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My Blogging Experience

In the past, I have ever organized several blogs. One of the blogs I wrote the most was Xanga, because many of my friends also wrote Xanga. I would share my feelings and some interesting things in the day with my friends. After taking this course, I was given a deeper insight of these online communities play in our life, and how the blogs reflect our identities. The course gives me a chance to learn how to manage a blog well. The posts I wrote used to contained text only. Now, I know that a good post should include not only critical and objective opinion, but also relevant images and hyperlinks to various sources like video, audio, music and texts to make it more readable and attractive. Also, through making comments on others’ blogs, I can exchange useful opinions and information with my classmates as well. The blog forms a social network for us to communicate and contact with each others online.

I choose the post “Auction @ Internet” as the sample because I think online shopping is an interesting topic. Nowadays, online shopping has become one of the most common modes of consumption in Hong Kong. In this post, I would like to introduce how people sell and buy things by using the Internet as well as the drawbacks of online shopping. I can also share some of my experience and point of view towards online shopping with them. It is also easy for me to find some extra sources which are related to online shopping like articles and video for sharing in the post since this is a popular topic. Moreover, since many of my classmates have brought and sold things online, I hope they can share their own experiences and opinions towards this topic after reading my post.

Buzzwords on Internet

Use of buzzwords is one of the conspicuous language features of the new generation in Hong Kong. As a kind of lexical innovation, fashion words coined and used commonly by today’s teenagers are originated from the Internet. Internet has become incredibly important for our social life. Through instant messaging and online communicating tools, including MSN, Facebook, e-mail and chat rooms, teenagers are able to send and receive messages.

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When communicating online, fashion words are favoured by the Internet generation to describe one’s feelings and meanings in a more vivid way. For instance, the popular term “hea” is coined by young people to characterize the act of being lazy or doing nothing meaningful but just waiting the time to pass by. “Kai” is another example of fashion words, which is used to describe someone or something silly. Nowadays, the use of such coined words has even permeated into the daily conversations of young people, forming a particular modern culture shared only by youth of the same age group. Moreover, phenomena like code-mixing, use of slangs, lazy sounds, short forms, intensifiers and provocative phrases are also prevalent in youth language. Such fashionable language, as discussed above, reflects the rebellious and innovative cultures of the new generation, and at the same time, differentiates itself from other generations.

Do you think that the prevalence of buzzwords is originated from the Internet? How Internet influent the use of language and buzzwors in our society? =] Plz feel free to share your opinion here.

Internet as political tool?

Have you ever visited some pages or groups in Facebook which are about provoking specific political events like the 1 July Marches (七一遊行)? Or, have you ever participated in those protests after knowing them from Facebook?

Here, I would like to investigate the issue “Does Internet exert great influence in political events in our society?”

And my answer is definitely yes.

According to the statistics from Wen Wei Po, China has 4.52 hundred million Internet users nowadays. Various online communities such as Facebook, Twitter and Sina blog have became more and more popular among mainland Internet users. Even though there are many restrictions over the Internet in mainland, the number of Internet users in China is still growing. Obviously, the Internet affects our daily life in a large extend since many of us use Internet to chat with others, to play games, to seek and exchange useful information. Apart from these, are there any other functions of the Internet?

In fact, people start to use the Internet to promote and provoke political events in recent years. Therefore, it is no doubt to say that Internet also exert great influence in provoking political events in our society.

The Jasmine Revolution in China (中國茉莉花行動) in 2011 is a good example to support this argument. It is a protest originated form Facebook, Twitter and other social sites in China, which aims at ending the dictatorship of the Communist Party.  And the result of the protest is successful that there were protests took place in 13 main cities in China like Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing. After the first time of Jasmine Revolution, similar protests was took place in these cities later. And there were more and more people came to participate in the protests.

The Hong Kong 1 July Marches, which is one of the largest scale protestes in Hong Kong, is another example. In 2003, there were no Facebook and the Internet was still not so prevalent. There were only 35 thousands people came to the protest. However, the organizer started to promote and ask people to join the protest through setting pages and sending invitations in social sites like Facebook in recent years. Therefore, the number of participants of such event was increased to 140 thousands in 2009.

