, stay on the page for longer, and come back. The video above is the about video for StumbleUpon.com which I believe encompasses what I've just said. StumbleUpon allows you to like and dislike certain pages on the internet, giving you only what you want to see.

2.)

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"The writer for cyberspace is in the center of a creative universe, able to reach out to an infinity of space and time to integrate a limitless number and variety of...emotional and intellectual stimuli" (Hillard 46). This means that where a script writer writes from start to finish, an internet writer starts at one point, and as soon as the first idea is complete, more ideas "link" to it and more ideas "link" to previously formed ones and complete a web of possibilities for the interactive audience to choose from. I like this excerpt because it reminds me of what I think is the greatest thing about the Internet: the ability to provide external information to your viewers simply by including a hyperlink, and how simply doing that could keep someone on the internet occupied for hours.

3.)

On 61, Hilliard says to use the present tense. "It would be grammatically correct to say 'Last night another rebel village was destroyed by the Army and many women and children were killed', but it would be more effective, as well as grammatically correct, to say, 'The Army destroyed another rebel village last night and killed many women and children." This really hit home with me because it reminds me that it not only matters what I say on my blog, it matters how I say it. Although I’m not really sure why the present tense is more effective than the past tense, I do know that it is a technique that broadcasters use all the time, and if the news stations don’t know how to manipulate their words, no one does. It is something to keep in mind for me in the future: asking myself “is there another way I could say this that would be more effective?”

4.)

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 People today who write commercials have it a little harder than they used to. Before the Internet, commercial writers only had certain considerations to follow when writing a commercial script. Things like how many words could fit into the time slot, who their audience was, what message they were trying to get across, what programs aired before and after the commercial…Nowadays, commercial writers have to think about all of those things and in addition, try to make the commercial work for the Internet as well. When creating a commercial for multimedia, like that it will not only air on television but on websites, you have to consider all sorts of other things. Viewing a commercial on the internet is different because the video is smaller and so are words, the video is streaming which you don't account for on television, and the reading on a large television is quite different than on, say, a 400px by 350px YouTube player.

5.)

“Sometimes, especially in small independent stations with limited field resources, you can find yourself short of visuals for a given news show. Stock footage, still pictures from the morgue…” Material for stories comes from a variety of places. Phone calls, the internet, personal interviews, and especially the "morgue" of all past stories and evidence that news organizations keep like a library for perusal and are helpful for gathering information to build a news story. Encyclopedias, Atlases, and History books on certain regions are also common necessities that a writer uses to check their facts. Cameron wrote: “Using a Morgue seems unethical for the news and especially for broadcast news. Stock footage can be very easily used for nefarious purposes. However for a piece to be gripping you do need a visual hook to dig in to the viewer.” I find his point incredibly true. I don’t personally think that it is okay for the news to use past generic footage to play as the backdrop when newscasters are talking. It’s just so dishonest and not a lot of people know or can tell if it’s just old footage.

6.)

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 "Some practitioners consider the documentary the highest form of the news and information art. A good documentary can have a profound influence on social, political, or economic developments." - Hilliard 194 From personal experience, this makes sense to me because I think that news in a documentary form is much more interesting and therefore effective. At the same time, I think the section on documentaries in the book really sucked because this whole time, my whole life, I thought that documentaries are nothing but the truth. My whole life I have basically taken everything documentaries have said and swallowed it whole, not realizing that documentaries have creators with motives just like everything else, and it doesn’t mean that the truth isn’t manipulated a little bit.

7.)

 When you conduct an interview, it’s not actually to learn more about them. Hilliard notes on 273 that it is important to gather as much information about your interviewee beforehand so you can ask questions that go deep and encourage them to speak. It’s not, “How long have you been doing the Carol Burnett Show?”, it’s “You did the Carol Burnett Show for eleven years. Will you ever do another television series?”. I’ve had to conduct a few mock interviews for classes along the years and if I would have understood that, I bet my interviews would have been more successful. This is really a very important thing to know about interviews, if you are ever going to have to be an interviewer.

8.) “Cartoons may have dramatic plots or sequences, but they are by and large written on a very low level, filled with violence and sexism, and in many cases are merely program length commercials, some with the entire cartoon centered around the toy that the advertiser is trying to sell to the children” (Hilliard 381). How often do you hear people reminisce about the old cartoons I believe Hilliard is referring to? Yosemite Sam, Elmer Fudd, and Road Runner might have been violent, but they are better than the crappy animated cartoons on t.v. today. Yes, I am using one of my meditations to show you a classic clip.

9.)

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“The two major objectives most programs have are: that of the client of management and that of the target audience. Demographics are an important factor in determining what appeals to your target audience.” I said that for Chapter nine and I’m choosing to elaborate on it here. Although I understood this makes sense in television and radio, I did not get how a company was able to determine the demographics of their audience on the Internet. Then I logged onto Facebook and realized that we are teaching the machine which advertisements to show us. All on my Facebook page, the ads were Vermont related, skateboard related, or college related. “We are teaching the machine” (the Machine is Us) is my all time favorite media related video.

The video I blogged about. 

10.) “…You don’t know anything, other than what you have been told. So be honest about who told you.” – Philip Lerman 252. Just recently I started a blog and have been posting every day. I’ve made great progress establishing myself so far, but one of the biggest drawbacks is experiencing the first time someone used something of mine on the Internet without permission. A website similar to mine but with a huge fan base recently posted a blog entry with exact content I wrote. Word. For. Word. It was a contributor, not the owner, but obviously someone who doesn’t understand copyright or think I would catch her. So yeah, after being initially flattered that I was noticed by such a big website, I got pretty hung up about it and that is the final thing I’ve learned from blogging and writing for an electronic audience. “…You don’t know anything, other than what you have been told. So be honest about who told you.”