Week 7 - Valentine's day invitation

https://txwes.edu/campus-life/upcoming-events/gsa-movie-night/

In the beginning we considered our topic (movies and series) and then we decided to do Valentine’s Day movie night with our friends. We think that invitation design fits because it’s Valentine’s Day and we have chosen mostly romantic films and event is aimed to a couples but still every friend of ours is invited.

When we were writing a text of our invitation we tried to form it briefly but still with a lot of information. We thought that it should be divided to maximum of four or three paragraphs.  In first paragraph we are inviting everybody and there is also a name of our party “Movie Night”. In second paragraph we tried to tell most of the information such us what we will be doing what films we prepared and our projector equipment. And in the end we urge everybody to come to our party.

The main goal of this event is to hang out with other people, watch some movies a have a nice chat about movies and TV series. Also spent the Valentines day how it should be spent - in good mood and with friends who share the same opinion.

Here is the link to the Event - evite

http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/p/keep-calm-and-stay-tuned-25/

A.P.

Week 6 - Visual characteristics

This week we went on and searched for pictures linked to our theme. We found so many pictures of movie titles and tv-serie quotes it was unbelievable how many pictures there were! It almost felt like they never end... Anyways we found some cool pictures and made a board for them. You can check it out here !


Most of the pictures we pinned are the covers of different movies and tv-series. They all aim to be very inviting and attractive. There is always text (the title of the movie or series, names of the main actors, slogan that the movie or the series is using..) and pictures in them. In the pictures the viewer can see the main actors. The style of the pictures usually describe very well the theme and the atmosphere of the movie. For the audience, it is the first sight of the film and it aims to make the audience want to see that specific movie/tv-series.


For example the cover photo of Lord of the Rings: the photo really gives an appearance of a big adventure. The characters have worried facial expressions, they are carrying their weapons and riding horses. The font and the colors also tell audience that this movie is no romantic comedy. The audience desires to get to know how the adventure ends.


Another cover photo that has an interesting meaning is the cover photo for the movie Forrest Gump. The photo is interesting because there is a man sitting on a bench and looking to his left, like he is glazing to the future filled with hope. It also has nice bright colours red and nacy blue. The background is white and looks like he is sitting in sunshine. The audience will have some kind of idea that this might be a happy movie. Of all the pictures on the internet, movie titles are one of the easiest pictures to point out. They follow a same pattern; a picture of almost anything and the movie title written somewhere on the picture. They are easy to spot.


A.A & H-L.S & A.P

Week 5: Linguistic Characteristics of Difital Communication

As we mentioned in the post before we will be interested in tv-series and movies. One of the largest web site which collects information’s about almost every film, TV series and even more is IMDb. Link to this site is IMBD. We can also find there something that reminds forum but it is more like message board where people are sharing their own opinions on TV series, films, awards and many more.

I think there are many kind of people. The largest group creates people who are really interested in movies and TV series. They are posting their own opinions (we can say reviews) in understandable form (some of them in an incomprehensible form) on movies and TV series they have seen. These people are forming evaluations on films and TV series because they can rate them. Of course nobody can rate films and TV series after registration.

First of December (last count) there were 15,191,834 unique visitors. In average this site have 15,2M unique visitors per month. It is 96 most visited page in USA. Statistic can be found here .

Their forum is organized in sections. First section is called “Trivia! Trivia” there can post people for example who cant remember name of film. Other people can help him find the name for the film. for example (“There was an alien which wanted to go home”). Also in this section we can find Best and Worst. They defined it as “Discussion of the best and worst that film and TV has to offer“. And many more … Link to this forum is here.

Before posting you have to be registered. It is for safety and to avoid some kind of bots which can spam the forum and even to make DDoS attacks. Registration is limited. You have to be at least 13 to create an account on IMDB. Forum is moderated by IMDB staff which is composed of people which are basically living for movies, TV series and happenings in the world of show business.

 Behind the ”Best and worst” topic you can find many different discussion threads about people’s favourite and most disliked movies and tv-series. A few discussion threads that I will concentrate on are called “Best of 2014”, “Poll: Top 25 snubs of the 2000s” and “What movies did you watch last week (26/01-01/02)?”

