Will the Chinese have a Xin Nian Kuai Le? (Happy New Year)

Photograph by Keith Williamson

February 3rd will see Chinese people all over the world celebrate the Spring Festival (also known as Chinese New Year) but in Britain Celebrations are being dampened as the fire service warns people to be cautious with the traditional burning lanterns.
The Lanterns which are set off in order to bring luck and prosperity and have been used for almost two thousand years but have led to 100 calls to the emergency services in the last two years.
Fire services around Britain have warned people to set their lanterns off away from roads, wooded areas and houses but Farmers, the Civil Air Authority and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency also have worries.
The Spring Festival is all about celebrating the Earth coming back to life and it will be sad if a two thousand year tradition is stopped by the infamous British red tape.

Is social media making us less social?

According to Facebook, there are currently more than '500 million active users' of the social network, 'the average user has 130 friends' and 'people that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.

I am not about to preach that Facebook is the worst thing ever created or that we should all abandon it - that would make me a hypocrite. I am on Facebook and use it on my phone. As I am writing this post I have Facebook open in another tab. I have 313 'friends' on Facebook and spend my time looking at their photos and reading their status updates but rarely talk to them. When I bump into them while out shopping I find there is little to talk about as I have not seen them for years but just read that their boyfriend just did something amazing or they just split up with their girlfriend they have been with for years.

Don't get me wrong - in terms of Journalism, Facebook is a brilliant tool. It allows you to find groups of people who all feel the same way about something. It is a social networking tool, it allows us to connect with people all over the world but it seems that we are becoming less social. Facebook is an addiction. The only time I do not check Facebook is when I am at work, in university or asleep. I check it before my shift at work starts and as soon as I finish. I check it before a lecture and as soon as it finishes. I check it before turning my phone off at night and as soon as I turn it on in the morning.

The amount of times I check Facebook outweighs the number of conversations I have most days. When I do have conversations it is often about something a friend of mine has seen on Facebook and often I have already seen it.

When looking through various websites last night, I came across a very interesting video about Facebook and it really made me think about social networking in a new light. You can find the video here. I must warn you that it does have some strong language.

Every point the guy in the video makes is true. If someone asked me now how many friends I have I wouldn't count all the people I have on Facebook. I would count the important people in my life not the people from school who I haven't seen or talked to since I left there in 2007.

We cannot blame Facebook for becoming a less social world. Sites like myspace and Bebo were around before it and there will probably be more social networking sites in the future. I confess that I am a Facebook addict and I pledge that from now on I will try to be more social in the real world than online.

If you would like to contact me about anything in the post feel free to email me at FDent1@uclan.ac.uk.

Poor Journalism

I was recently searching the internet looking for something to do when I came across something which shocked me –a website by a guy called Tom Scott who has created a set of Journalism Warning Labels he has created to warn people of what he calls “sloppy journalism and other questionable content”. In his site, he mentions how he has been putting the stickers on copies of free London newspapers and has even made them available for readers to download.

At first I was appalled by this – if I saw one of these stickers on a piece of my work I would be very offended and a little upset. But then, as I thought more about the idea I realised that apart from sending letters to the editor, there is no real way of commenting on newspaper articles as there is online. If you send a letter in to a newspaper they are unlikely to publish it but if you comment on an article on their news website, a person is more likely to see it.

A couple of websites later, I found this article. I am not normally one to read about celebrities’ relationships but when I found this article about the announcement that Muse front man Matt Bellamy and actress Kate Hudson are expecting a baby I couldn’t dismiss it. I don’t wish to brag about my skills – I do not think that I am an amazing writer but if I wrote an article like that one I would give up on any hope I ever had of being a journalist.

Having read the Kate Hudson article a few times in a bid to make sense of it I feel that if writing like this appears in your newspaper Tom Scott’s stickers might not be so offensive after all!

Happy New Year!

Despite having travelled to many countries, one of my favourite cities remains Newcastle upon Tyne. Having spent most of the past year and a half in Preston I love coming back home. It’s events like last night’s Winter Festival held around the city really make Newcastle come alive.

The winter festival began with music and carnival dancers around Newcastle’s Greys monument before the parade, organised by outdoor arts company Walk the Plank stunned the thousands lining the streets.

The cities Ice Queen (pictured above) led the parade up Northumberland Street and to the Civic centre where a fantastic fireworks display concluded the event. The parade was a fantastic way to say goodbye to 2010 and welcome in 2011.

Newcastle’s next big event will be Chinese New Year on February 6 when we will celebrate the start of the year of the Rabbit.