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Global social media: China

The Great Firewall of China

In 2020, China is one of the most populated countries in the world with more than 1.4 billion population (World O Meters 2020). With these many population, the internet usage will also increase as Lai (2020) shows that there are 903.59 million internet users in March 2020. This shows that at least 65% of the people in China are connected to the internet. When it comes to the internet of China, there is an interesting thing about it which is their firewall which is also known as The Great Firewall of China. China is able to control how the people use the Internet by using the Great Firewall of China. Essentially, they made the firewall to block access to most western website or applications such as Google, WhatsApp and even YouTube (Heaven 2019). Instead of all of the things we usually see like Google, WhatsApp and Shopee, they have their own versions of these applications like Baidu for searching, WeChat for messaging and TaoBao for online commerce. Although the firewall blocks off most access to applications outside China, but it is not hard to overcome the firewall by using Virtual Private Network (VPN). VPN allows them to have access to the web outside of China, but Heaven stated that many who developed the VPNs were arrested by the authorities. This ensures the government’s control over the use of The Internet.

China’s social credit system

With control over the Internet, the government will have a good control of the citizens. China announced their social credit system back in 2014. This social credit system is used to monitor the actions of the citizens from all aspect of life such as paying bills, buying product online and other behaviors (Kobie 2019). It means that the people are being monitored and judged every second. It is said that the social credit system is set to be fully operational by 2020. According to Ma (2019), credit scores of an individual will affect their life and punishment will be given if credit score of an individual is very low. Punishments of the credit system includes banned from flying or using a train, internet speeds throttled, the individual and their kids are unable to get into the best schools, individuals cannot get the best jobs, banned from staying in the best hotels and even having their pets being taken away.

One way that the Chinese Government monitors the actions is by using the mass surveillance that they have. According to Casiano (2020), China has been using their surveillance apparatus to collect a large amount of information about their people for years now. China spent a large amount of money on technology like facial recognition and artificial intelligence to improve their surveillance systems. This allows them to identify people who are in the sight of the surveillance cameras. Another way of monitoring is gathering data from social platforms. As China has control over the use of Internet of their people, they are able to collect data from large companies like Alibaba or Tencent to calculate the scores of each citizen. For example, Tencent as the owner of Wechat which is one of the main platforms that Chinese citizens use to communicate is able to provide valuable information of each Chinese citizen to calculate their credit scores.

In my opinion, this is a very effective and unique way to control the peace of a country, but it feels too controlled as people have no rights to voice out opinions. I cannot imagine my activities in both real life and on the Internet being judged 24/7. I think I feel very constrained and very scared to say anything online as it may or may not affect my social credit score.

#mda20009 #week11 #GlobalSocialMedia #China

Social Gaming

What is social gaming?

Social gaming has been around for a long time now. Social gaming can be defined as a video game that is played with people facing against one another with the use of Internet (Cambridge n.d.). Social gaming is when people come together to play the same game and have interaction. In 2012, A research showed that people between the age of 19 – 25 was accounted as the largest segment on the social gaming market. These people played social games using social media platforms like Facebook and the people of these numbers are evenly distributed between male and females with females more active than the males (Digicult n.d.). There are many games which allows player to interact with one another such as MMOs like World of Warcraft and Ragnarok Online or MOBAs like League of Legends and Dota 2. In these games, people are able to interact with one another using chat systems. Other than playing, sites like Twitch, Mixer or Facebook Gaming allows people who watch other people play games and have interaction. Usually people on these platforms stream themselves playing the game and viewers can watch and have a chat with the streamer. This allows them to build a community as well. Other than PC games, there are a lot of mobile games that allows interaction with other players as well. According to Iqbal (2020), the games that were played the most in 2019 were Anipop, Honour of Kings, Candy Crush Saga, Clash of Clans, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds: Exciting Battlefield and so on. Many of these games contain either a chat system or a voice chat system that allows players to interact with other players.

Are gaming communities becoming more toxic?

