Friday, 11 March 2016

2 news articles

A silhouette of a person in front of a Facebook sign

After some major corporate changes Facebook may be made to pay millions and would no longer be able to evade their tax payments. This plan will mostly benefit UK and USA as well as mitigating the the criticism that institutions such as Facebook are currently receiving due to avoiding paying their tax. Facebook also works with advertising agencies and gain great profit from that aspect.
  • The UK represents less than 10% of Facebook’s global revenue
  •  more than 850 staff remain an important part of the business
  • The company faced criticism after it was revealed it paid just £4,327 in corporation tax in 2014, despite its UK staff taking home an average of £210,000 in the same period
  • The world’s poorest nations are hardest hit by corporate tax dodging - losing at least $100bn every year that could pay for hospitals and schools.
  • Google’s similar ad-sales arrangements showed that only 1% of its ads were sold offline, but that they accounted for approximately 60% of the company’s revenue in the UK
  • HMRC, which spent £27,000 on adverts with Facebook in the past year, would not comment on the particulars of the social network’s tax arrangements.
  • Google has also been criticised for its tax arrangements. It agreed to pay £130m in back taxes in January
It has been a very apparent issue recently that big institutions, Google and Facebook only being two of the many, who avoid paying great taxes. But as the companies have been receiving may criticisms of their actions, they are feeling more pressurized to change how they go about paying for taxes and have decided to pay their taxes in full.

#48Google hires founder of 4chan, the ‘Zuckerberg of online underground’

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/07/chris-poole-4chan-google-hire-social-media



Poole announced his move in a post on Tumblr.

Christopher Poole, who was the founder of the controversial site, 4Chan, has been recently hired by Google. It is speculated that Poole will attempt to help Google with its social media aspects, an area where the company is greatly lacking and Poole stated through a post of Tumblr  that he would like to contribute his experience from a dozen years, creating online communities. Although Google announced in November 2015 that they will release a social network that will be similar to pinterest and reddit, this announcement did not receive much attention. Poole's involvement may possibly turn the audience around for the better.

  • Described by Rolling Stone as the “Mark Zuckerberg of the online underground”
  • Poole founded 4chan in 2003 when he was just 15 years old.
  • Today the site claims to attract 22 million unique visitors per month.
  • 4chan has also gained a reputation as a breeding ground for abuse, trolling and online harassment.
  • In January 2015, Poole retired from running 4chan, and in September 2015, the site was sold to a Japanese entrepreneur.
Google being a massive, leading institution, will greatly benefit from Poole's involvement to help them increase their reputation in terms of social media. However, since Poole is notorious for running a site that is a hub for online abuse and harassment, if there is a negative outcome from any of Poole's future projects, Google will also be greatly damaged and will become mistrusted
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2 news articles

#45 Hong Kong’s post-1997 search for identity helped rise of K-pop, says South Korean consul


South Korean Consul General Kim Kwang-dong was initially surprised that Korean wave had a huge following in Hong Kong. Inset: A member of Big Bang. Photo: Dickson Lee

Hongkongers’ struggle for a cultural identity after the 1997 handover has given rise to the popularity of Korean pop culture in the city, according to Seoul’s top diplomat here. Speaking on the eve of tonight’s Mnet Asian Music Awards (MAMA) taking place in Hong Kong for the fourth time, Kim said he was initially surprised to learn that Korean wave, or hallyu in Korean, has a huge following in Hong Kong as well as mainland China.

  • the power of cultural exports to generate economic benefits, 
  • South Korean Consul General Kim Kwang-dong said cultivating strong manufacturing industries was essential and urged the city’s leaders to consider reviving this faded sector.


#46 It's The New Day - first look at Trinity Mirror's new newspaper



A dummy issue of The New Day, an ‘upbeat, optimistic, impartial’ title.


One week ahead of Trinity Mirror’s innovative leap into newsprint, it has released a photograph of its new national newspaper, the New Day.Calling it “the first standalone national daily newspaper for 30 years”, the company will launch the Monday-to-Friday title on Monday, 29 February.Trinity Mirror stresses that it will not be a sister title to its flagship, the Daily Mirror.

