Group Blog Assignment : Responding to the Audience Comments on the Group Video

Be Friend of the Sea or the Murderer of the Future?
 

First of all, thank you for your comments. I do admit that there is still a lot to improve in our video. Your idea and comment is valuable to us, especially criticism is always a positive motivator for people to improve. And yes, we believe we should also include some sea bed, boats and fishing pictures so that the video would be more coherent to the missions of FOS. Perhaps pictures of those ban trawling that harms the sea bed. Bascially FOS promoted the idea of 'NOT over digging from the ocean'. As we were targeting the Hongkonger who might not be familiar with WHAT is over digging. Hong Kong is now a very developed city. Fishing industry seem to be too far from the generatin X so we adopted a more popular topic in Hong Kong which is shark killing. Eating shark fin is good to your body, especially to your skin. They are valuable and expensive. Chinese people or let's focus onto the Hongkonger therefore love shark fin soup for dinner so much to exhabit their wealth as well. So because of its demand, finshers kill sharks heavily to obtain their valuable fin for selling to the Chinese market. And if we keep killing and killing endlessly, they will extinct one day such as all other kinds of species. Understood from your comment that you don't like shark at all because they are such a dangerous sea creature. However, isn't that's just their instinct to kill for survival as all other kinds of creatures (including human being). You may agree or disagree, but we do believe that all animals in this planet deserve some rooms to live. If we keep hunting and hunting greedyily without leting them reproduce, people will not have enough fish to eat one day. The message is if we wish to sustain our future, we start saying, telling yourself and other people doing what we need to do today. Pass the message out, role modelling yourself to spread the idea across HK, as well as to the world.

After reviewed all the comments, the most issue that people addressed is the bloody fish pictures and the shark fin images.  Although comments were subject to different perspectives, they shared a common characteristic.  Audience tend to pay more attention to those images in relation to the "Pathos" clusters (Aristotle's Rhetoric), talking about the persuasion tactics that inspire the audience emotions.  In our video, we intentionally putting lots of bloody fish and shark fin images to make the audience think guilty.  This is our purpose to persuade audience using their affective emotions for appealing.  And it proves its a right approach. Audience tend to remember those things that can arose their emotions rather than cognitive thinking.  Not only the pictures, so as the background music can impress audience. There are few comments specify that our video song made them patience to stay focus on our lengthy video.  It gave me an insight that the human 5-senses are important in persuasive efficacy of video.

Another insights about persuasive efficacy that we learnt from the comments is about the tactics to "Frame for common ground".  We are not only trying to frame the common benefit in saving the sea, we frame the common culture of Chinese about the custom eating the shark fin in wedding party.  That common culture made us be part of the murderer of the extinguish fishes.  The photos provide evidence that able to persuade audience to re-think our consequences of the common behaviour.  Few comments agreed that only few pictures that can arouse their guilty feeling.  This is another way to connect the audience by framing a common ground of our argument. This is based on a solid understanding of our audience background that make their positions come alive.