Wandering the streets of Maruyama Park it is hard not to be taken away by the plethora of cherry blossom lining the streets and dusting the air. The colours are bright, the crowd is bustling, so it is no wonder the geisha take the opportunity to enjoy the festivities during their break.

As they walk the streets, heads turn, cameras click, and the girls usually scurry as quickly as they can from destination to destination. However, they are only human, and sometimes to be admired can be a fun thing, so why not smile about it?

In a world that has gone digital, it is hard to separate the real from the virtual. Ever since the domestication of television, there has been an evident change in the structure of not only the household, but, how we utilise our leisure and relaxation time. No longer do we go outside, and make a reality of our own, we experience real life through the screen, which transcends the confines of the television, and has extended onto our computer screens, where episodes, highlights, and even extra footage of our favourite reality television shows are put to air. So, how does “reality” apply to these series? Is what we watch real, or even a reflection of reality? Or, are we just vicariously living through the characters in these shows and creating our own reality?
It is hard to say that the shows we watch are a reality. The situations that a placed upon the people we are watching in reality TV games such as biggest loser, or Australian idol, are not really realistic. How often do you have the opportunity to take 3 months off work to compete in a weight loss game show? The only connections these shows have with reality are that they use real people. Even then, these people are selected from thousands, the shows are partly scripted, such as what you witness in such reality TV series’ as The Hills, and The Osbournes; and what we think are ‘real emotions’ that we are witnessing, is footage that has been shot, and re-shot from all different angles, and the final cut of what we see is an edited version of the real events.
Whilst it may appear that reality lacks a connection with the real, there is the possibility that the reality TV shows we watch create a reality for the viewer. Recently, during the season of Master Chef, you will have noticed how the television show was not restricted to the air time it received on channel Ten. Instead the characters, situations and conversations relating to, or segued from the series reflect on how these shows become embedded in our day-to-day lives. It was also documented that there was a significant rise in sale of kitchen utensils, and request for special order in kitchen equipment as a result of the television reality series.
Whilst the situations/characters/possibility of outcomes in the shows are not necessarily real, there is the reality of life that surrounds the shows. The characters we watch become topic of hot conversation and gossip, as though the people we see were actually one of our close friends. You find people replicating what they see in the series in real life, having been inspired by what they’re watching. So whilst some would say that reality television has little to do with reality, it is fair to say that the shows we watch could have very little to no connection with reality, however, how these shows affect their audiences, is very real.

We continued like this for a while, and eventually decided to load up the computer to see potentially what employers could find out about us… my name was put in first, being an avid user of the internet…and the first google result that popped up was my WordPress Blog … the one in fact about my current place of employment! Yikes! Ok ok so they may have had a point….

Before we continue, and I know you are currently reading a blog, but i felt it was important you understand just how blogs work so that you can fully grasp the concept of the situation.

I went home that night, and immediately destroyed the post about work….I knew that I had posted it in the public sphere, I just hadn’t realised when you typed my name into google, that one would be returned first….My family had said to me I better be careful about what I post because it could get me fired. Which then made me think about all those headliners of people being fired for blogging, twittering or facebook status updating about their jobs, and how much freedom of speech we have as bloggers….

Whilst a blogger may not professionally be considered a journalist, they are still publishing texts that become widely distributed across the complex networks of the internet, and once something is published, it will forever have an imprint in cyberspace, even if you delete your content, someone may have had the chance to copy and paste or print-screen your post. Basically, you have to assume you are always being watched. I googled “freedom of speech and blogs” just to see if I could find any information about how serious the implications of a bad blog could be. I found a post about blogging freedom of speech which went into detail about cases in China of slandering and the potential consequences, and even how in the US, you could say something negative about the government, and whilst inherently you do not mean what you are being prosecuted for, the people investigating your blog will make implicit connections that just do not exist….what we say here in Australia can also get us in trouble overseas, and currently as Australian citizens there is no Constitution or legislation that protect our freedom of speech, and all the Government has done is passed legislation to restrict the freedom of speech.