  • According to a press release issued early Monday morning, it “will report with an upbeat, optimistic approach and will be politically neutral.”
  • It will be available free from over 40,000 retailers on launch day, and will be priced at 25p for the following two weeks before selling at 50p after that.
Its editor, Alison Phillips, said: “There are many people who aren’t currently buying a newspaper, not because they have fallen out of love with newspapers as a format, but because what is currently available on the newsstand is not meeting their needs. “This paper has been created as a result of customer insight and is the first newspaper designed for people’s modern lifestyles.”
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Tuesday, 8 March 2016

index - Articles













 Story 27 & 28 - Facebook cracks down on marijuana firms with dozens of accounts shut down.  A work reunion? I’ve been naked in front of some of these people – I’m not sure











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Independent NDM case study: Media Magazine research

MM50 – page 26
  • In 2013 the biggest grossing movie in North America (which includes Canada) was The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, which took $425m at the box office.
  • In 2012 Lionsgate was the 5th top distributor (based on box office gross) in North America, putting it ahead of Hollywood major studios 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures. Does this mean we have a seventh major studio to consider?
  • Lionsgate began in 1997 as a Canadian distribution company based in Vancouver and, according to the-numbers.com, has distributed 261 films since. Only 10 of these have exceeded $100m at the North American box office, the cut-off point for a film having ‘blockbuster’ status.
  • The Walt Disney Company has five divisions that include a record label, television stations, videogames as well as theme parks.
  • Lionsgate has four divisions,which include both the television and music industries, and even though it produces television programmes, such as Orange is the New Black for Netflix, and part-owns nine cable television channels, some of which do play the company’s films and television programmes, it is nevertheless a small company.
  • Walt Disney’s market capitalisation calculated on number of shares x share price) was $155.33bn compared to Lionsgate’s $4.49bn.
  • Anita Elberse (2013) has pointed out, the blockbuster strategy is the only one that is economically viable in the film industry
  • In early 2012 Lionsgate bought the independent producer Summit Entertainment, and so inherited the Twilight franchise. Until then it had only released one $100m-plus film, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), a documentary
  • Warner Bros. spent around $100m producing The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002), which only took just over $7m worldwide at the box office.
  • Fewer than 500,000 copies of the first The Hunger Games book had sold in 2009 when Lionsgate reportedly paid author Suzanne Collins $200,000 for the rights to the trilogy.
  • Lionsgate increased The Hunger Games’ budget to $80 million
  • Lionsgate hasstated it wants to increase the amount of money it makes from television programmes; but, at the time of writing, the amount of revenue that television brings in is only a small proportion of the total, and it remains reliant on its film division.

MM37 – page 14

  • Budgets generally are getting both bigger and smaller at the same time. The major studios are driving budgets up in the hope of utilising new technologies to create a greater spectacle to induce audiences into 3D and IMAX screenings.
  •  And what is the most successful film worldwide as I write? The King’s Speech had a production budget of $15 million and a worldwide gross of $400 million plus.
  • Film budgets are usually expressed in terms of two sets of costs: above the line (ATL) and below the line (BTL).
  • Above the line costs are ‘direct’ and largely fixed – in other words they must be paid irrespective of what happens during the production. They refer to the fees for all the principal creators of the film and the cost of acquiring the original intellectual property.
  • Below the line costs are indirect and refer to the goods and services purchased/hired as required for production activities – the ‘running costs’ of the production.
  •  The more that roles can be combined, the less expensive the production.
  • Costumes and locations create major costs. Let’s take costumes first. The audience for a film like Atonement (UK/US 2007) expects authenticity in costumes, and the novel suggests two distinct periods that require research and re-creation. A well-off family in a 1930s country house wore various different types of costumes, ‘dressing’ for dinner, for sports, for dances etc.
  • House interiors for the periodhad to be researched and recreated (partly from second-hand shops). Cast members had to get haircuts and appropriate costumes – and negotiations were necessary to acquire the rights for music (mostly reggae and ska) that fitted the time period.
  • Gareth Edwards’ film Monsters has come to be seen as something of a ‘game changer’ in low budget production. The film was made for around $500,000 and yet it was presented in CinemaScope on multiplex screens across the UK and featured some beautiful CGI work.
MM30 – Page 52

