Ronan Vun

For this week’s blog, I’ll be talking about the social media in China. With businesses across the globe using Facebook/Instagram to reach new customers, entering a new market without them might seem impossible. However, there’s a range of other platforms available that businesses can use for social media marketing in China. As we all know, China had created their own social media such as WeChat, Weibo, Tencent and etc. These social are more like a China version of social media from the Western countries.

The video below shows the top 5 social media in China.

Why is social media so important in China?

According to a Chinese government study, 802 million people in China are now active internet users. This amounts to 57.7% of the country’s population. Even more interesting is the incredible level of mobile uptake in China: 98% of Chinese people using the internet do so via mobile devices. Compare that with just 73% in the US. This makes Chinese social media more immediate and dynamic, with mobile users looking to platforms like WeChat and Weibo for the latest recommendations, testimonials, and tips.

Why some social media are banned in China?

China is considered to have one of the most extensive and sophisticated censorship regimes in the world. The "Great Firewall," a number of methods are employed to control online expression, including website blocking and keyword filtering, censoring social media, and arresting content posters who broach sensitive or political issues. A host of government agencies wield authority over the internet in China, such as the Central Propaganda Department and the Ministry of Public Security. In 2014, it established the Cyberspace Administration of China as the main body for internet censorship in China. Since then, The Great Firewall prevents users from accessing foreign news sites such as the BBC, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

So for this week is social gaming. I like to play games and I enjoy watching people streaming their gameplays on Twitch. 

So, what is social gaming? Social gaming means a person or a group of people playing online game on a social media platform. The well-known social media platform for gaming that I know is Twitch. People uses Twitch to enjoy watching game streamers and enjoying the content they are making in it. Therefore, I have a question I want to ask. Is there risks in social gaming?

As we all know, mostly everybody can access the internet, thanks to the current technology. Since mostly everybody can access into in, there is a risk where people might trick you on buying fake stuff or scam your money. Mostly people got tricked by the advertisement of the scammers for having a great deal. People tend to compare prices when they wanted to buy a stuff, or they saw a product or service which has a very low price comparing to the market price.

A popular Twitch streamer ‘Shroud’ had his name faked by people in Twitch to scam the users of Twitch.  The scammers used his name to attract people to go inside the stream by putting the title skin giveaway. This has attracted lots of people into it because skins in games are very valuable and pricey, which the scammers used this as an advantage to lure people. It is easy for people to get lure into the trap of the scammer if that person is either new to Twitch or new to the game that they are playing. 

Since this is a problematic matter, what are the actions done?

The community members would need to help Twitch to identify the scammers and report them in order for Twitch to ban them. This is a very huge problem to other streaming platform such as YouTube because streamers tend to upload their content to YouTube, which could cause misleading for the fans. Therefore, Twitch is trying its best to maintain a strict copyright policy.

Before attending the Digital communities’ class, the word ‘fandom’ for me is a place where fans of a particular thing such as movies, cartoons, games and etc. I think some of them will like to make their own fan art based on the things they like. Basically, it is a place for people that have same interest in things where they can communicate with each other with their shared interest.

For more information, I would like to say more about the origin of fandom. Why people use the word ‘fandom’ as fandom?

According to Lara (2016), the word ‘fandom’ has been named a century ago. It was way before the times where there’s no Internet. The word ‘fandom’ comes from ‘fanatic’ which means ‘frenzied’ or ‘mad’. In the early 1682, they started to shorten the word ‘fanatic’ to ‘fan’. Finally, in 1903, the word ‘fandom’ has made its appearance. “Fandom” is a combination of the “fan” with the suffix “-dom.” Although “fandom” is generally used to refer simply to a collection of fans, I like idea of having -dom behind it. If we read “fandom” the same way as “kingdom,” then it would literally refer to a region controlled by fans — a meaning that I think expresses something essential about fandom. It is a group dedicated to showing devotion to some object, but it is also a site of production generated and controlled by fans — a space where fans create their own language and communities, and where they reimagine characters and worlds into something that is uniquely theirs.