Another reason that I think Internet can exert great influence on political events is the difficulties of the government to filter the information, even though China government has tight restrictions over the Internet. Because everyone can initiate protests on Facebook, SINA and other social sites. Also, the government has to cooperate with the administrators of every website to strike the anti-government powers. It requires much more manpower to filter the anti-government and sensitive issues. Therefore, it is very difficult to block and filter invitations of anti-governemnt activities or protests in the Internet entirely.

Finally, people want to use Internet to provoke protest is due to the features of the social sites. That is, they can upload information and send invitation through Facebook conveniently. They can also setup groups or pages for the events and ask people and their friends to join. The extensive social network in Facebook and other online commities can even increase the promotional effect.

To conclude, Internet has great influence in provoking protests and other political events. People prefer to use online communities like Facebook, Twitter and Xanga to promote and provoke the protests when these online communication tools become more and more common. And I believe the influence of Internet on provoking protest in Hong Kong is greater than that in China since there are not many restrictions on Internet in Hong Kong. However, being one of the members in our society, we should be objective and critical enough toward those political events provoking from the Internet, think carefully before we decide what to do something instead of just following others in the Internet. I think no one want to see that social sites become the tool of destroying the stability of our society.

Auction @ Internet

Have you ever bought things from Yahoo auction or Taobao?

Nowadays, online auction being more and more prevalent in Hong Kong. Various auction websites like Yahoo, Taobao and ebay have become the paradises of many shopaholic. 

In fact, online shopping is really a suitable and convenient shopping way for those lazy people like me. Because I can browse all the products I intend to buy at home without going out. Another advantage of online shopping is that you can know the prices of the products of each shop clearly and there is no need to go around to compare the prices. Besides, I can do online shopping anytime as the online shops open for 24 hours.

However, the main drawback of online shopping is the time consuming delivery process of the products. Therefore, online shopping can never replace "real" shopping since the customers cannot get the products immediately. If the seller are not in Hong Kong, you may even have to wait for a longer time for the product to send to you. Of course, you can also choose face trade if this service is available to shorten the delivery process.

In addition to buying things, you can sell the things which are unuseful for you throught the acution system online simply by just uploading the photos of that thing and set the price you desired.

By the way, the most important problem of using the online auction system that we concern a lot is probably the You have to bare the risk that you cannot receive the products or the quality of the product is poor.

Since more and more people like using Facebook to communicate and socialize with other now, Facebook also becomes one of the most popular online shopping platforms gradually. Some people may make their Faceboook into an online shop and upload the photos of the products on their album. I think creating an online shop in Facebook may gain greater promotional effect than that in other websites as the Facebook users can post comments or Arrprove 'o the items they like immediately. And after their friends view the status of those shoppers in Facebook, they may visit the shop as well. This can undoubtedly increase the popularity of the shop.

In view of this, some of my friends asked me to open an online shop on Yahoo or Facebook. They thought that operating online shop can not only save the time of monitoring the real shop, but also save the rental cost. In such case, the online shop owners can gain more profit by selling the products at the same price as the real shop. However, operating an online shop is still a great challenge for me as the online shop owners have to manage all the things themselves including ordering and transferring the product, taking photos of them and uploading to the Internet, contacting the buyers and sendng out the products.

Maybe, I will consider and start my online business soon. But now, I want to be a buyer rather than a seller!

Era of New Media ...

The rapid development of media and technology over the past decades has marked the world’s entering to the new era of media. Nowadays, technology is undoubtedly an impartible part of our daily life. Entering the MTR train, you may find that over 50% of people playing with their iPhone or iPad. Most of us even spend much time on using computers and online communities every day.

Facebook, one of most well-known on-line communities in the world, for example, has nearly 4, 00000000 users. Apart from Facebook, online social spaces such as Twitter, Xanga and MSN which provide Internet users with a convenient channel to communicate with their friends and other Internet users, have become more and more prevalent among Hong Kong people, especially youngsters. As people spend more time on online communication by using these virtual tools, the chance of face to face interactions has inevitably decreased in our society.

Participating in online communities allow us to learn communication pattern and discourse system within these sites, which can further help us to communicate with others and integrate into these online communities better. I also think the practices of different online communities are not exactly the same even though they belong to the same kind of media.

What I expect to learn from this course is not only communicating and chatting with others through bloggering, but also to dig out the linguistic features, culture and social practices of "blogger" and other media. Later, I will share what I have learnt, as well as useful or interesting things related to this course here. Finally, I hope I can enjoy the course with all of you in this semester. Let's start our digital media life!!!=]