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Week 11 Global Social Media Practice: Case study China

The Great Firewall Of China

The internet censorship regulated in China is really extreme because of a wide range of laws and regulation applied to the Internet access in China Mainland. In relation to the internet censorship in China, two key phrases “Golden Shield Project” and “The Great Firewall of China” as a sub-system are still the hot topic that many researchers and foreign companies are concerned about. “The Great Firewall Of China” is a nickname appeared in 1997 which refers to a project initiated and controlled by Chinese Government. In general, the role of “The Great Firewall” is to filter keywords out of internet search and restrict the access to some selected websites in the internet sphere of China. 

Take social media platforms and some specific websites as the typical example of “The Great Firewall” in China Internet. In the half second of 2009, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China because of containing social and political commentary. Moreover, Google and Wikimedia website are also blocked to limit the users’ approach to specific contents. 

Due to these facts happened in China Internet, a question has risen that so ‘What is happening behind “The Great Firewall Of China” to make the usage of social media in China still leading in the world?’ and ‘How the users get engaged with social media in their own manner?’

Behind The Great Firewall Of China

According to Forbes, at the end of 2015, China has 688 million Internet users, more than double the population of  the United State. This researched data demonstrates the fact that though China blocked every single of social media platforms from Western, China is still considered as one of the biggest population of netizens or internet users in the whole world. The way that they made that kind of stuff is to not only block but also create/develop their domestic media sphere (Chinanet). They create some social media platforms such as Renren, Weibo, Youku and  Tudou to replace the appearance of Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube in China Internet. 

Take Weibo as the typical example of the equivalent platform of Twitter that Weibo offers the users an online place  to share their 140-characters message, find and follow their friend and re-post friends’ message. Moreover, Weibo allows the users to post their images and videos and comment on the other’s updates. 

References:

Lee, M 2016, China's Nearly 700 Million Internet Users Are Hot For Online Finance, viewed on 22 May 2016.<http://www.forbes.com/sites/melanieleest/2016/01/25/chinas-nearly-700-million-internet-users-are-hot-for-online-finance/#4f92d6fd1391>

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Week 10: Social Game: Playing The Crowd

In the developing era of digital technology (smartphone, Ipad) and the appearance of social networking sites especially Facebook, another platform that follows the success of this is social games industry.

Some characteristics of social games

Awareness of others’ actions in games – When you could see in your news feed that someone in your friend list invites you to play the game with them. These notifications appear as social context, making you more likely to interact with the game.

Casual gaming – “Social gaming” is not really for so called “hardcore gamers”. Because social gaming is for the average user and not for a specific type of person.

Multiplayer – refers to that more than one person can interact with the game at the same time. Whether it’s two or two hundred users connected all over the world, the game has to be multiplayer for it to be social.

Based on Social Platforms – based around social platforms, Facebook for example, one of the most powerful platforms that integrate with social games. In the context of social gaming, social platforms provide users with an identity and also can provide the basic manner for simple forms of communication (such as notifications, etc).

Definition Of Social Games

Social Games are a type of online games that enables the users to interact with the others. Social Games typically features multiplayer, casual and are based on social networking platforms. For example, Happy Farm by 5 Minutes, FarmVille by Zynga and The Sims Social by Playfish.

Appstore as Social Gaming Distribution 

According to The Statistic Portal 2016, in 2015, the App Store offered 396,094 gaming apps, this figure had almost doubled since July 2013. Due to the fact that mostly all the games offered in Appstore reflect the characteristics of social games, Appstore can be considered as a huge digital distribution of social games.

Development of Gaming Industry

From Lan Party to MMOG

In the past, gaming industry offers a gaming manner that a gathering of people with computers or game consoles, between which they establish a local area network (LAN), primarily for the purpose of playing multiplayer video games. The size of these networks may vary from the very small to a very large cooperation of hundreds or more. As of 2013, the world record for the size of a LAN party is 17,403 connected systems, set in Sweden.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, gaming industry experiences a huge change from Lan party to MMOG (Massively multiplayer online game) which is capable of supporting large numbers of players simultaneously in every corner of the world. MMOs usually feature a huge, persistent network of gaming players. These games can be found for most network-capable platforms, including the personal computer, video game console, or smartphones and other mobile devices.