The video below show how does fandom works.

Basically, fandom is a community created by fans of a particular interest and people with the same interest would join them to talk about. Personally, I love watching anime and playing games. I’d seen lots of anime fandoms and game fandoms which is kind of fun to have people to talk about the things that you enjoy.  Social media has revolutionized the ways audiences connect with and consume media. Through the promotion of participatory culture social media has magnified and evolved fan practices that existed pre web 2.0 into mainstream cultural practices. Other than that, social media is continually evolving to create new media distribution platforms to capture an increasingly engaged media audience.

First of all, I would like to explain about what are crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.

What Is Crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing involves obtaining work, information, or opinions from a large group of people who submit their data via the Internet, social media, and smartphone apps. People involved in crowdsourcing sometimes work as paid freelancers, while others perform small tasks on a voluntary basis. For example, traffic apps encourage drivers to report accidents and other roadway incidents to provide real-time updated information to app users. Crowdsourcing allows companies to farm out work to people anywhere in the country or around the world, which lets businesses tap into a vast array of skills and expertise without incurring the normal overhead costs of in-house employees.

What is crowdfunding?

Crowdfunding is a method of raising capital through the collective effort of friends, family, customers, and individual investors. This approach taps into the collective efforts of a large pool of individuals—primarily online via social media and crowdfunding platforms—and leverages their networks for greater reach and exposure. For example, Crowdfunding is essentially the opposite of the mainstream approach to business finance. Traditionally, if you want to raise capital to start a business or launch a new product, you would need to pack up your business plan, market research, and prototypes, and then shop your idea around to a limited pool or wealthy individuals or institutions. These funding sources included banks, angel investors, and venture capital firms, really limiting your options to a few key players.  You can think of this fundraising approach as a funnel, with you and your pitch at the wide end and your audience of investors at the closed end. Fail to point that funnel at the right investor or firm at the right time, and that’s your time and money lost.  

The difference between Crowdsourcing & Crowdfunding

While crowdsourcing seeks information or work product, crowdfunding seeks money to support individuals, charities, or start-up companies. People can contribute to crowdfunding requests with no expectation of repayment, or companies can offer shares of the business to contributors.

What is public health campaign?

Promoting public health and preventing the spread of dangerous health risks is an integral communication function in modern society. Whether the focus is on the prevention and control of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), cancer, heart disease, or community violence, a fusion of theory and practice in communication is urgently needed to guide effective promotion efforts. Public health campaigns involve a broad set of communication strategies and activities that specialists in health promotion engage in to disseminate relevant and persuasive health information to groups of people who need such information to help them lead healthy lives.

Public health campaigns involve the strategic dissemination of information to the public in order to help groups of people resist imminent health threats and adopt behaviors that promote good health. Typically, these campaigns are designed to raise public consciousness about important health issues by educating specific groups (i.e., target audiences) about imminent health threats and risky behaviors that might harm them. Health campaigns are generally designed both to increase awareness of health threats and to move target audiences to action in support of public health.

For example, public health campaigns often encourage target audience members to engage in healthy behaviors that provide resistance to serious health threats. These behaviors can include adopting healthy lifestyles that include exercise, nutrition, and stress-reduction; avoiding dangerous substances such as poisons, carcinogens, or other toxic materials; seeking opportunities for early screening and diagnosis for serious health problems; and availing themselves of the best available health-care services, when appropriate, to minimize harm.

I have read an article about social media for health promotion and weight management. the use of social media for health promotion is an emerging field of investigation, preliminary research suggests that it increases participant engagement, and may provide a cost-effective tool to provide social support for individuals participating in weight management programmes. With stringent privacy protocols in place, social media may be a useful, cost-effective accompaniment to multifactorial weight management programmes. However more research is needed to identify how to make the best use of social media as health promotion tool.

