New Forms of Media Pulishing

Conveying messages to the public now comes in many new forms such as through

• blogs
  
• You Tube
• alternatives online newspapers

We will take an example on the dissemination of information through blogs. In Malaysia, freedom of expression by the media or society is strictly controlled especially if it touches on political issues which may tarnish the current government's reputation. Voices of the opposition parties are most of the time ignored or prohibited to be publish on printed news as most publication companies are owned by the government or sometimes at risk of being shut down if there are contents afflicting the government.

Opinions and consents of the public are much needed to aid in the development of a country. So, blogs are formed to replace the print publication as a medium of interaction. Different types of blogs attracts different groups of readers. Political savvy society will follow up blogs from Jeff Ooi and Malaysia Today to look at two sides of political point-of-views. Other blog such as MyBlog-TV is a platform to provide eyewitnesses accounts on general affairs and issues in Malaysia with an objective to encourage Malaysian to evaluate information themselves. The interaction between readers and texts occurs depending on;

the social and cultural context of reader, the socio-cultural framework of text convention, the purpose and genre of texts, the readers' interest and the immediate situation of when the text is being read (Walsh 2006, p. 25).

Examples of blogs:

The Central Connecting Community
(Source: Malaysia Today 2009)

Blogger Centric Community
(Source: Jeff Ooi 2009)

Beside this, another medium of interaction between people is the You Tube website. It functions as a uploading base for anyone to post up video materials. The comment space provided are for viewers to voice their opinions and widen their networks on topics of interest. Collections of uploads could be videos ranging from political to comedies to cookeries and many more.

The Boundaried Community
(Source: You Tube 2009)

Reference:

Walsh, M 2006, 'Textual shift: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts', in Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no.1, pp. 24 - 37.