  • American Reality shows – they’re glossy, manipulative, and highly addictive. And they often open with the words: ‘Some scenes have been recreated for entertainment purposes’. So where exactly is the ‘reality’?
  • Jean Baudrillard argues in his book Simulacra and simulation that: The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. This suggests that In contemporary society our system of representations, symbols and images has become so vital, it supersedes the truth it claims to signify to the extent where that truth fades into oblivion, or fails to exist at all.
  • Baudrillard’s theory is particularly appropriate to the study of reality television and to the exploration of the idea that on TV, we rarely see a ‘true’ reality. Situations are manipulated, events are dramatised and incidents are staged and enhanced ‘for entertainment purposes’.
  • Paradoxically, ‘reality’ is constructed within a genre that claims to give the audience the ‘truth’ as it actually happened. In other words, they create a ‘truth’ that never has, or arguably never would have existed in reality.


MM30 – Page 58

  • Indeed, the history of media technology in the twentieth century was built on this premise: cinema, television, music video and computer games all invite the audience to suspend disbelief and inhabit a parallel fantasy world made possible only by successive advancements in technology.
  • The last thirty years has seen a profusion of films, television and pop music that play with audience expectations in their use of intertextual references and self-reflexive allusions. However, perhaps what marks out the genuinely postmodern from ironic critique is the way in which audience appropriation of new media technologies is both naturalised and creative.
  • Throughout the history of television and cinema, audiences have traditionally been very accepting of the ways in which media texts invite the viewer to confront their own perception of reality. As the silent movie era moved into that of the talking picture, for example, audiences did not recoil with incredulity that the image projected on to the screen was actually speaking, but accepted the concept as natural and unaffected.
  • By the same token audiences have been extremely imaginative in the way in which new media technologies have been incorporated into their day-to-day existence.
  • Of course the proliferation of the internet from the late 1990s onwards has accelerated and heightened people’s routine use of technology in their day-to-day engagement with society and culture. And, indeed, it is befitting that the proliferation of laptops, wireless and broadband technology in the Noughties has liberated people from viewing computer technology as fixed to work stations previously associated with word processing and gaming.
  • The internet has infused contemporary civilisation with a new vitality that can be felt across various media forms including television, film, pop music and the press.
  • Various theoreticians have argued that the appropriation of media texts is symptomatic of cultural malaise. Frankfurt School theorists like Theodore Adorno, for example, viewed the gramophone record and cinema as a means of distracting the working class from their disadvantaged social positions.




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Monday, 22 February 2016

2 new articles

#43 Facebook sets up 'social VR' team to explore virtual reality beyond games
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/22/facebook-social-virtual-reality-beyond-games-mark-zuckerberg

Samsung’s Mobile World Congress event had plenty of Gear VR headsets.


Facebook has created a “social VR” team to explore virtual-reality technology’s potential beyond games, as it prepares for the consumer launch of its Oculus Rift VR headset.Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed the plans in a surprise appearance at Samsung’s Mobile World Congress press conference, while talking up the popularity of 360-degree videos on Facebook, and on Samsung’s Gear VR headset – which uses technology from Oculus.“People have already watched more than a million hours of video in Gear VR,”explained a blog post from Facebook following the event. “Already, millions of people watch 360 videos on Facebook every day. More than 20,000 have been uploaded, with hundreds more added daily.”Facebook is upping the quality of 360-degree videos on its service, while tasking its new team with developing other kinds of non-games content for VR headsets.

  • Virtual reality is already one of the hot topics at this year’s Mobile World Congress conference.
  • HTC has confirmed that its Vive headset will cost $799, with pre-orders opening at the end of February. Meanwhile, LG is launching its own headset, designed to work with its new G5 Android smartphone.