The social media is a useful technology for us to access through various information about public healthcare and so on. There is also a risk that people would just spreading fake news around the social media to cause chaos on the internet. It is wise to check with others whether the information obtained from the social media is trustable or not. 

As we all know, protests are getting even more outrageous among these years. There is a protest which matters about a black people was killed by a white policeman on the street. 

The black person is called George Floyd,  African American man killed during an arrest after a store clerk alleged he had passed a counterfeit $20 bill in Minneapolis. A white police officer named Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for a period initially reported to be 8 minutes and 46 seconds. After his death, protests against police brutality, especially toward black people, quickly spread across the United States and internationally.

George Floyd protests

The George Floyd protests are an ongoing series of protests and civil unrest which began in Minneapolis in the United States on May 26, 2020. The protests began as part of the responses to the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man who was killed during an arrest after Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis Police Department officer, knelt on Floyd's neck for nearly eight minutes as three other officers looked on. Chauvin and the other three officers involved in the arrest which led to Floyd's death were later arrested.

Local protests began in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area of Minnesota before quickly spreading nationwide and in over 2,000 cities and towns in over 60 countries in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Protests continued throughout June, July, and August, with polls at the time estimating that between 15 million and 26 million people had participated at some point in the demonstrations in the United States, making the protests the largest in United States history.

While the majority of protests have been peaceful, demonstrations in many cities escalated into riots, looting, and street skirmishes with police. Many police responded to protests with numerous instances of police brutality, including against reporters. At least 200 cities in the U.S. had imposed curfews by early June, while at least more than 30 states and Washington, D.C. activated over 62,000 National Guard personnel due to the mass unrest. By the end of June, at least 14,000 people had been arrested. It was estimated that between May 26 and August 22, 93% of individual protests were "peaceful and nondestructive".

How the pandemic changed social media and George Floyd’s death created a collective conscience?

The image of a police officer kneeling on the neck of a George Floyd while he is in police custody, handcuffed and saying he cannot breath will be forever be burned into our memory. In the last few weeks, many of us have been following the protests sparked by his killing through social media and online news publications.

George Floyd is not the first black man to be killed by police brutality. Before him, there were many black people lost and civil rights activists had been calling for change well before this moment. However, what makes it different now is the sheer size of the response.

Across the world, from New York to Cape Town, large crowds of people of all ages and backgrounds have taken to the streets to protest the injustice of Floyd’s killing and to draw attention to the systems of racism that exist in their countries. The first protest began the day after Floyd was killed on May 26 and they are still going.

The coronavirus and how we have been consuming social media has a lot to do with the psychology of why so many have and continue to be mobilized.

So what is political engagement? According to Bournemouth University,  Political engagement is defined here as a cognitive process. When the brain becomes stimulated by external stimuli, in this case relating to politics, elaboration occurs. Elaboration here means the connecting of thoughts, recognizing the new information as important and relevant, a process that leads to having an attitudinal reaction. Political engagement is a necessary precursor for political participation and thus important for a vibrant civic culture.

There is an interesting journal that I have stumbled upon which is the use of social media on political participation among university students. 

According to Ahmad, Alvi, Ittefaq (2019), they investigated how online political activities impact political efficacy and real-life political participation among university students in rural Pakistan.  The results reveal that the majority of the students use social media for political awareness and information. Political efficacy is significantly based on online political participation. In addition to that, social media is a vital platform for netizens to participate in real-life political activities.  In conclusion, the findings of the study suggest that online political activities strongly correlate to political awareness and offline political participation. In rural areas of Pakistan, the younger generations are very active on social media to participate in online and offline political happenings. 

There is a video that I had found regarding on how social media can help us engage in politics and how it could shape our future.

According to Alex Honeysett (2020), unlike many other social media platforms, Tumblr allows you to post a wide variety of content types, ranging from text and photos to video, audio, and links. It also offers a variety of design “themes,” which let you create a page that best supports your brand’s image and the types of content you plan to post.