A Chinese Internet? History, practice, and globalization

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Notes

^1. At a public event held on 15 March 2010, which I attended, Twitter's co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey said that many of Twitter's innovations, such as the adoption of hashtags, were based on user experiences and input. In China, major websites have job positions for analysing user experience. Thus it is likely that Sina Weibo has similar mechanisms as Twitter for absorbing user input.

^2. In recent years, these incidents have been named “Internet mass incidents” (wangluo qunti shijian) by Chinese government authorities, a sort of online version of “mass incidents” (qunti xin shijian). Some scholars in China and Hong Kong view them as “new media events”. See Qiu and Chan (2011).

^3. Increasingly, the dynamism of Internet incidents takes the form of complex interactions among multiple media channels – television and newspapers, as well as blogs and microblogs. It is worth emphasizing, however, that in many cases, the initial momentum is built through online interaction and online information dissemination. The popularity of microblogs heightens these functions due to their feature as an “awareness system” that enables users to maintain perpetual mental awareness of news and events (Hermida, 2010).

^4. The complete essay is available at http://www.xys.org/xys/netters/others/net/smth2.txt. Accessed 12 May 2011. My translation.