[Cit AO2, MS AO4, MS AO6]
In this section you will look at the various types of sites that exist and will also find out who uses the web and for what purpose?
Having looked at the examples of all the different types of web sites there are in Links for Comparison you can see that there is a huge variety of sites which appeal to a huge variety of different users. We want you to find out about the use of the web in your own community. You will be asking two very simple questions.
- Who logs on to the web?
- And for what purpose(s)?
To answer these questions you need to devise a questionnaire which allows you to offer an answer to these questions and which provides evidence to back up your claims about who uses the web. The result may provide evidence for your Media Studies course [Cit AO2, MS AO4, MS AO6]. Check with your teacher.
Using the Web - what are the issues and debates?
Some people think the Web is too vast and chaotic to be of any real use
to students. They argue that it needs to be restricted and policed more
carefully. A lot of publicity suggests it is a dangerous place, populated
by perverts and criminals. This raises questions about censorship.
Others say this is a moral panic, like the scare over comics in the 1950s,
or violent videos at the time of the Jamie Bulger case. A more recent
example of a moral panic occurred when video games were blamed in the
USA for encouraging children to be violent. Rather than seeing the availability
of guns as a major cause of the Colombine High School massacre in 2000,
a survey showed more people ready to blame video games.
It may be that the web is at the centre of a similar moral panic. But
whatever the arguments against the web, it is an important commercial
tool. There are few Hollywood movies nowadays, for example, released without
their own web site and, as you may have seen in Sites
for Evaluation, Governments see advantages of using the web.
If you want to read about more issues and debates click here.
Now move on to Planning a Survey Questionnaire