Generally, there seems to be quite few characteristics of netspeak on the threads I looked at. Many people write comments with good English and many of the sentences they use are almost full or grammatically correct. One example of this is a sentence in one comment by MusicDefined: “To expand my acting ranks out a little further I’ll follow your lead.” This example is on syntactic level. Before going any further on this level, let us start on the lexical level which consists of the smallest parts of language, such as individual words and symbols.

An example of lexical level on the thread “Poll: Top 25 snubs of the 2000s” is a sentence in a comment from Scott-101: “So glad to see that someone agrees w/ me.” In this sentence the word “with” is shortened to “w/” which is very common for examples on Internet forums and in text messages. In the same comment, Scott-101 uses “b/c” for “because” and “#” for “number”. These ways of shortening words and using symbols for words are too very common in netspeak. Also, Scott-101 answers like this to another person: “Wrong thread. Jerk.” On almost every web site that offers some kind of way to comment the content of the site there are always some people that quite aggressively insult other people. It is of course much easier to call people names behind user names than to their faces.

You can find examples on syntactic level in almost every comment in the three discussion threads I mentioned in the beginning. For example, in the thread “What movies did you watch last week? (26/01-01/02)” Darksidecrew has posted a comment: “Wont be seeing this.” The sentence is not grammatically correct because it has no subject. Daksidecrew has even left out the apostrophe in “won’t”. Of course it is easier and faster to write without any apostrophes or commas, for example. It is very common for netspeak.

http://abroadblogs.newpaltz.edu/blog/2014/04/stayed-tuned-for-application-openings-and-due-dates/

A.P. and J.J.

Week 4: Inventing a New Word

Welcome to our blog! We are the Brave of Seven, a group of students on a course called Communicating in the Digital World, at the University of Vaasa.

Why did we chose this name for our group? Well, obviously there is seven of us. At the first lecture of the course we were taught to step out of our comfort zone. We decided to be brave and defeat this course. That’s why we are called the Brave of Seven.

We also had to choose a theme to our blog. We had little difficulties to come up with a theme that is interesting to all of us. Anyway, the theme is now is tv-series and movies. It means that our blog posts are always somehow related to this theme.

After coming up with the name, theme and creating a blog we started working on our first assignment. What we had to do, was to decide an interesting phenomenon of digital communication which does not yet have a name and give a name for it and write the name and description in Urban Dictionary.

At first it seemed difficult to imagine a phenomenon that doesn’t have a name yet. Quite soon one of us came up with an idea: to define the phenomenon of using memes as the main way of communicating in the social media. The rest of us thought the idea was very good, we didn’t have to argue about it. We don’t have a word for that kind of communication even though it is very common. It was also quite easy to create a word for the phenomenon. There was already an existing word meme so what we had to do was to adapt the word to our needs. To create a verb out of it. We decided to combine the words meme and communicate.

Writing the official definition wasn't as easy as we thought: we had to post and edit the definiton three times before our new word was accepted to be part of the vocabulary of Urban Dictionary. It is actually very difficult to define a new word so that everyone can understand it. 

So, nowadays we have a word for this phenomenon. The phenomenon can be called to memecate. The official definition is to use memes as the way of communication in the social media, to describe and comment events and facts on social media by using memes, usually in a humorous way. Usually used by heavy Internet users (Geeks). There is a pre-knowledge of memecating or memes needed, to use memes in the right context.

You can find the definition also on the Urban Dictionary when you click here.

The first assignment was very interesting. Time will show if our new word will actually be used in general. Anyway, it was interesting to notice that this is how the process actually works: someone is in a need of a word for an unnamed phenomenon and comes up with an idea. He/she starts to use the word and if other people find it good enough, it becomes part of people’s daily vocabulary.

In conclusion, let me memecate a little by using the favorite memes of our group!

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQglTs5mCLvdrV2i5wWD3WdnNbTwh4HMpKkh6xrjyVLy-YFRwZrOw

http://www.digitallydanielle.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Blog-meme-2.0.png

http://cdn.crushable.com/files/2012/04/Offensive-Forrest-Gump-1.jpg

https://scontent-b-ams.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/10522094_10203620098772785_7755325129432332811_n.jpg?oh=1efee317d1e30205ed1af51ca43cc8d1&oe=556918E2

http://www.quickmeme.com/img/a9/a99abdac727ddfc3646fe9b55d8b0f10c943f8e813bd1d84b9102d0c48c09519.jpg

Stay tuned! :)

H-L S.