We utilise our blogs to express ourselves, that was the purpose of their construction, existence and future. We use them to interact with other bloggers and just generally other content on the internet, talking about what we do and don’t like and what we do and don’t agree with. Freedom of speech should be tolerated in relation to blogs….when reading blogs it should be in the mindset that you understand you are perving on someone elses private thoughts, and should take this into account when evaluating their content. They aren’t doing it for propaganda reasons, but to talk about the way they feel. It is understood that blogs have the potential to harm and offend more than just a few members of society, but being able to talk about your opinions and beliefs are one of the attractions of blogs. Not only to the blogger, but more so to their audience, especially in terms of a political genre of blogs, which have been constructed to openly talk about a person’s viewpoint on the state of the government and related topics. As blogging is a relatively new form of publication there hasn’t been much opportunity for governments or the international legal environment to pass legislation or bills to regulate the content….but how can you when there are so many gateways to get around them? How do we regulate or protect bloggers rights for that matter, when the internet is not a contained or definable publication medium. It is forever expanding, diversifying, and there is no limit to it’s capabilities…the internet grows as we grow and as we cannot measure cyber space there is no telling when it will reach its boundaries….

It is hard to take a side on how free our freedom speech should be in a blog. On the one hand it is very necessary to protect society from blogs that may talk about or include reference to harming children etc, and on the other hand once we start censoring blogs some people can take it to the extreme, and to give them the ability to sue over comments and remarks made in someone’s blogs that they may find offensive we can never control, because who is to measure the limit on how offended someone can be? That and we would have to start censoring the internet, which hinders our right to the freedom of information.

Do you think that the freedom of speech should apply to blogs? Or do you believe there should be rammifications for offensive content in our blogs? How far is too far in a blog? And how can we know where to stop?

For more information you can refer to the Bloggers’ Rights page.

Isn’t it weird how sometimes you never know something about yourself until someone else points it out for you?

This last Saturday I was at work. It was a fairly quiet day after a busy week of new stock deliveries. Usually deliveries aren’t that exciting, however this month, was a month of new release cook books, and the week of the new October Delicious magazine. I suppose for some, this event would not ever be worth drawing attention to, however for me, I felt like a fat kid with cake…..quite literally. My face lit up at the prospect of a quiet Saturday with the ability to flick through the new cook books and marvel at the glory of all the wonderful food photographs and recipes.

I know this is beginning to sound kind of weird, but I wasn’t alone. My colleague and I have a ritual of rating the cookbooks based on presentation,

photography, and of course recipes, and thus this is what we did on Saturday. We managed to make it through all the new books and the magazine. It was a hectic day, and we finally decided that Jamie’s America was a clear winner in terms of the best cook book of the day, however, Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Companion was definitely a book that deserved a lifetime award (the Kitchen Garden Cooking with Kids is also fabulous for those with green thumbs and green kids). When we were completed, we returned all the books to their respected areas on the ‘Cooking’ wall, and gleefully returned to the counter feeling very euphoric. I do believe my face could have been glowing. My colleague turned to me and said that it wasn’t until she met me that she appreciated food quite so much, and that I was a bit of a food addict.

This is not new to me. It is something I have always known in the back of my mind… I always knew I was a foodie…I just never though of myself as an addict. It was later that week that my dad pointed out that he thinks 90% of the time I converse with someone, the topic is in relation to food. I quickly rewound the days events and skimmed through what I could remember, stop-starting at points of conversation…and alas….it was true. It then sparked another thought that not only when I am talking to people do I think about food. I often use my free day dreaming time to contemplate wonderous recipes and potential concoctions of goodies I can master for dinner. At home when I’m bored in between refreshing Facebook I read food blogs, such as Not Quite Nigella, which are beginning to beat my love of cook books, as they are updated more regularly, and can provide faster satisfaction.

I have never thought that my adoration of anything edible could be a bad thing. I think of myself as a Samantha from Sex and the City in the food world, just more Steffi in Food and the Recipe. You could say I was very confident in my restaurant food-ality. I am what one might term a try-foodual….i’ll try anything once! And I’m a bit of a restaurant whore. I work my way around the city and take my friends along. The more the merrier, and these things can get dirty. Some of my…alright who am I kidding, ALL of my…..fondest childhood memories revolve around a family meal. Having grown up in a family of European descent, I am sure you are aware of their obsession with meals and gatherings around meals. Even today, when we meet up for friends it’s usually for coffee or a dinner party….and thus to me, an intense relationship with food could only make sense. Perhaps one day I might make a career out of it. I think the best job in the entire world would to be a global food critic! To be paid to travel, and eat exotic and delicious foods could only a positive right?

Today, a great source of knowledge is derived from the sources of mass media. For example, televisions, radios, newspapers, magazines, tabloids etc. However, as much as we assume we exist in a society where there is meant to be; freedom from bias, relatively little censorship on what we are presented with, and a story that tells us the truth, it is hard to escape the realities of agendas of media corporations. Whether this is a political agenda or another form, it is undeniable that the media is a mass contributor of knowledge, and thus is a very powerful weapon. But what makes it so powerful? And why do we have an automatic acceptance of what is projected onto us?