Moreover, nowadays, as the gaming industry is getting bigger and stronger, the relationship between gamers is not only built up on-screen through the internet but also being reinforced off-screen in real life events. For example, “viewing parties” is the place for everybody who share the same favorite to gather together to watch esports events. In 2014, “League of Legends” world championship hosted by Riot Games in Seoul Worldcup Stadium with 45,000 seats and roughly 27 million streaming views. 

References:

The Statistics Portal, Number of available apps in the iTunes App Store from 2008 to 2015, viewed on 22 May 2016. <http://www.statista.com/statistics/268251/number-of-apps-in-the-itunes-app-store-since-2008/>

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Week 9: Public Health Campaigns & Communities

In 1961, The Cancer Council Australia was formed by the Australia Cancer Society as a non-profit organization which its main objectives is to promote cancer-control policies in Australia, support cancer patients, and their families and contribute to cancer research and prevention as well. The Cancer Council Organisation has provided many social networking platforms such as Facebook page, Twitter or Youtube channel for the viewer to interact with and to perform as an informative resource to seek the advice for health issues.  

In their platforms, except from research information and data about cancers, they mostly share many true stories about cancer patients, how they bravely face with this diabolic illness and how their families overcome the suffering time. Moreover, they also give the examples of some specific individuals that contribute so much to the organisation and then call upon the others to give a hand in helping cancer patients. All of their posts are not only the motivation for the patients but also the place for the others to find the information about cancer. Therefore, The Cancer Council is considered as the presentation of social media’s role in public health. 

According to Pew Research Center, 72% of internet users say they looked online for health information within the past year. This data portrays the fact that a large number of people make use of the internet as their “personal doctor” to deal with any problems relating to health. Though the internet is a huge resource of information that the users can access to everywhere and every time they want, the users should not totally believe in this information as in some cases, this information is lack of evidence to diagnose the state of someone’s health. Therefore, the users should remain their lucid mind in processing the information on the internet to achieve the best result.  

References:

Pew Research Center, Who Doesn’t Gather Health Information Online?, Fox, S 2011. Viewed on 22 May 2016 <http://www.pewinternet.org/2011/10/18/who-doesnt-gather-health-information-online/>

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I found this Gif really true about the attitude of users in social networking platforms and in the real life

Yep.

More Hilarious Gifs

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Week 8: Crowdsourcing In Times of Crisis

In the era of online community and social networking sites, a new word “crowdsourcing” is invented to portray a process of obtaining the ideas and information from a large group of people, especially from the online sources. The word “crowdsourcing” is the combination of two separate words, “crowd” and “outsourcing”, referring to the collaboration of different member’s knowledge in a large community to solve a problem or to achieve a result. Wikipedia can be seen as a typical example of crowdsourcing as the Wikipedia allows the users to perform as the producers as well to generate the content based on their own intelligence. 

Due to the characteristic of “crowdsourcing” as user-generated content, “crowdsourcing” covers a wide range of activities offering both the advantages and disadvantages to the organization.

The “crowdsourcing” performs as crowdsourcing design in the example of Moutain Dew company. The Moutain Dew has utilized the free labour power outside the mind of staff and employees withing the company to acquire the new idea for a new brand name. This kind of activity allows the company to find the name based mostly in the interest of customers without any creative boundary.  

The “crowdsourcing” also involves in “microtasks” as it separates the work into small pieces which are solved by a different of people so that the result or the information will be collected in a fast way. “Safety Check” discourse in Facebook is the typical instance of the practice of “crowdsourcing” through social networking sites. Through Facebook, each of people in natural disaster areas can confirm their status to their friends that they are in safe or unsafe. By doing this way, the information will go faster and more correct.  

However, because all the information is obtained from the crowd and online community, the diversity and unreliability of information’s source can negatively affect the quality of the information. Therefore, the users who utilize “crowdsourcing” to get information have to consider and double-check carefully before officially applying this information to any projects.

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Digital Citizenship: Trolling and Social Media Conflict

In the era of internet and social networking sites’ development, the online platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr perform as the best tool to connect everybody into a large community. However, everything has two sides, the bad one and the good one. Therefore, except from the positive point, one of the most negative problem risen after the arrival of online platforms is ‘trolling’ and ‘cyber-bullying’, the form of conflict in social media.

