Japan Disaster - A Different Experienced

Internet has enabled a constant growth and improvement to social media. It has been provided us the opportunity to change the way people utilise their freedom of speech and helped sped the spread of information globally. With the aid of the article published on Mediashift, it would be clearer to understand the changes it has made.

 

The article, ‘How Social Media, Internet changed experience of Japan disaster,’ illustrates how, in the eyes of Dorian Benkoil, the internet/social media has enhanced the experience of the Japan disaster as compared to if the disaster had taken place many years back. Benkoil points out that back in 1995 there was still the difficulty of understanding what was being broadcasted in the news report. However, now with the internet and social media vehicles, the Japan disaster is exposed everywhere from the television right up to the iPad. There is also an increased of video footage published on vehicles like Youtube and Facebook, which can provide the viewers a live experience of what is or has taken place as compared to what a media print could provide. All these have been able to emotionally affect our experience towards the disaster than it could have many years back.

 

From the article, it is clear to see that the internet has somewhat improved the multimodality of texts. Multimodal refers to the different ‘modes’ by which information can be communicated (Walsh 2006), in this case the article emphasised on the multimodal texts in non-print form i.e. videos. Heath (2000) further emphasises that visual texts have impact on ‘neural networks’ and leads to different conceptualisations and different way of thinking. On this note, internet has thus allowed an increase of video footages to be viewed by audiences and it aids us in our understanding and perception towards, in this case, the Japan disaster. As seen in the article, video exposure of the disaster alongside personal sharing of experience of the event has helped viewers around the world to be drawn emotionally to obtain a full understanding of all the little, but real, details of the situation and then contribute, if they can, to help them.

 

In conclusion, the internet and social media vehicles have allowed a further advancement and development to multimodal texting. These improvements to multimodality has provided viewers around the world to understand, not only emotionally, but with full details of how tragic was the Japan disaster on its people.

References

Heath, SB 2000, ‘Seeing our Way into Learning’, Cambridge Joumal of Education,

Vol.30, no.1,121-131.

Walsh, M 2006, ‘The 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