Can Weibo change China? - FT Chinese website

During this year's Press Day, Chinese media such as the Southern Media Group, Guangzhou Daily Newspaper Group, Xinhua Daily Newspaper Group, Beijing Daily Newspaper Group, People's Network, Xinhua Network, Youth Journalists jointly conducted an investigation involving over 120 media from 46 cities in 22 provinces (municipalities and autonomous regions) nationwide. One of the results showed that microblogging was considered as the most respectable media in 2010.

The majority of the respondents were journalists, so the sample was relatively single. It is hard to say whether this result could represent public recognition. Nevertheless, it still shows how microblogging has penetrated into society in a short year. A large number of media personnel have become microblog users who are influenced by microblogging. This leads to extremely high mention rates of microblog content on the media they serve, which also influences the audiences of these media. I remember during the Shanghai 11.15 fire, I was taking a taxi and the radio reported this news by directly quoting a lot of eye-witness reports released by Sina Weibo netizens. The taxi driver even sighed: "With microblogging, it is getting harder to cover things up."

Observers and researchers have defined many profound positive meanings for microblogging, such as spreading great significance in concise words, promoting citizen journalists, changing society through standing-by, etc. Whether standing-by can change society naturally still needs time to be tested. But for me personally, microblogging has indeed changed many previous habits of mine. Moreover, I cannot tell whether these habits are good or bad.

The most direct change is that I spend much more time indulging on the Internet. More than ten years ago, as one of the earlier domestic Internet users, I once got highly addicted to Internet life, being keen on online writing and forum exchanges. However, with the popularization of the network, miscellaneous users and increased commercial factors, this caused the troubles brought by the Internet to gradually offset its benefits. Thus, I unconsciously reduced the time spent online. I basically stopped using QQ and stayed long-term invisible on MSN. My life became cleaner...until microblogging came along. Now, I am back to the embarrassing situation where I refresh my microblog page while anxiously calculating my remaining writing time. Although everyone in China recognizes microblogging as a new type of media, essentially, it is still a social network between people-to-people. Since it is social, it has most of the inherent disadvantages of social networks, such as falsity and vanity, arrogance and hypocrisy - these disadvantages may even be amplified by microblogging. For example, since the number of followers in microblogging is an important standard for measuring a person's influence, there are a large number of transactions specifically for buying and selling followers on Taobao; another example is that since the number of forwards in microblogging is an important standard for measuring the influence of a piece of information, some people are obsessed with spreading false information; as for constantly refreshing personal pages to see if there are new follows or replies, according to cybernetic psychologists, this indicates that microblogging makes you more narcissistic.