Personally, I think that only some gaming communities can be really toxic but not all, but toxicity is everywhere no matter what online game people play. According to Mustofa (2018), a research conducted by Haewoon Kwak stated some of the reason why online games can be a place for toxicity and I think there is two reason that I agree with. First, people are toxic especially when game contain competitive element. When it comes to online games, usually people will put victory over losses which makes them very unhappy when they lose a game. This happens a lot especially when it comes to a game where you have to play with a team to win against another team like Dota 2. Dota 2 is very famous for its toxicity as some players will be toxic and scold their teammates when they are not doing well during the game. Other than that, people can be toxic because they are anonymous. In the game, people are identified by their nickname or in-game name which makes them to be unknown to others in the game. Because no one knows them, toxic players feel safe when they are scolding or blaming teammates online. Game developers has also noticed this and taken actions as well. Many online games like League of Legends and Overwatch has created their own system to reduce the toxicity in their games (Castello 2018). In the case of League of Legends, the developers created their own Honor system which praises player when they do good and act positively in a game. In 2015, the lead game Designer of Socials System Jeffrey Lin stated that verbal abuse in game has dropped by 40% and 91.6% of toxic gamers have changed their toxicity.

Although the results of creating a system to reduce the toxicity of players like League of Legends’ Honor system shows good result, but I think that toxicity of a player can be very hard to solve as the game may only analyze the player’s behavior while playing the game and not outside the game. This allows them to be still toxic as they can just not type in game to scold or complain about the teammates. I personally not try to be toxic while playing a game as it can lead to very bad consequences. Toxicity can be similar to cyber bullying which can lead to other person to feel worthless, depressed, disinterested and much more.

#week10 #mda20009 #SocialGaming

Fandom

What is fandom?

Fandom, also the term for fan culture, is defined as the state or condition of someone being very interested in someone or something (Lexico n.d.). Fandom is said to be a community that is consisting of many people that are fans of the same person or topic. These people or topic can be anything such as a celebrity or a popular TV series.

Fandom are usually built by very active or passionate fans (Hundred Life Design 2019). There are fans that supports the person or topic a lot to the point they want to know a lot about it. For example, hardcore Star Wars fans will be willing to watch any Star Wars related content. They will also try to collect all the merchandise sold about Star Wars such as action figures, clothing, and many more. Then, there are also people who will make content about the fandom. People are able to participate in a fandom group by creating creative works such as fan fictions, fan arts, or even videos. Other than that, participation in a fandom can counted when a fan shares about the latest news, a picture about the fandom or even a video clip of the person or topic.

Jenkins et al. (2006) explained that fandom is a participatory culture. Participatory culture is a culture that people can easily express their emotions and have an engagement. This culture also shows strong support for the creation and sharing of an idea with people. This culture also gives the members of the culture to have a sense of connection with others in the same culture. I think this is very true as there are a lot of fan groups or fan pages on social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram. These pages usually post pictures or videos of the fandom that they are in. Then, there will be fans commenting on the post and conversations will be made under the comment section. This shows members are able to express their support towards the topic and connect with members that are participating in the same culture.

Are media representations of fans as ‘weird’ and ‘overly emotional’ fair?

No, I think its not fair to think people that like something is weird or overly emotional. In my opinion, everyone is a fan of something whether it is a book or just a simple hobby. We should not say someone’s fandom is weird but understand the fandom. In a journal wrote by Van den Bulck et al. (2016), they stated that media present fans as people who are ‘nerds’ or ‘obsessed loners’ who are childish and overly obsessed over something. Take cosplay as example, there are representations of cosplayers such as kinky, lonely, spent too much money on costumes or cosplayers do not have other hobbies other than cosplaying (Snellgrove 2017). Most of these representations are not true. People do cosplays because they are passionate and wants show support to their favorite movies or games. Other than that, cosplay is able to build a large community. Weisberg (2016) reported that cosplayers said that cosplaying allowed them to build up the cosplay communities. Cosplayer Nguyen said that cosplay can be fun when done with many people who share the same passion and interest as you are able feel that you are part of a universe.

