New Media convergence,Image courtesy of conversationagent.com
President elect Barack Obama mobilized new media through unique ways like the iphone app, facebook and YouTube to disseminate his campaign message to all Americans (Lewin, 2008). The usage of new media in the recent Malaysia general election has grown due to the repressive laws that prohibit freedom of speech and freedom of mainstream press (Wai, 2008).
Image courtesy of Facebook
The advent and usage of new media especially the Internet is due to its ability to incorporate multimodal texts such as video, audio, images and writings providing (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006) an interactive provided an ideal platform to reach out to the community.
However in Malaysia there seems to be a high emphasis of controlling new media, there have been many instances where bloggers are arrested and threatened with draconian laws, such as Raja Petra Kamarudin who have been arrested under the Internal Security Act which allows for detention without trial (Crispin, 2008).
References:
Crispin, W (2008) Malaysia's Risk-Takers [Online] Avilable at: http://cpj.org/reports/2008/10/malaysia08.php [Accessed on 5th November 2008]
Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T (2006), Reading Images: Grammar of Visual Design, Routledge, London.
Lewin, J.(2008) How Barack Obama Beat John McCain With New Media [online]. Available at: http://www.podcastingnews.com/2008/11/05/how-barack-obama-beat-john-mccain-with-new-media/ [Accessed on 5th November 2008]
Wai, C. (2008). Denial syndrome must end. The Star Online, [Online] 14th March. Available at: http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/3/14/election2008/20637966&sec=election2008 [Accessed on 14th November 2008]
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