This led to complaints and protest by the offended Christians. Several Christian groups as well as inter-religious organisations converge on the Tempo office to complain over the cover. Catholic Students Almni Forum head Hermawi Taslim said The painting has a deep meaning for Catholics as it potrays the holy journey of Jesus and his disciples (Jakarta Post, 2008). Chief editor of Tempo, Toriq Hadad apologised and confessed that there were no intention of hurting the Christians but were only inspired by the composition of the painting, not the concept told in the holy bible. The apology also ran in the next issue.
As a document designer, Putnis & Petelin (1996) implied that, many issues need to be taken into consideration before writing and submitting a piece of work; This is so that he or she will be careful to not touch sensitive issues of the community. A document designer identifies his audience, purposes , and sets aside sensitive issues that are in the community of his audience before choosing the elements for his documents. Also, as Walsh (2006) states that interaction between reader and text can occur within a number of contexts simultaneously; one of them is the social or cultural context of the individual. Thus, this suggest that every writer and document designer should understand the cultural and social context of his or her audience. This is because their cultural and social context influence in the meaning-making of a document.
Therefore, as a mass comunication student, I personally think that it is vital to fully understand the cultural and social context of my targeted reader. This is to avoid touching on sensitive issues and offending the community. However, not only do we writers and document designers should take these into consideration, but also the community in their daily lives to avoid conflicts. After all, we surely do not want to involve ourselves in a lawsuit as there were charges made against Tempo magazine for blasphemy against Christianity (Indonesia Matters, 2008).
References
ABC News 2008, Indonesian weekly apologises over Last Supper Suharto cover, viewed 14th November 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/06/2156269.htm.
Indonesia Matters, 2008, The Last Supper, viewed 14th November
2009, http://www.indonesiamatters.com/1617/the-last-supper/
Putnis, Pete & Petelin, Roslyn 1996, “Writing to communicate”, in Professional communication : principles and applications, Prentice Hall, Sydney, pp236-254
Walsh, M 2006, ‘”Textual shift”: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.
No comments:
Post a Comment