Section 2: New media qualities; multimodality; new forms of journalism

In an article entitled ‘How Social Media, Internet Changed Experience of Japan Disaster ‘ the author talks about how the many elements of the internet has changed the way information and news are delievered. In regards of the devastating natural disaster that had recently happened the writer mentions that the accesibility of news regarding the tsunami and earth quake are easy to obtain with the technology he has . He also mentions that there are an array of videos to look at in order to observe and it was also possible to get updated news regarding the happening with the help of online social networks. With the helps of the interactivity within Twitter and Facebook , he gets more personal detail on the Japan disaster however he also mentions that the brief information given from Twitter we not that substantial as it lacked resourceful details. But at the same time he was still able to refer to some datas and reports regarding the disaster. Google Earth had enabled him to view the before and after situation of an area that had undergone a nuclear meltdown. Other than that, he is also able to get a hold of how the situation is in Japan in a more personal level and the details that is being exposed through online media gives a much bigger scope on what is happening. With the technology that he is able to uphold, it gives him a much better and stronger feeling of connection with Japan eventhough he is far away.

In my opinion, technology has indeed helped us review news in a lot of different angle with ease. The information obtained is within our fingertips and it is also useful too seek accuracy and different views with the different portals of information available like facebook and twitter. The possibility to gain a variety of news and information in many different forms is due to new media’s multimodality. Multimodality revolves around audios, videos and also graphics within texts ( Walsh, 2006) .Hence, technology has in fact influenced the nature of journalism in aspects such as augumented communication among other readers, personalized journalism and also a range of different perspective (Chung, 2007). Moreover, the new media has also given news reporters the ability to expand their information georaphically ( Chung, 2007) . The internet has made it possible to view news in a more acessible , faster and more comprehensive way for the public ( Reese et al., 2007).

Reference:

1. Chung, DS 2007, ‘Profits and Perils : Online News Producers' Perceptions of Interactivity and Uses of Interactive Features’ Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 13, no. 43, pp. 44-61
2. Reese, SD, Rutigliano,L, Hyun , K & Jeong, J 2007, ‘Mapping the blogosphere : Professional and citizen-based media in the global news arena’ Journalism, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 235-261.
3. 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, p.24-37