Although I am not a big fan of any fandom, but I do like some Chinese singers and e-sports athletes. I will go look at the fan pages of the singers I listen to and see how the fans of the singer are like from time to time. In my opinion, if we are not part of a fandom, we should not go and say the fans of that fandom are weird or overly obsessed, instead we should respect and acknowledge the communities that they have built.

#mda20009 #week9 #fandom

Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing

Crowdfunding

According to GrantSpace(n.d.), crowdfunding can be described as a way to acquire the amount needed for a project or cause by asking people to donate the money. Usually organizations will do crowdfunding campaigns online in order to reach as much people as possible from all across the world especially their supporters. This allows them to have more chance to acquire the amount they planned. In the recent years, crowdfunding can be done for any purpose such as a new video game, a movie or even to support an artist. GrantSpace stated that there are two types of crowdfunding which are donation-based funding and Investment crowdfunding. Donation-based funding is a type of crowdfunding where people contribute to a project without expecting too much as a reward often to be a perk or rewards to the funders. Investment crowdfunding is where business will acquire money through crowdfunding and the individuals who has funded or donated will be become the stakeholders and investors that will have a chance of gaining a financial return.

One example that I know about crowdfunding is a Kickstarter campaign for a deck of cards named Jerry’s Nugget. According to Prins (2019), Jerry’s Nuggets was originally playing cards that were printed around 50 years ago. In the recent years, the cards have became very scarce and very desirable which makes it so rare until the point that an original version of the Jerry’s Nugget can be sold at a price of $500 or more. In 2019, a playing card company called Expert Playing Card Company started a KickStarter campaign to raise funds to make a new batch of Jerry’s Nuggets. The project was successfully supported by 4094 backers and raised a total amount of $477,299. People who funded the project was given rewards depending on the amount of money they donated such as $10 for a deck of new Jerry’s Nugget, $18 for one blue and one red of Jerry’s Nuggets and many other rewards. The playing cards are now released and are sold at $12 per deck.

Crowdsourcing

The definition given by Brunelli (2019) states that crowdsourcing is a method of using individuals from different backgrounds which are also called crowds to perform services or create new ideas or content for a specific purpose. He also stated that crowdsourcing has been used for a long time, longer than the term ‘crowdsourcing’ was even created. Hargrave (2019) explained that crowdsourcing involves a large amount of people to submit their data using platforms like the internet, social media platforms or even our smartphone applications in order to gain information or opinions of the people. Brunelli also stated that an early example of crowdsourcing traces back to 1907 where aa British scientist named Sir Francis Galton asked for the answers of 700 participants about their guess of the weight of an ox.

One example of crowdsourcing is the My Burger campaign made by McDonalds. According to Brown (2012), McDonalds in Germany launched a My Burger campaign instead of following what the other branches were doing to celebrate its 40th birthday. The campaign is about the consumers creating their own burgers and advertisements for the burger. Consumers were given tools to create advertisements as well. Then, the people are able to vote for their favorite burgers and will be chosen and will be in the McDonald’s menu. The campaign was very successful as it attracted a lot of people to make their own burgers and around 327,000 burgers were made. Other than this example, Waze is apparently to be a crowdsourcing application. Waze was a navigation application that was made in the April of 2017. Waze is able to navigate users to their destinated location and tell them which way is the fastest way. Other than that, users are able to report any incidents that will make traffic slower on the application. This made it to be a successful crowdsourcing application to be made as the director of business development, Avichai Bakst, said that they have over 100 million users to create these crowdsourced data. He also stated that users only need to use the application while driving and they will be contributing useful data and the real-time road map will be updated accordingly.

In conclusion, crowdfunding and crowdsourcing are good methods for organizations get help from the community whether its financial help or obtaining useful information.

#week8 #crowdsourcing #crowdfunding #mda20009

Public Health Campaign

Is social media useful in spreading information on Covid-19 in Malaysia or your home country?

