03.31.09

As the media becomes essential to our daily life, the merit and demerit are both appearing. Obviously, we get a lot of benefit from the media society, such as entertainment and cultivation. We rely on media industry too much so that forget maybe we are violated by it also.

I saw a lot of stuff of surveillance in the movies. Usually, the characters in the movie use the cameras which exist nearly everywhere to get the information they want. In the second version of national treasure, Nicolas Cage was chased by the villains so that he has to throw away the wood with important message on it. Before passing a crossroad, he got an idea. He lets his partner break the traffic rules and at the meantime he holds the wood to meet the camera at the crossroad. By throwing the wood, he escapes from the chasing of villain; also he gets the message by getting into the database. I have to say that it is amazing to see the clever way of using cameras around the crossroad. However, it is a movie. In our real life, the cameras always watch us without notice. We may notice the cameras around the cross road, but we can never know the hidden cameras which will violate our privacy.

There is an event in China recently make me think more about the effect of cameras in public. At the night of October 11th last year, a fight occurred between two groups of people in front of a bar due to some trivial quarrel. However, one of the sides in fight is a group of police and they finally killed one person in the other group. After what happened, there are several descriptions about the issue. At first, the public voice stood in the side of the dead person who is a obviously victim. However, there is a camera outside of the bar recorded the whole fight and the tape was showed on TV. From the tape, we can see that the dead person started to hit the policy several times without hearing his companions’ dissuasion. However, this is not the whole record of the event since it doesn’t show how the man be killed. It is said that the whole tape will be used as evidence in the court. But after the tape showed, the public voice turned to support the policy. Some people even said that the man is a ruffian who should be killed sooner or later. However, since the public can not see the whole record, they will never know what happened in the last few minutes and the discussion will continue. However, I guess it is a positive effect of the camera surveillance in our society. Sometimes, it can provide evidence for the controversial event.

women's role

Nowadays, the social roles of women have changed a lot. Women come out to work instead of staying home to care for baby and the family only contains members of mother and children has also been normal and accepted by public. In a word, women become stronger and tougher without continuing play the role of victim in our society anymore.

At the same time, the feminism is still very popular social issue. The change of the role made women to consider their own identity more thoroughly and conversely they may feel more confident about themselves.

Moreover, in my mind, one extraordinary example of the growing social class is that more and more commercial industries set women as their marketing target. Now we have special magazines designed for women, the special cigarettes for women, and the special advertisement for women and so on.

In china, there are several male competition shows on TV. On these shows, men should strive hardly to survive from the fierce competition such as expressing their male power and the judges are always women. These shows are very popular in China. They drew attention of lots of women audience and made money of that. Although someone argues that all these phenomena shows that the social status of women have increased, I still believe that this is only feint fantasy which covers the reality that the commercial industries set women as their quarry.

the reliablity of media

There is a so sad reality for me, and my fellow classmates in China, to major in journalism and communication, that is, the more we learn of how about the operation of media industry, the less we believe in the media. Considering the complicated operation of the media and the money-driving structure, the media become more and more unreliable.

In the past, I always took the information on the media serious and believed whatever they said. But now, no matter what the media reports, I would suspect first and look for other proof in the different media. Although I can get the same information in different media, I would not believe anything totally.

There is a very famous controversy issue of media in China which lasting from last year to now called “Huanan Tiger Issue”. This issue is originated from that Shanxi local government declared that a farmer photographed some pictures of Huanan Tiger which is a nearly extinct species of animal in the world when he was climbing the mountain and then showed the pictures on the media. This is a very important breakthrough because the experts had not found the Huanan Tiger for many years. However, after a few days, some experts claimed that the pictures are faked while the farmer insisted they are real. At the same time, the local government insisted the pictures were real and argued with the opposite opinion. This argument lasted for a long time with many experts, national forest bureau and national court involved in until a person found the tiger on the picture is highly similar with the tiger on the New Year pictures which published several years before. This evoked big discussion on the internet and the reality nearly came out. Finally, it turned out that the photos are faked and the potential maker is the local government which wants to make a name for it.

Eventually, this becomes a completely farce which destroy the government dignity and a lot of experts’ which have their own secret intentions. However, I don’t want to talk too much about the lack of government obligations and how many famous and common people stimulate the development of the issue. What I want to say is there is nothing can be believed in the world, even if you see it by yourself!

03.26.2009

I always believe that different people have different characters and these different characters were caused by many factors such as growing background, cultural background and education level and so on.

Therefore, there will be a thousand of Hamlet in a thousand people’s eyes. The point views which different people watch the same movie would be dramatically different. In the view of cross-cultural communication, especially when the movies travel across the culture, the meaning of them would be dismissed or misunderstood. As soon as there are a lot of Chinese directors who are also famous in Hollywood, some of their works would be controversial, especially the works involve in the ancient Chinese culture. On one hand, they should pay attention to the receive discount of the oversea audience when they come across with the complex and unfamiliar Chinese ancient culture. On the other hand, they should consider the tolerance rate of domestic audience for the change of the gorgeous ancient culture. If they can handle this dilemma, the movie would be extremely successful.

This is a long trip for me, from San Diego to Watsonville, to San Francisco, then to San Jose. From this trip, I saw not only more cities of America, but also more aspects of American people and their lives. As a student majoring in communication and journalism, the understanding of the social culture is indispensable from my view point. This is also the trouble which bothers me most because I feel isolated in laramie, in this country and never actually involved in the life here.
Fortunately, this trip gives me a precious opportunity to learn the social culture of America. My friend Lisa is a nice woman and she introduced me every possible knowledge of American culture during the period I lived in her house. She brought me to her friend's party so that I learned how the family party is in America, we played the card game which taught me a lot of American history and pop culture, and I almost win! Also, the relationship between her and her her children makes me thinging about the different adaptation styles for foreign people in America.
This is really a wonderful trip, and it opens a door for me to get understand the real Americans.

sdsu

Yestoday, I went to San Diego State University with Becky, the friend of mine , who is a teacher in the department of journalism and media studies in SDSU. She is pursuing her phd degree at the same time in another university.
She worked as a television journalist in Idaho and now she is very interested in media convergence. She brought me to her classes are talking about the practice of television news report.
Besides this, she talked a lot of the media convergence issues to me, such as the poor situation of the print journalism, the bloggers and the online news. She said she had to learn the new techonolies in advance to adapt to the new media environment so that she can teach her students to do that. Therefore, she bought iMac, kept updated to the new medium.

By talking to her and visiting her class, I really learned a lot, not only the place, but also the media convergence in other parts of America.

San Diego!!

San Diego is really a lovely place. I fall in love with it when the plane was landing in the night. I looked through out the window and found the tall buildings, they reminds me China. But when I went out in the daytime, the sunshine and the hills and sweety cars in the street made me realize that this is what I saw in the movies, and this is America.
Now, I really think that being out of wyoming may be a good choice to see the different parts of America and expand my eye view. I really love this place and do not want to leave...