Uni – Comms and Media @UOW – Page 5

Audience 2.0 in the Wikipedia-UGC Era

From Consumer/User to Producer to both

In one year, from January 1^st 2016 to January 1^st 2017, the English site of Wikipedia has gotten 93,322,823,874 hits from a body of more than 30,604,028 users worldwide, living up to its reputation as the fifth most visited website globally.

What is so significant about Wikipedia is that, in terms of media audience research, it makes an excellent example of what I would like to call the (Media) Audience 2.0, or the audience as “produser[s]” – a term coined by Brun in 2005 (cited in Bird 2011, p. 502), a combination of two words: producer and user. This new “generation” of users was given rise to by the emergence of digital media, particularly Web 2.0 (Bird 2011, p. 502), which introduced, for the first time, user-generated content (UGC). Continue reading “Audience 2.0 in the Wikipedia-UGC Era”

BCM212 Research Proposal: How Language Barriers Influence the Academic and Social Life of Vietnamese International Students at UOW

“Do you know how smart I am in Vietnamese?”

“Yes” – was all I said in my first tutorial at UOW.

Eight months ago, I arrived in Australia, so confident that I would have no trouble with my studies, having had twelve years studying English as a second language. Yet in that tutorial, I was horrified to find myself suddenly unable to utter anything other than a single “yes” for the roll call, seeing how fast and fluent domestic students were. Continue reading “BCM212 Research Proposal: How Language Barriers Influence the Academic and Social Life of Vietnamese International Students at UOW”

How Fireworks Sparked My Curiosity

Dedicated to Grandpa

“We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” – Walt Disney

For years since when I was very little, my family has got a Lunar New Year’s tradition. Close to midnight of New Year’s Eve, Grandpa, Dad, and I (and later on, my little sister) would walk to Hoan Kiem lake (Hanoi), to watch the fireworks show. I would be standing completely still with my neck craning, marveled by the mesmerizing sparkly flowers blooming on the velvety black night sky.

Most parents, and of course, grandparents, would make ooh and ah sounds to kids or playfully clapping the kids’ hands together. But one year, Grandpa, being a former High School teacher in Math who’s extremely keen on natural sciences, decided instead to point at the sky-flowers and explain to me – who was, at that time, a tiny little five-year-old – how each different metals put into firework cannon balls would give off a specific colour when shot up and exploding. Continue reading “How Fireworks Sparked My Curiosity”

The Riddled Coverage

Is the Globalisation of News Truly Global?

Every twenty-four hours, 230 stories and videos are produced by the New York Times, 240 are published by the Wall Street Journal, and a stunning number of 500 are circulated by the Washington Post (Meyer 2016).

Incredible, isn’t it?

Now spend five minutes watching this viral TED Talk, How the news distorts our worldview, then take a closer look at this extracted frame from it.

Continue reading “The Riddled Coverage”

Washed Fresh By The Wave

The Global Image of Korea is Repainted Anew by the Hallyu Wave

In 2015, $2.82 out of $7.03 billion of total Korean exports were cultural and entertainment contents including television dramas and music, as calculated in a study done by The Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) and the Korea Foundation for International Culture Exchange (KOFICE) (Hicap 2016). Continue reading “Washed Fresh By The Wave”

Mastering The (Uni)versal Language

Australian English – a Linguistic Challenge for International Students in Australia

The experience of studying abroad is – to international students – supposedly and saliently an active process of self-formation in which the student oscillates between two adaptive strategies known as multiplicity (consciously switching between different selves corresponding to different settings) and hybridity (synthesizing multiple cultural identities into one newly formed self) (Marginson 2012, p.). However, in reality, the experience is hardly fluid, as a great many international students are immediately faced with the dreadful language barriers on their arrival in Australia. Continue reading “Mastering The (Uni)versal Language”