The recent Covid-19 pandemic has influenced the whole world in many ways. Many countries have started to ask the people to quarantine themselves. The pandemic started back in 2019 and cases of an unknown virus were reported in Wuhan, China on 31 December 2019 (Schumaker 2020). In March, it quickly escalated and was declared a global pandemic. Malaysia announced their Movement Control Order (MCO) on 16 March 2020 and started on the 18 March.

Personally, I feel like social media is very useful when used to spread information especially when people can only contact with the outside world using social media during quarantine. Beginning of the MCO, I scroll through social media a lot to find there is a lot of information on the how the virus spread. Although social media should be used to spread accurate and useful information, but there was a lot of fake news and misleading information about the virus such as eating garlic will kill the virus. Fake news and misleading information are one of dangers of using social media to spread any public awareness as it will lead to many people to do things that they should not do to prevent the virus. Personally, I filtered through all the news by find official websites to determine whether the information is reliable such as News company such as The Star and Sin Chew Daily and trusted pages such as Sarawak Eye on Facebook.

Are there particular social media platforms which are more appropriate for some campaigns?

Yes, I think the selection of social media platforms for campaigns is crucial if the campaigns are targeted to specific age group of people. Take Facebook and Instagram for example, Facebook is a platform that has 2.49 billion active users monthly in 2020 and Instagram had just reached its 1 billion active users monthly in 2020 (Clement 2020). Although it maybe obvious that Facebook is able to reach more people then Instagram, but Instagram can be more appropriate if the campaigns are targeted to younger people like teenagers and young adult. This is because Instagram users are mostly younger people as the statistics shown by Statista shows that age group of 18-24 and 25-34 shows higher percentage than Facebook’s by 7.2% and 7.9% respectively (Clement 2020). On the other hand, Facebook’s age group of 45-54, 55-64 and 65+ shows higher percentage than Instagram’s by 3.3%, 6% and 7.3% respectively (Clement 2020). Thus, using Instagram will reach more young people and Facebook will reach more and older people.

#mda20009 #PublicHealthCampaign #week7

Protest and Activism

What is protest and activism? According to Cambridge Dictionary(n.d.), protest can be described as a strong disagreement towards a certain matter or an event where people do things to show disagreement. On the other hand, activism is said to be the use of actions to achieve a particular result either a political or social one. One of the examples of a well-known protest and activism is the 2019 Hong Kong protest.

2019 Hong Kong Protest

In my opinion, I think the Hong Kong protest that happened in 2019 is one of the most serious protests that I have seen. According to BBC (2019), it started back in the April of 2019 when the extradition bill was announced. This sparked disagreement among the citizens as they afraid that this would lead citizens to unfair treatment, and it might give China a greater influence over Hong Kong. The first protest started in June 2019 and after a few weeks of protest, Carrie Lam who is the chief executive of Hong Kong decided to withdraw the bill after seeing the protests. Although the bill has been withdrawn, but protesters are scared that the bill may be brought back. Thus, the demonstrations continued. As the number of protests increased, the protests started to get more and more violent to the extent that protesters started to use projectiles and police started to shoot protesters.

According to Shao (2019), it is said that social media was also one of the tools that were used throughout the protest. Just like in the 2014 Umbrella Movement which was also a protest that happened in Hong Kong, social Media was used to conceal the identities of identities as they spread information on social media platforms. Loh said in Shao (2019) that she thinks that the difference in this protest with the Umbrella Movement is that social media is used to win over the hearts of citizens. This can be seen where the protesters use images of police brutality and the police are using images of protester brutality.

How might activists use social media?

Other than the Hong Kong protest, we can see many activists do social movements on various social media platform from Facebook to Youtube. One of the types of activism that we can see often is the Hashtag activism which uses hashtags to promote a social movement and is able to attract people with the same opinion to join the movement. For example, an incident where policeman George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin who was a 17-year-old black male in Florida and the #BlackLivesMatter was created after this incident (Simon 2018). Since then, this hashtag is been widely used around the world to draw attention to issues that involves racial inequalities and many more. According to Simon (2018), the hashtag has been used nearly 30 million times with an average use of 17,003 times per day. This shows that hashtags can be very strong in spreading awareness when promoting social movements on social media.

