Written Task

Presenter: Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the documentary you have been waiting the whole week, the documentary that is going to inform you how it actually started, how it all began and how it ended to be so successful. Not only you know what I am talking about, you also use it every day to either talk to friends or just see what’s up with their life. Today we will go through the history of Facebook, and the big question we have all asked ourselves at least one, how did some college kids manage to create what is now the most accessed website in the internet.

It all started 9 years ago, the night of February 4^th 2004. It was that night when Mark Zuckerberg created a simple website, a website whose membership was limited by the founders to other Harvard students. Within days it was expanded to other colleges near the area, but today anyone who is at least 13 years old can become a member.

Today almost anyone can create a website, with all the tutorials and explanations online it became something very easy to do. So why is it that Facebook is consider so special, well, in my opinion it is the unique idea of creating an online personal profile, where you list everything about you that you want other people to know. You can chat with your friends and family, catch up with them, you can upload pictures so that your friends can see what you are up to, you can comment pictures that your friends uploaded, you can even check who’s birthday it is in case you forgot. Facebook gives us access to an online social life, not only for kids but also adults, who want to contact old friends of their childhood.

Facebook got famous not much a while ago since it was launched; Facebook did not use much money in advertisement by the time, many of the popular pages use some advertisement to get peoples attention, but this is not the case. For one reason, people just accessed the website and created their online profile, and since then, started adding friends and inviting others. It probably has happened to you that sometimes you receive an advertising email, almost like a spam that tells you to visit their page and everything. But this is not what happened with Facebook, you didn’t receive spam emails to join the page, what happened is that you received actual emails from your friends, invitations from them for you to join the site and catch up with them. Someone had a Facebook profile and told their friends, those friends told their friends until a point where almost everyone who has access to a computer and Internet has a Facebook profile. Even the president of the United States has a page, the army, celebrities; all have the same need to share what they are doing, contact their fans for example.

Something very peculiar about Facebook is that the creators didn’t look for places to advertise their website, the people who wanted to advertise looked for Facebook, and advertised their stuff on Facebook. The media also had Facebook pages, and as they want to communicate with their audience to hear their opinions, or to answer questions they shared their Facebook page to the audience, and as they shared it even more people knew about the page. It was something that just happened, like a real online social world. Facebook was something special, the need of communication through a much easier way was exactly what everyone wanted. Getting even to a point where Facebook has video calls. It literally propagated like a virus, one person had a Facebook and at the next day 20 friends of him had a Facebook profile.

To have a closer look, we have a short interview with the creator, Mark Zuckerberg.

Presenter: Welcome Mark

Mark: Hello, thank you for having me here.

Presenter: Don’t worry about that. So, Mark, tell us how you started Facebook.

Mark: You could say everything started with facemash

Presenter: What is facemash?

Mark: Facemash is a website I created on night; I was a bit drunk with some friends and we though of an idea. The idea was to put the pictures of two girls and vote for them, to see who is hotter. But why would people join, you can search for hot girls at any part of the Internet, what is special about this one is that it was based on girls we knew, or lived next door. Imagine a community where everyone is someone you know. It attracts more people to it.

Presenter: What happened after creating the website?

Mark: We started sending invitations to friends, and those friends send it to their friends, from there on it wasn’t much work what we had to do. We stop focusing on advertising the page or sending it to people, and started working on what Facebook had, the content of the page, the amount of things you could do, we worked on it almost all day.

Presenter: It was great talking to you mark

Mark: you too

Rationale: I decided to write a documentary screenplay because you can include almost everything in it, as seen in previous documentaries they have a good amount of information about the subject and they also include short interviews with people related to the subject. All this creates in the audience a wide understanding. After knowing what type of text I wanted to write I just needed to know what to write about. I had some ideas, everything related with advertising or media, and then I thought of Facebook. Why Facebook? Well its something we all use every day, we use it to many things, maybe talk to some friends, find something out about them, congratulate them on a special day. And as many people, it catches my attention on how Facebook got so famous, as I, personally never saw any advertisement of Facebook. The audience on this documentary would be any one who has any interest in Facebook, maybe users of Facebook, who like the idea, or as its part history of Facebook, maybe someone who wants to know how it all started, or maybe how it got so famous. The relation with this topic and what we have seen in class is media and advertising, how Facebook used advertisement and how did the media react to Facebook. 

Written Commentary Outline

The text is a non fiction text, its basically an overview about a touristic place, Barbuda & Antigua. The audience is people who are looking for a nice place to spend a vacation, a place where you have many things to do, such as museums and diving or swimming. The text is trying to persuade people who are looking a place for a vacation to go to Barbuda & Antigua.