Mary Macken-Horarik explains that through the use of composite texts – those that include interaction between communicative resources e.g. visual, verbal, layout, and typographic – the media are able to fabricate ‘believable’ stories and sell them as ‘news items.’ One of the greatest associations that permit the ‘validity’ of these texts is the “complementary truths of word and image,” (Macken-Horarik, 2003, pg.5). Basically, we can be sold a lie, and so long as it is featured with a picture, ‘it must be true.’

It is not an unknown fact that newspapers often present articles that do not present the whole truth of the story. We often find that what was originally deemed a factual news item was actually a montage of images and information that were taken out of context and pasted together in order to create a completely new item that would sell. More often than not, these are hard news stories that are created to destabilise society, and flood the front pages of your newspapers.

Moral panics are one result of the media; taking a potential threat to society, blowing it out of proportion, using categories and a plethora of negative verbiage to differentiate ‘us’ and ‘them’ (in order to demonstrate how society is at threat), and repeating the story on a regular basis to reinstate this fear. The ‘children overboard,’ issue of the 2001 Australian elections is an example of how the media manipulated a case of innocence, and turned it in a story of how “illegal immigrants” were attempting to ‘penetrate our Australian borders.’ Two out of over 100 images taken of the ‘children overboard,’ were distributed for association with newspaper items, and not surprisingly, these images were not a very objective nor unbiased depiction of the event. They were not items that explicitly depicted the whole story of events, however, their association with the ‘children overboard’ story, saw an implicit interpretation of the refugees, further shaping, and reinforcing the information textually presented. And from it, knowledge of the ‘children overboard,’ was created.

Bibliography

Macken-Horarik, M. “The children overboard affair” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 26.2 (2003), 1-16.

Saussure’s theories of semitiocs suggested that semiotic systems determined how the world is perceived. However, language, as a construction of society, is adaptable and forever changing, so how can it be that language creates meaning, when it is us who give meaning to language, based on contexts, and body language, and behaviour and ideologies etc etc.

One of the greater issues with language identified in the chapter are those related to issues of gender identities. The system of binaries e.g. man/woman, good/bad etc etc make it hard for gender identification. For example, the meanings attached to the notions of ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ cannot necessarily be applied when identifying someone’s gender. In other words, what it constitutes to be a ‘man’ is arguable, especially in the world of today, where there is greater interplay in gender roles. For example, a ‘woman’ who takes out the garbage, could be performing a stereotypically classified ‘male’ task, and thus would at this point in time be taking on gender attributes generally related to a ‘man.’ This does not however make her a ‘man,’ and yet, she is not behaving like a ‘woman.’ The concept of man/woman is also a very Western ideal. Many cultures in the East and Africa have from anywhere between two and five genders, and sometimes, it is required in these societies to have a third gender to permit for the proper functioning of society.

This got me thinking about how we interpret sexuality as well, for homosexuality and heterosexuality do not inherently mean relations between different sexes. We gave these symbols these meanings. Who’s to say that homosexuality refers to relations between two men or two women. Why does it have to relate to the sex of those involved? Why couldn’t heterosexuality refer to the relations between a Christian and a Muslim? Or an American and an Australian? Or people of different ages??

The production of meaning for signs and symbols is one that is required for humans to justify their existence, for without allowing people to make sense of their lives through the meanings of signs and symbols, there is no meaning to being.

Bibliography

Schirato, T. and Yell, S. “: Signs and Meaning.” Communication and Cultural Literacy: An Introduction. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2000, 18-33.

We are gathered here today, to farewell an old friend. One, who was there to bring us stories from home and the world. One who served to entertain us on a saturday night with nothing to do. One, who provided us with years of free babysitting services. And one who will forever have a place, not only in our memories, but its remnants, will forever hold a place as a member of the family in our loungerooms.

Leonardo da Vinci once said:

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death.

As we progress into an age of ’interactivity, intercreativity and produsage,’ it was inevitable that broadcast television would soon be replaced by a newer and more versatile model.

An industry once monopolised by the television, has today become an oligarchy of media devices that are designed to meet the requirements of entertaining the masses in a way more convenient to them. One, we have all come to recognise, takes form of the Internet.

Unfortunately, television was born into a, bias, and a non-network-neutral environment, which ‘locked out’ the creativity of the television viewers. And thus, as the masses have done in the past and will continue to do in the future, they overthrew the restrictive powers to create an environment better suited to their desired requirements.