A ‘troll’ can be defined as an abusive and obnoxious user who lives to get a rise out of others online. A ‘troll’ promotes argument between people by using provoking or off-topic content in web conversation such as chat room, comment, status on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr. Moreover, the ‘Anonymous’ users can be considered as the primary source of trolling and other social media conflicts. Due to the free and unlimited access to mostly all the social networking sites, many people use an anonymous account with the aim of provoking, seducing or teasing other people by violent or sexual content and disregard the bad result remaining after their action. For example, some people use the fake Facebook account as a tool to revenge other people they hate and it also marks the beginning of many unfortunate rows happing in real life. In many cases, we can easily see that some accounts using off-topic contents to disrupt the content in a page or a forum just for their amusement. This action creates so much inconvenience for the users who truly engage with the page. Another form of social media conflict is ‘bullying’ which is normally seen in school as the aggressive behaviours between teenager students but now can be seen in online platforms as a serious problem for young people. ‘Cyber-bullying’ is the act of severely harming people by posting bad rumors about other people, especially teenagers, in the internet which leads to some serious issues such as depression or suicide. 

Facing a big problem of conflict on social networking sites, many solutions have been invented to deal with it. For example, the Australia government has established a children’s e-Safety Commissioner to protect children from being harmed by negative content on the internet. Moreover, the Facebook company has created a block and report option that allows the users to block someone that is dangerous to them or report the contents which comprise negative point. However, neither of ways mentioned above cannot totally remove all the bad effect of ‘trolling’ and ‘bullying’. Therefore, the best way for the users is that they should consider carefully with any contents on the internet and ignore everything that is untrue or dangerous to them.

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Digital Citizenship: Activism and Protest

Nowadays, in the era of social networking sites and the internet, ‘Internet Activism’ and Protest have become an important part of our social life. By the help of some online platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc, everybody from all over the world can stay involved with some specific universal issues. Nevertheless, everything has two sides, the good side, and the bad side, ‘Online Activism’ brings not only some positive effects but also some negative effects on our society.

Firstly, the increasing use of social networking sites in activism and protest brings several advantages to our society as it connects every people, disregard the geographic position, to participate in this activity or campaign. Additionally, hashtags can be considered as the most powerful tool to do any activism online because ‘hashtags’ can gain easily the attention from a thousand of people to join the conversation just through a ‘click’. Moreover, hashtags is the fastest way to keep updating with the newest post relating to one specific issue. “Ice Bucket Challenge” can be seen as one of the most typical examples of activism. It is an activity to promote the awareness of one mental disease and encourage people to raise money for research. People get involved in this activity by making a video that dumping a bucket of ice water on someone’s head, posting it on Facebook with the hashtag #Icebucketchallenge and tagging some friends to challenge. At this time, ‘Ice Bucket Challenge’ is seen as something that more than just ‘hashtag activism’ as , according to CBS news, “the ALS Association has gained more than 630,000 new donors, there have been 2.4 million videos related to the challenge on Facebook.” “Ice Bucket Challenge” has created a new universal hot trend at this time with an extremely huge of interaction from every corner of the world. The date mentioned above can clearly portray the power of ‘Internet activism’ nowadays.

Co-exist with the positive effects of ‘Internet Activism’, ‘Internet Activism’ also has some disadvantages as it brings out a new century of ‘clicktivism’. This means that people click the ‘like’ button to support the issue without totally understanding the content and the purpose of this issues. For example, after a terrorist attack on November 2015 in Paris, people around the world change their avatar with the hashtag #prayforparis to take a compassion on the victims. However, some members of the community share this stuff just for fun and because it is a new trend and they have to follow it.

Condon, S 2014, ‘Ice bucket challenge: More than just "hashtag activism"?’, CBS News, viewed at 17 April 2016. <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-bucket-challenge-more-than-just-hashtag-activism/>

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Digital Citizenship: Political Engagement

“The internet is having an impact upon election news but also, more broadly, on news journalism and political communication.” (Young, 2010) There is no doubt that nowadays, in the era of internet and social networking sites, everybody can easily get engaged with political information through online platforms.

According to Young (2010), “the Pew Research Center found that nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of American internet users went online during the 2008 presidential election to take part in, or get news and information about, the campaign. This was 55 percent of the entire adult population and it was not only about passively receiving news: 13 percent of all American adults used the internet to create their own political content and 14 percent used social networking sites for ‘political information or to take part in some aspect of the campaign…”.

Due to the fact that a large number of people interacting with political information through the internet, mostly politicians in the world make use of social networking sites as an effective tool to create political campaign strategy, broadcast their images to everybody and somehow increase their voting number. Twitter and Facebook can be considered as the most popular sites that the politicians use to interact with the community by sharing, retweet, comment and facilitate some discussion forum about political issues.