#44 Mobile operator Three to introduce adblocking

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/feb/19/mobile-operator-three-ad-blocking



Mobile company Three is to introduce adblocking across its UK and Italian networks, making it the first major European operator to do so. Three has struck a deal with Israeli company Shine that will see the mobile adblocking technology introduced in the UK and Italy, followed by a “rapid roll-out” across its operations in other countries. The move is cause for serious concern for digital publishers and advertisers, which are already dealing with a rising number of people who block advertising when they use their phones. Three said its move to implement network-wide adblocking is not an attempt to “eliminate” all mobile advertising, but to “give customers more control, choice and greater transparency over what they receive”. The company, which has 9 million UK customers, said a network-wide adblocking strategy is better than relying on apps because it “reaches a broader range of mobile adblocking”.

  • Customers pay data charges so they should not then receive ads, costs which the company says advertisers should be made to pay.
  • Some advertising aims to elicit customer data and information without them knowing.
  • Customers should only receive relevant advertising and not have their mobile experience “degraded by excessive, intrusive, unwanted or irrelevant ads”
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Index

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Friday, 12 February 2016

Media and collective identity

1) Read the article and summarise each section in one sentence, starting with the section 'Who are you?'
I think, therefore I am:  Social position was, at one point, much more important than being an individual, and it was what our success was based on.
From Citizen to consumer: Edward Bernays said that people purposefully conditioned themselves to become a passive consumer from an active citizen and that with this, advertisers aimed to sell products by promoting a positive self image.
The rise of the individual: The concept of individualism become popular and people rebelled against conformity as they wanted to show their different and unique points.
Branding and Lifestyle:  Branding associates personality with a product and we, as the audience, attempt to find products that match our personalities.

2) List five brands you are happy to be associated with and explain how they reflect your sense of identity.
Apple: Apple products are created for numerous purposes and has many functions, converged into one device, whether it be an iPhone, computer of watch. I think it shows how I seek convenience.
Converse: Shoes which are comfortable yet stylish shows how I like to wear things that look good but are also comfortable for daily life.
H&M: Clothing is often affordable and comfortable which is all thats needed from clothing.
Vans:Shoes which are comfortable yet stylish shows how I like to wear things that look good but are also comfortable for daily life.
Kipling: Kipling bags are mostly for casual use, but they are also very effective due to the many pockets and compartments that most bags have. The material is also very durable, which shows that I like to use the same style for a long while.

3) Do you agree with the view that modern media is all about 'style over substance'? What does this expression mean?
This expression means that people worry more about the outlook and appearance of their product rather than the effectiveness of its purpose, and I think that recently, this statement has been proven to be very true. Many people have a great focus on items that are trending in fashion whether it be clothing or digital items, and that the function of the item no longer matters. I think, to a certain extent, the style and branding of items, in some sense, shows other people the type of person you are and people carefully choose the things they own to portray a certain image to society. Although, there is a proportion of people who think its more about substance over style, it is evident that the media is entirely comprised of different forms of promoting style rather than substance.

4) Explain Baudrillard's theory of 'media saturation' in one paragraph. You may need to research it online to find out more.
The media has conditioned society to think a certain way and act a certain way. As we are completely overloaded with the media's dominant ideologies, we can no longer distinguish between the real value of commodities and the great value that the media conveys.

5) Is your presence on social media an accurate reflection of who you are? Have you ever added or removed a picture from a social media site purely because of what it says about the type of person you are?
I think my presence on social media greatly reflects who I am but only to a certain extent. I think this is because with social media sites such as Facebook, people get to see your likes and interests through what kind of pages and posts you like. However, it is difficult to see my personality through my presence on social media. I haven't removed or added pictures purely with the intent of showing people what kind of person I am, but it is common with many people as they only want certain aspects of their character to be shown publicly.
6) What is your opinion on 'data mining'? Are you happy for companies to sell you products based on your social media presence and online search terms? Is this an invasion of privacy?

Personally, I have no issues with data mining as greatly filters out what kind of things I would want to see and what kind of things I wouldn't want to see. I think it would be a great time saver when the time comes where there is something particular that I would like to buy or watch. I do think this is an invasion of ones privacy, however, unless someone is doing something that is inappropriate or illegal, there aren't any major effects for anyone.
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