About & Exegesis

About Yong and his blog

Yong is a student @ curtin university, perth, Australia. He was born in 1993 in a harbour city called Busan located in South Korea. Yong has been moving around many nations since he was only seven years old. He stayed in South Korea for seven years from age 0 - 7, Germany for three years (7 - 10), Malaysia for four years (10 - 14), England for three years (14 - 17), Japan for a year (17- 18) and he is now studying in Australia. [It's only been 5 months since he came to australia!]

With these global experiences, he is able of communicating with people looking beyond the boundaries of cultures and languages. Therefore the challenge in his life for him was always about locating his home and saying many goodbyes to his friends, leaving everything behind, moving onto a new place.

'I'm from nowhere. Home is where I am at. Who I call my friends and families are who I can meet as for now.'

Yong intends to become a multi-talented artist in the near future, directing films, writing scripts, taking photographs and composing music for parties. He has many titles that he wants in the future. Yong the film director, Yong the DJ, Yong the photographer and Yong the artist!

EXEGESIS

             To begin with, I have chosen a blog as my central node as it was basically what I was most comfortable with in terms of creating a website. The fundamental reason however does not stop here as Rettberg (2003, p.57) supports my choice by stating that “blogs are a social genre... supports a dense network of small audiences and many producers... are a relatively free-form type of social software and are decentralized… are closely connected to other uses of social software, where blogs form part of, but not the entirety of, the site.” This suggests that blogs are a type of social software just like Facebook and Twitter is and this was the fundamental reason to why I have chosen a blog instead of a website.

             The background of the blog is very colorful yet not intriguingly sullied. This background was chosen to suggest the spirit of a passionate youth. It has pictures of a graffiti artwork, which suggests a young spirit rebelling against the world. The layouts also contribute to this idea by not being arranged in a solid manner. The whole point of the layout was to focus the reader to the center of the page as writings for the blog were all arranged at the center. I tried to use as much functional gadgets as possible without altering the blog’s overall concept and theme. Gadgets such as e-mail subscribing, RSS feeds, Share on Facebook and Search engines were all used to give the blog a true web 2.0 look. Images and music from Flickr and Soundcloud were embedded again, to give the blog a true web 2.0 look. The concept and overall theme of this blog is of a young passionate artist.

             The choices that I have made for the gadgets to give the blog a true web 2.0 look is supported by Green (2010, p.4) as he states that “…Web 2.0 recognizes that online environment now offers opportunities for social connection and interactivity for example, through blogs, wikis and social networking systems and technologies.” Therefore, the gadgets and the contributing nodes definitely complements to the overall web 2.0 look of the blog. The contributing nodes I chose for the blog are flickr, delicious, youtube and soundcloud. These are web 2.0 sites which encourage social interaction and sharing of information and media content with the general public. These contributing nodes definitely complements the overall concept and theme of the blog which is of a young passionate artist as photography works were uploaded on flickr, short films were uploaded on youtube and composed music were listed on soundcloud. With delicious, all the artistic sites and industry-related sites that this young artist might have been surfing were shared. When uploading the works however, hesitations were made regarding the copyrights. What was amazing was how all these sites were encouraging one to upload their files under the ‘creative commons’ license.

             Collins (2008) cites that “Web 2.0 have thrust copyright law under public scrutiny, provoking discourses questioning what is fair in the digital age.” This shows how the copyright laws become invalid with the emergence of new media such as Web 2.0. This definitely shows the power of media and the people in which it indicates that even laws can be changed. With alterations to the law, introducing creative commons license, I figured that it was okay to upload my files under these license as I still had ‘some rights reserved’ to the files.

             The other challenge in creating the blog was however the colour of the texts as the colourful background did not support the texts adequately. This was an important challenge as it was very easy to alter the overall look of the blog and thus alter the theme of the blog by changing the colour of the texts. Another challenge was in linking the contributing nodes on the blog. I had to alter the html codes on the logos of the contributing nodes and make it as hyperlinks connected to each profiles of the nodes.

             All in all, the links added on the profile of delicious are all about films, music and photography which are the main three concepts that completes the ‘young passionate artist’ look of the blog. The party pictures were chosen to convey a message of a social artist who is able of socializing with people as artists are often ‘alone’ and very emotional. Consequently the genres of the music composed are dance, party and lounge music, therefore I believe it was adequate to have partying pictures and links to music festivals on delicious.

REFERENCE

Collins, S. (2008). Recovering Fair Use. M/C Journal, 11(6). Retrieved from

http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/105

Green, L. (2010). The internet. Oxford: Berg Publishers.

Rettberg, J., (2008), Blogs, Communities and Networks in Blogging. Polity Press; Cambridge.