ESLB3053

LANGUAGE AND POWER

LANGUAGE AND MEDIA

CONTENT

1. Introduction
2. News coverage
3. Media voices: accent, dialect and register
4. Public participation in the media
4.1. Public as participant
4.2. Public as producer
5. Mobile and online interaction
5.1 Rules and standards in new modes
5.2 Creative texting
6. Summary

2
1. Introduction

Development of online and

Traditional ‘mass media’ – digital communications –
television, radio and press. audience more active, construct
and consume media

Nowadays, audience can ‘Citizen producer’, ‘citizen

choose what news they journalist’, ‘user-generated
consume content’

3
2. News coverage

• Transitivity model – used in the analysis of utterances to show how the speaker’s experience
is encoded. In the model, utterances comprise three components which are process,
participants and circumstances.

3)
1) Process, what 2) Participants, Circumstances,
kind of event that the ‘doer’ of the specifying when,
is being process / who did where, why and
described the process how of the
process

• Examples:
• The woman was hit by a car yesterday.
• Two men, a mechanic and a clerk were caught in Johor after killing a businessman.
• A teenage girl was found dead in her bedroom in Taman Setia, Klang.

4
3. Media voices: accents, dialect and register

• All about pronunciation.

• Use same grammar, same syntax
Accents and same vocabulary but difference
in pronunciation.

• Differences in pronunciation,
grammar and syntax.
• Two people might speak English but
Dialects one might say:
• i) He did well!
• ii) He done well!

5
Register

Different registers
Three factors
can be characterized
The way language determine variation /
by their sentence
vary according to the differences in register
structure,
situation it is used. are field, tenor and
pronunciation and
mode.
vocabulary.

Mode – medium of
Tenor – style or level
Field – subject matter / communication used
of formality perform by
topic speaking, writing,
the speaker
visuals or mixture

6
4. Public participation in the media

1) User – generated content

• Any form of content such as blogs, wikis, forums, podcasts, tweets,
video etc that was created by users of an online system made
available via social media websites.
• Eg: blogs, tweet, facebook, podcats, videos, images etc.

2) Citizen journalism

• Public citizens who play active role in collecting, reporting, analyzing

in disseminating news.
• As an alternative form of newsgathering and reporting that functions
outside mainstream media institutions.

7
4.1 Public as participant

Public with knowledge

or interest participates Experts with subject
Sharing information,
in discussion matter discussing
giving comments
programmes or talk about the topic / issue
shows

Regulate turns in Examples MHI, Wanita

communicating their Hari Ini, BELLA, Harith
views Iskandar

8
4.2 Public as producer

• ‘User-generated’ and ‘citizen journalism’ are terms used to describe those who are not
professional in media industry but with the new technology have become the producers of
media.
• A key consideration – citizen journalism involves an interaction between user – generated
content and mass media.
• Coverage of disasters and unexpected events of eye – witness photos and footage captured
on the cameras and mobile phones of bystanders before professional journalists arrive on the
scene.
• Examples: Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, volcano eruption etc
• Therefore, the photos and footage taken are given to the produced broadcasts along with the
journalist’s own recordings for publishing.
• Sometimes, news gathering is collected from tweets that provide up-to-the-minute feed of
information.
• Nevertheless, it is important for public to check the source of the news for authenticity
purpose in order to ensure its trustworthiness.

9
5. Mobile and online interaction

The accessibility of internet and Texting, emailing, phone calls,

mobile – a form of instant messaging and Skype –
communication mode of communication

Drawbacks – misused of
technology. Eg: ‘fired by text
message’

10
5.1 Rules and Standards in New Modes

Popularity of texting Major concern on the

The use of Standard
among children and ability to spell and
English while texting
young people punctuate

Rapid use of email and

Examples Whatsapp,
text – left behind the
WeChat, Twitter, Line
rules of written
etc
Standard English

11
5.2 Creative Texting

Mobile phones with emoticons as standard which has become the ‘code’.
Code – a term used instead of language to refer to a linguistic system of
communication.

The use of emoticons in emails and texting has reduced the use
of standard written English.

Sometimes, the use of emoticons can lead to misunderstanding

between the sender and the receiver – different way of
interpreting the text with the used of emoticons.

12
6. Summary

• Two key points in relation to language and media:

1. Even though media has shifted for using more images than language, it is to remember that
the use of language is still important.
2. The relationship between language, media, society and power are shifting, more choice of
what to access, relatively more challenging media material, more possibilities for audience to
produce as well as consume media messages – we should be careful, to think and not being
bias with what we consume from media.

13
THANK YOU

u n i t a r. my