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[history-and-stuff-and-things]

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[letstalkaboutsocialmedia]

The forbidden discussion of Tiananmen Square

He who shall not be named. No, I’m not talking about Voldemort, I’m talking about the events that occurred at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

On the night of June 4th, 1989, thousands of pro-democracy and mostly student protestors were horrifically killed by the Chinese military. This all occurred after months of tension surrounding protests at and in the surrounding areas of Tiananmen Square.

Immediately after the event, the government issued a complete media blackout, which over the next 29 years has always remained. But now, with the 30th anniversary of the event quickly coming up, the censorship has strengthened even further. Not only have the words ‘Tiananmen Square’ along with images and footage of the now coined term ‘June 4th Event’ been blocked, but now dates, names, death tolls, and even the word ‘today’ are instantly blocked from posting across common social media sites such as WeChat and Weibo. The China Digital Times released a spreadsheet in 2016 with the 264 sensitive words related to the event, although with advancing technologies the censorship has become even stricter, with AI able to instantly recognise images of the square or the famous image of the ‘Tank Man’ blocking the 4 tanks from heading towards the square.

Every day there are four sensors running to block all necessary information, and it was released that they censor between 5,000 and 10,000 pieces of information a day, or five to seven pieces a minute.

Over the years, many attempts have been made to publicise the events, with references made on the hit TV show ‘The Simpsons’ (as shown in the image above). In 2012, one of the most watched Chinese stock indices fell exactly 64.89 points on the day of the 23rd anniversary of the event. The 64.89 is the exact date of the events, and although sparked a lot of controversy, it was eventually ruled as a strange coincidence rather than a deliberate attack. Despite this being classified as accidental, the censors still blocked the words ‘Shanghai Stock Market’ throughout the internet for some time afterwards.

Reporter for The Guardian, Louisa Lim, went around four different Beijing university campuses, showing students the ‘Tank Man’ image and asked them whether they recognised it. Out of the 100 students she interviewed, only 15 of them could identify the image, with some asking whether the picture was from  Korea or Japan, and having absolutely no recognition of the the term ‘June 4th’.

The firewall in China is so strong that residents living in the country their whole life may never know about the events that occurred in Tiananmen Square and the lives that were lost fighting for the freedom of people in the country. The political rights of the Chinese are stripped from them, and ultimately the Government will keep these rights until likely another Tiananmen Square type event will occur.

This is my last post on this blog. It’s been a fun 8 weeks posting on here and I’ve learnt a lot about social media and the many aspects of this broad topic. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it :)

BYE BYE!

[avengersmemes]

Pretty much 😂

[catchymemes]

[letstalkaboutsocialmedia]

When streamers join forces

6 influencers. 1 House.

This sounds like the beginning of a new reality TV show but you are mistaken. In August 2018, 6 online content creators came together to form a group YouTube page titled ‘Click’. The group consists of 6 Australian content creators by the usernames of Muselk, Loserfruit, Crayator, BazzaGazza, Marcus, and LazarBeam. All 6 of them have been creating content online for the last 10 years, specialising in various games and creating both YouTube or online streaming content.

The 6 of them came to all be friends/acquaintances throughout 2018 as they were some of the leading esports content creators in the oceanic area. Specifically, all of them played the wildly popular online game ‘Fortnite’ (you may have not heard of it idk....). Through meeting at various conventions and esports competitions such as PAX and VidCon, they all decided to join forces and create an empire known as Click.

Though all 6 members gained popularity from the creation of the channel, I will specifically focus on one member who’s popularity went through the roof. 

Kathleen Belsten, 26, had just 620,000 subscribers the day that Click launched. She was known mostly for her Twitch channel in which she streamed mainly different online games as well as showing her dancing talent. After just a month of Click, she had already reached 880,000 subscribers, and reached 1 million just another month later. As Kathleen was the only female in the Click group, alongside 5 males with a male predominant following, its suspected that she was quite appealing for many to subscribe.

The Click channel has now reached 1.9 million subscribers, with each video reaching over 2 million views. This channel allowed not only the 6 influencers to gain a larger audience, but it also brought popularity of esports back to the Australian area. The Oceanic server on Fortnite is one of the smallest servers, with most popular Fortnite streamers and channels based in the USA, with the most prominent example being Ninja. But this channel has flowed popularity back to local content creators and boosted the overall esports community in Australia. This popularity increase has shown most recently through the creation of the Fortnite Summer Smash Tournament in the 2019 Australian Open.

In early 2019, the Australian Open announced that they were going to host a Fortnite competition with $500K prize money for the winner’s charity of choice during the afternoon before the Mens’ final. There were many famous Fortnite players including all the members of Click, alongside others such as Lachlan, MrFreshAsian, MrToastedShoes, and the RNG Twins, joined with many Australian celebrities and personalities such as Peter Hellier, Nick Kyrgios, Mark Bonanno, Michelle Brasier, and many more. This not only brought a lot of hype and tourism to the Australian Open, but it also brought the online Fortnite community to the mainstream media and entertainment. This event possibly allowed people to discover the Fortnite community or even just the game itself, expanding the size of the community.

Gaming communities are strong, inclusive groups that allow many to find new hobbies, friends, and even colleagues in the case of the Click group.

Until next week, maybe I’ll go play some Fortnite.

[forever-memes]

Stealth mode.