#mda20009 #ProtestAndActivism #week6

Politic Engagement

Over the years, the invention of social media has influenced the way people can broadcast a message and get responses such as people who opens a shop or owns a brand will use social media as a platform to promote their brands and get feedback from customers. Politicians are the same way too. In the recent years, more and more politicians use social media to engage with their supporters or gain supporters. The question we should ask is “Why are politicians starting to use social media as a tool”.

First, we can look into how many people are using social media. According to the statistic made by Marketing Signal Lab (2019), we can see that there are 24 million active users on Facebook and 12 million active users on Instagram every month. Other than that, it is also stated that the largest age group that can be found in all social media platform is between 25 – 34 years old. From these statistics, we can see that a lot of young people are using social media. This is perfect for politicians because they are able to target the people in this age group of 25-34 years old as they are most likely to be eligible to vote.

Then, politicians are able to use social media to update their supporters with new accurate information and with fast delivery. Before social media, most politicians used media such as televisions and newspapers to help them in their campaigns, but there are some disadvantages to this. One of the disadvantages is that the delivery of media like newspapers are slow because it may take 1-2 days before the politician’s story or information will be shared to the public. Other than that, this may lead to inaccurate information. In the past, some journalist will show bias towards the politic party that they support. According to Relman(2018), Many Americans believed that many news companies in the U.S. provide news that are biased. Based on two surveys that were carried out, it shows that many American news company are reporting biased news with Fox News and Breitbart News with two of the most perceived bias. Thus, by using social media, the politicians can voice out opinions and provide insights that are not altered in any way as soon as possible. Then, their supporters are able to spread the information to other people to see by using sharing features provided on the social media platform.

Personally, I am not involved in politics too much, but usually when the Malaysian General Election happens, the news is all over the place. From Facebook to Youtube, I can see that I am able to watch all of the opinions and activities of different candidates who are running. So, social media platforms are really strong weapon for politicians to use in order to gain more supporters.

#mda20009 #week5 #PoliticEngagement

Is Tumblr a blog or social networking site?

So, is Tumblr considered as a blog or social network site? First, we need to identify what is a blog. Based on what I understand, a blog is an online journal or diary like post that people can write and express their emotions about what they like or what they are interested in. According to Skrba (n.d.), a blog can be described as an online journal with the latest post is shown on the top of the platform which is a reversed chronological order.

Then, we will talk about what is social networking site. Personally, I think that a social networking site is a website that allows users interact with one another using tools provided on the website such as private messaging, voice call, commenting and many others. According to Technopedia (2017), a social networking site is a site where people can create a public profile for themselves and use it to interact with people that they want to share a connection with. A good example of social networking site would be Facebook. Facebook allows people to add other people as friends and interact with one other. Other than that, Facebook provides many functions to allow people to interact with their friends such as instant messaging, voice calls and video calls.

Now, let’s talk about Tumblr. Tumblr is a site created by David Karl in 2007. It is a site where people can post texts, photos, quote, links, chats, audios, videos onto their personal profile page. It can be considered as a social networking site as it meets the criteria that I have mentioned before such as it allows people to create public profiles and it lets people interact by commenting, messaging and reblogging. But, statistics on Statista shows that 488.1 million blogs were made on Tumblr by January 2020. This shows that many people use Tumblr as a blogging website to post up their blogs on.

In my opinion, I feel that Tumblr is more of a social networking site than a blog site. This is because people interact with one another under posts no matter if it’s a blog or not. I see the blogs more as a type of content on this website due to the fact that you can post stuff other than blogs. So yes, Tumblr is a social networking site.

#IsTumblrABlogOrSocialNetworkingSite? week4 #mda20009

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