Media Image Analysis

Provide an analysis for the following image. What is the message being conveyed? Up to what extent does it apply to your own reality as part of this “Global Village”

I believe the message is trying to say that when people watch the news they usually stay with the information that the media is giving them, they only know what the media wants them to know, they don't question if the media is really telling the truth or not, they don't investigate further more. As the text says, they are relaxed by knowing that the information they have is given by the media. The image shows someone locked up in his room, no color in the image, a sad image, and it appears he doesn't feel safe, he has one eye watching away, as if he was being cautious to something that could happen.  

Imrpove Writing & Paper 1

The Basics about Paper 1

• Paper 1 asks students to produce a written commentary on one of two unseen texts within one and a half hour.
• Pasages for analysis may be complete pieces of writing or extracts from larger works. There is also the possibility of commenting on a visual text or extract from a longer piece. Possible text-types for analysis include: advertisements, opinion columns, brochures, extracts from memoirs, or travel writing.
• Each individual text is presented with two guiding questions.
• The official Paper 1 counts for 25% of the final grade. It is assessed externally.

8 Ways to improve your writing"

Clauses at the beginning of a sentence: good idea, but avoid really long ones. 
There is nothing more boring than a series of sentences that all start with the subject of the sentence

Avoid 'it' as the subject of a sentence. 
Sentences that start with 'it' or dummy subjects, such as 'there is...' or 'there are...', are quite weak.

Use the right verb tense. 
This may come more naturally for native speakers of English. Nevertheless, many people make mistakes in the verb tense that they use. Be sure to know when to use each tense, such as the present simple, the present perfect, etc.

Use (relative) clauses. 
Using clauses in general is a good idea, as we saw in the first tip. Using relative clauses, which expand on ideas further (like this one), are also a good idea. Relative clauses make use of words such as 'which', 'who' and 'where'

Watch out for wordy sentences. 
It is good to read and reread your own work. Often times during self-evaluation, you see sentences that are not clear or 'run on'. Wordy sentences can be cleaned up with punctuation and parallel constructions (Tip 7).
Instead of: "If everyone in the building were to just clean up their own garbage and  if they  just sorted it properly then the recycle man wouldn't have to go through everything, then we wouldn't have to pay extra fees for this service."

Never start a sentence with 'But'. 
Although you may see sentences that start with 'But' in other works, you should avoid starting sentences with it for academic purposes.

Use parallelisms. 
Parallelisms are sentences or phrases that contain parallel syntactical structures. These usually contain lists of noun phrases or clauses with similar structure. For example: "I decided not to (1) use PowerPoint, (2) read notecards or (3) memorize a script." Notice how ideas 1-3 all contain a verb and an object. They all line up nicely in parallel.

Use active verbs.
In persuasive and academic writing and speaking, active verbs sound much stronger than passive verbs. Passive verb phrases use the verb 'to be' and the past participle of another verb. For example "The house was built by me." The active form of this phrase would be: "I built the house."

Written Task Planner

Idea Planner for Written Task 1 on Language and Mass Communication

Idea One:	Text type: Screenplay for a documentary
	Topic: How did the creators of Facebook, some college boys managed to give an appropriate use to the media to get from a simple social network site to the most accessed network site ever.
	Audience: Anyone who is interested in how Facebook started, and how it got from a simple page to the most accessed social network site.
	Why this text type is appropriate to topic: It is going to be based on actual information, therefore it would not be appropriate for it to be an opinion. It could be based on an interview with the creator but as it is going to be a screenplay for a documentary, we can include actual information and a short interview with the creator.

Media Power on Society

1. What is Harold Laswell’s Chain of Communication’s Model? 

Who (speaker) says what (message) on which channel (medium) to whom (audience or listener) with what effect.

2. What does the theorist Marshall McLuhan’s mean by stating that “the Medium is the Message”? 

The media is the one that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action, therefor the media has the power to say whatever they want, either true or false, and make it believable for the audience. It has the ability to manipulate. The news can be real, but the way the media shows us the message is the real trick.

3. Refer to Jurgen Habermas’ “Public Sphere as a Platform for Advertising” 

We are all in the same sphere, media reveals information and many people may get it, and the ones who did not get it will probably get the information by friends of them. Sooner or later we all get the information.

4. What is the connection between Self-Presentation & the Celebrity Image?

Because of the women they use in advertisement, mostly celebrities, women who are thin are consider to be beautiful, and if those beautiful celebrities have talent then it is consider to be successful.