So why Twitter and Facebook?

Simply because Twitter and Facebook are the online platforms which are easy to establish and inexpensive to use but still effective in reaching out so many people. “Twitter is a way of following people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would now otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand ‘friends’ on Facebook, as you never could in real life.” (Jericho, 2012)

In addition, using Twitter and Facebook can be seen as the friendly way to connect with different kind of people.

By using hashtags or tags on Twitter and Facebook, the politicians can set up a series of information relating to one or some crucial issues and allow the users to update this information by clicking on the hashtags and every post mentioning this keyword will appear.

Except from the advantages of social networking sites, Twitter and Facebook also have some disadvantages that the politicians have to consider carefully before posting anything into publicity. Because Twitter and Facebook are free to download and sign-up, they create a very big space for everybody disregard of age and sex to talk and state their personal viewpoints. Thus, each statement made by the politicians has to be checked elaborately before publishing. For example, Donald Trump, one of the most popular person appearing in social network sites nowadays with so many shocking statements. Obviously, in free-talking space like Facebook or Twitter, he will receive both the positive and negative viewpoints from the society. We can easily run into his images on Facebook with a joking statement or a video made about him with satirical implication behind it.

Jericho, G. 2012 'How many votes are there on Twitter?' in The rise of the Fifth Estate: social media and blogging in Australian politics, Scribe Publications Pty Ltd, Australia, EBL eBook Library, viewed 20 January 2013, pp 254 - 278

Young, S. 2010, 'New, political reporting and the internet' in How Australia decides: election reporting and the media, Cambridge University Press, Australia, EBL eBook Library viewed 28 February 2012, pp 203-228.

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Is Tumblr a blog or social network site ?

It is really rough to figure out that What exactly Tumblr is? Blog or Social Networking Site. The boundary between Blog and Social Network Site is now not clear due to the rise of internet and technologies. Thus, to understand deeply about the term Tumblr, firstly we will look at the definition of the blog and the networking site.

According to Professor Jill Walker Rettberg, “the word blog is a contraction of words ‘web’ and ‘log’,… but the basic sense of a blog being some kind of log, kept on the Web.” Simply, the blog can be understood as an informational site published on Web and consists of diversity posts displayed in reverse chronological order.

In her 2013 book “Blogging”, she also mentions that the blog is separated into three main types of blogging. The first is the Diary-style blog which is kind of real stories presenting some aspects of one’s life and give a chance for the readers to know about this person. The second one is Filter blogs which not reveal the much information about blogger’s life but his/her experiences in specific subjects. Topic-driven blog is the last one which the topic of the blog is not fixed but primarily focus on one main interest.

In the other angle, social network site is considered as the web-based platform which creates a social network for everybody to share their stories, interests, activities, etc. The content of this platform can range from text to images, videos, and gifs.

Social Network Sites also share some characteristics and affordances with Social Media that is broader bandwidth, personalization, wireless and global connectivity (Siapera).

Broader bandwidth refers to the availability of network connection. With the development of internet nowadays, the users easily access to the internet whenever they want.

Personalization refers to the ability to decide who will be our friends and how we appear on the internet. For example, Facebook allows us to edit our profile’s appearance and choose who will be friends by the accepting button.

Wireless refers to the capability to connect disregard of location. Thus, the users can access the internet everywhere just with their phone, laptop.

Global connection refers to the interacting competence of users. The users nowadays have no boundary in sharing and connecting information with the others around the world.

Personally, Tumblr has both the characteristics of both a blog and a social network site or “what we do in social media is at root a form of blogging” (Jill Rettberg). Tumblr can be considered as a blog as it allows us to create content and keep it in the web. However, Tumblr also is the social networking site because the content of it is not only text but also images, video, especially gifs.

Tumblr enables us to access everywhere and whenever we want with the internet, decide who we want to appear in feed and connect with everybody in the world. All of these features make Tumblr become a networking site.

Moreover, Tumblr also moves from the “one to many” culture to “many to many” culture by allowing us to reblog, comment, like.

Walker Rettberg, J. (2013), 'What is a Blog' ch1; and 'Blogging Communities and Networks', ch 3 in Blogging. (2nd edn) eBook Library

Siapera, E. (2012) ‘Socialities and Social Media’, in Introduction to New Media, pp 191-208.