[noahnomore]

[dankmemesreasonforliving]

[broadwaybadass]

some of you haven’t gotten the urge to perform a whole musical by yourself at 2 am and it shows

[letstalkaboutsocialmedia]

Self diagnosing on YouTube

Many big YouTube stars have always been open to discuss their personal experiences with mental health issues. Three influencers, Dan Howell, Zoe Sugg, and Dodie Clark, all have large followings of more than 18 million subscribers between the three.

All three of these influencers have made videos discussing their own experiences with 3 different mental illnesses; Dan with depression, Zoe with anxiety, and Dodie with derealisation.

In Dan’s video, he opens up about how he has not often discussed his history with depression in the past as he thought he was never healthy enough to discuss it, but decided to upload his video in the hope that someone would find it helpful or informative. In his video, despite being informative, he still keeps his comedic tone throughout the entirety of the video. In Zoe’s video, she also discusses her experience with growing up with anxiety and how it affects her daily life. Dodie is a particularly interesting example, as she was only diagnosed with derealisation in 2017, even though she had been experiencing symptoms of it since 2012. She had a mental breakdown in 2016, in which at the time she found the illness ‘depersonalisation’ which she diagnosed herself with until she discovered derealisation.

Looking through the comments of all 3 videos, it’s clear that the videos have done a lot of good for many, allowing people to feel included or understood, validating their own issues. But there are also comments from clearly young teens, commenting on how they are ‘11 and have all the symptoms of depression’ or saying things such as ‘shit I think I might be mildly depressed’.

Some young impressionable viewers can watch their idols and see they experience something like depression, in which the viewer sees as something they also want to have in order to feel similar or have something in common with someone they look up to. So many of these young viewers are uneducated about the reality of mental illnesses and they don’t realise that mental illnesses are not ‘cool and quirky’ and are a genuine problem that take approximately 3000 lives every year in Australia alone.

As someone who became active on social media around the age of 11/12, and becoming particularly active on YouTube around 13, I remember a time when I convinced myself I had depression and anxiety, because I almost thought it was cool and relatable to have these problems, which is so upsetting to look back on. I now can look back at that age and know that I was not depressed or anxious. I know that I convinced myself I was when in reality I was probably just stressed from the wildly stressful times of year 8 maths (lol). At 19, I now know that I do have quite extreme anxiety, stemming from a severe phobia, but I am that much older and more educated about the issue and my own mind and body to know that it’s not just placebo.

Although I have made some negative points about these videos I do believe that they can also be extremely helpful. These influencers are using their platforms to spread a message and a voice to increase accessibility and access to information about mental health and mental illnesses. People watching this video may be able to recognise their own symptoms and use this as a starting point to help diagnose themselves with an illness they may not have known they were experiencing. Although self diagnosis should be accompanied with diagnosis from a health professional, it can be a good starting point, as well as allowing emotional support from others in comment sections. I think Kati Morton, who runs a YouTube channel discussing mental health, describes the process of self diagnosis well in her video.

There are many aspects of the mental health presence on YouTube that cause both positive and negative reactions. Personally I think that discussing mental health and illness, when done well, is great as it destigmatises the negative connotations surrounding mental health, particularly with adults.

Until next time!

[dankmemeuniversity]

[dankmemeuniversity]

[letstalkaboutsocialmedia]

Crowdsourcing Group Presentation

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1t1JpLocOjqHUV1Yk9PbIGdesn27qdPj56zvflBJzTx8/edit?usp=sharing :D

[letstalkaboutsocialmedia]

My own experiment with crowd wisdom

Crowdsourcing is a very powerful concept and has become amplified through the growth of social media. There are 4 main branches to crowdsourcing:

1. Crowd creation

2. Crowd voting

3. Crowd funding

4. Crowd wisdom

In this post I’m focusing specifically on crowd wisdom as I am particularly fascinated by the concept. Jan Lorenz describes the concept nicely, that “the aggregate of many people’s estimates tend to be closer to the true value than all of the separate individual or even expert guesses” (Lorenz. J, 2011).

After watching Lior Zoref’s fascinating Ted Talk on crowdsourcing, specifically the TedOX he brought on stage to prove the experiment of crowd wisdom, I was inspired. I just had to test out the theory of crowd wisdom with my own cricles on different social media platforms because the theory seemed almost too good to be true.

So I took to my many social media platforms with a simple and age old question: how many almonds (ok maybe almonds aren’t so ‘age old’) are in the jar?

How many do you think are in the jar?

With posts on Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Discord, Twitch, and email, I found and pestered anyone I could find to share their guesses and share the post with their own friends, creating a decentralised network throughout the internet.

After just 48 hours, I managed to receive over 100 guesses. Incredible! Also a little scary to see how many people I interact with online every day.

The results ranged between a measly 58 almonds to over 860 almonds. When I averaged out all of these, the total average came out to be 340 almonds. The correct number was actually 379 so the error margin was just 39 almonds below which is just incredible. 

Although the error margin of my experiment was higher than Lior Zoref’s amazing 3kg off the actual weight of the Ox, I was still unbelievably happy with the results. I can assume that the reason my error margin was higher was because my pool size was smaller. In Lior’s experiment, he had over 500 answers, so it’s assumed that if I were to receive more answers to add to my average, I my error margin would slowly shrink smaller and smaller.

After doing this experiment, it’s clear that crowd wisdom is definitely possible and true to the basic theory. The power that a crowd has over an individual is very powerful and could be used in many instances for the good.

Really the only downfall to this experiment was the copious amounts of almonds I ate.

Until next week!