The internet has allowed for us, to be able to become our own broadcasters and content providers. We have been invited to choose what to watch, when we want, ad-free, and to suggest our viewing preferences, by such means as ‘playlists,’ to other viewers with similar interests. And if we do not like what we are presented with, Youtube has provided us with a platform to produce our own material, and show people, ‘how it’s really done’.

We are no longer restricted to viewing embargoes. And broadcasts of our favourite programs - that were available what now seems to be; few and far between – we have instantaneous access to from peer distributors located all around the world. A system far more efficient in reaching audiences, than the capabilities of the television. Even telecaster attempts to ‘live stream straight from the U.S.,’ to keep up with the internet technology, whilst appreciated, were no match for the Internet phenomenon.

Indeed, the television still reigned in visual quality of broadcast, however, the future of internet HD and HQ, is nigh. And no longer is the audience captivated by quality visuals, we will watch what speaks to us, not what is available in what was once a ‘limited pool of choices.’

It is thus, that this day will forever be remembered as the death of broadcast television as we know it. Your shell will remain a useful implement for the viewing of DVDs and recorded programs.

While we lay television to rest here today, we hope for a ressurection, as you will forever remain apart of our culture. Perhaps we will see a new age of television. One which will transform the television into a subset of ‘televisual’ and ‘audiovisual’ practices. Perhaps, we will be presented with a media streaming, ‘video on demand,’ and ‘downloadable video,’ service.

Until that day, we hope you rest in peace.

Bibliography

 Bruns, Dr A. Reconfiguring Television for a Networked, Produsage Context. Media & Communication, Creative Industry Facult, QLD University of Technology, Brisbane. Taken from: http://snurb.info/

(Don’t really know how to reference this one!! Sorry)

Twittered by Kylieandjackieo, Sun 19 Apr 21:53 via web

It’s brand recognition and loyalty like this that “Forbes ranked American Idol as the most profitable of all reality series,” (Jenkins, 2006, pg 60). But why is it that reality tv series are so popular and classified as ‘must see’ television? Henry Jenkin’s epicly long chapter on how we are Buying into American Idol, explains it as such that in part this is due to the fact that reality television series provide viewing pleasure for all types of tv watchers.

Whether you are a ‘zapper,’ a ‘loyal’ or a ‘casual,’ reality tv programs are structured to provide satisfaction for all  possible viewers. I’d classify myself as a ‘casual’ tv person. I don’t watch much tv, when I do,of course there are programs I favour, however, if the episode is boring, I’m not afraid to flick, and I often watch tv in conjuction with doing something else, like Facebooking, washing or cooking dinner. And still, I have a mad fascination with reality TV. The best part is, because I don’t watch a lot of TV, doesn’t matter which episode I tune in on, recaps and highlights from previous episodes are constantly shown, and thus I can catch up and stay up-to-date any time throughout the series. My top faves are: Australia’s/America’s Next Top Model, Biggest Loser and Big Brother (I know, I know. But I can’t help it. Something about watching bogans on live TV is oddly entertaining).

As reality TV programs are so popular across the board with viewers, it has become a prime sport for marketers, advertisers and even other companies to exploit reality tv programs to sell more of their products to consumers. ‘Transmedia franchising’ is a concept that refers to multilevel media producting. For example, in Australia with the Biggest Loser. The Biggest Loser is sponsored by Subway, who use the program to advertise their ”healthy alternative” fast-food chain. A book has been released about the stories of those on the shows as well as tips and recipes for weight-loss at home. The Biggest Loser also has an online club for people to join who want support through talking to the show’s trainers, watching motivational videos, as well as personalised diets and workouts. And, if you have noticed now in supermarkets, The Biggest Loser, has also released a line of ’dietary’ food. Just from the Biggest Loser you now have the show, the tie-in with ‘healthy’ fast food, a book, an online club, and even a food product line in supermarkets.

Jenkins’ explained that the more involved the viewing with a series, the more subconsciously we are aware of the brand, the products associated with the show, and the adverts that play in the ad-breaks. It is not a matter of how many people are watching a certain program, but how involved with the program they are, that should matter to companies, marketers and advertisers. It appears as though they have already caught on, as these series that have acquired millions of loyal viewers, has seen to an onslaught of transmedia franchising, and advertising associated with these shows that we are being ‘sold’ to reality tv.

Bibliography

Jenkins, Henry. “Buying into American Idol: How We are being Sold on Reality Television.” In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York, NYU Press, 2006, 59-92.