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.
Thanks for this thoughtful post. Just one minor thing - you seem to be saying that the turnout to the 1 July March in 2003 was poor, but when I checked Wikipedia (that great source of all cultural knowledge!) it confirmed my feeling that 2003 was the year when 500,000 people marched to protest against the government's proposed Article 23 legislation.
ReplyDeletePerhaps what this means is that even without the Internet (well, without Facebook), important political rallies will still get organized. Of course, in most cases it is very hard to tell whether a particular political movement is succeeding *because of* the Internet: we have no way of knowing whether the movement would have succeeded without it.
What do you think?
“Does Internet exert great influence in political events in our society?” That's a good question! For me, I would say yes to this question too.
ReplyDeleteFacebook wall will be an indicator to show which event and curernt issue is important to us, for our generation, and relate to the public.
For example, once the Financial Secretary announced that $6000 will be given to Hong Kong permenant residents, my home feed is fill with news and status responded and commented on that issue, how amazing!