It was a Saturday morning, and I was going through the classified advertisements in the daily newspaper (Singapore Straits Times) with my morning shot of caffeine sitting inside my favourite mug. I make it a habit to look at job offer advertisement occasionally to size up Singapore's state of economy. I muttered to my wife about the shrinking number of job vacancies despite a healthy economy. She gave me a strange look and burst out laughing, telling me that I was old school. Today, many organizations today prefer placing job employment advertisement on the web rather than in print.
Technology today has evolved so much that the web has radically change the way we communicate. According to Castells, the World Wide Web is a communication network use to post and exchange documents. These documents can be texts, audio, video and software programs. Because the internet provides a diverse range of application, it has become the communication fabric of our lives, for work, for personal connection, for social networking, for information, for public service, for politics and for religion (2009, Pg. 64). In the new era of Web 2.0, social media, blogs and forum provide a platform to not only consume information, but to participate as well. This has resulted in a 2 way flow of communication.
Another significant change brought about by technology, is the way documents are designed. The first job advertisement that I explored on the internet made me realised why more and more organisations choose this platform as a preferred mode of job advertisement. The "Search" function is the first thing you see when you enter into a job advertisement site. The availability of this function allows job seeker to zoom in on specific jobs that they are looking for.
Next, job advertisement on the newspaper appear in the usual boring format of words. On the other hand, a similar advertisement on the internet includes images. Images have other effects that are different from words, particularly at effective, aesthetic and imaginative levels (Walsh 2006, Pg. 29). With so many jobs of similar nature being advertised, these job seekers rarely read an advertisement thoroughly. They scan through these advertisement usually seeking information such as salary, working hours and fringe benefits. Images such as company logo, photos of working environment and products (in the case of sales) will further arouse the interest of job seekers further, without having to read through lengthy documents.
The use of Hyperlink is another key aspect in document design. In this case, job seekers are able to instantly link themselves to other documents such as application forms, email address of the prospective employers and the profile of the company.
Snyder believes that the rapidly increasing use of visual modes of communication has a complex set of causes, the simultaneous development and the exponential expansion of the potentials of electronic technologies will entrench visual modes of communication as a rival to language in many domains of public life (ed. 1997, Pg. 55)
References :
Castells, M 2009, Communication Power, OUP, Oxford
Singapore jobs 1998 to 2013, viewed 16 February 2013, <http://sg.jobsdb.com/SG/>
Walsh, M 2006, The "textual shift" : Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal text, Australia journal of language and literacy, Vol. 29, no. 1, Pg. 24 to 37
Synder, I (ed.) 1997, Page to screen : taking literacy into the electronic era, Allen and Unwin, St. Leonards, N.S.W.
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