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In the present era influenced by ideological and social revolutions, the rapid growth of technology has enabled social media to interconnect the minds of individuals with no need of their physical presence. This kind of innovative communication method is gradually changing the way we interact with others thus nurturing a new form of community called virtual community. Currently, Sina Weibo is an extremely popular social media website in China. By the third quarter of 2015, this micro-blogging site had 222 million registered users and 100 million daily active users. Sina Weibo gathers a lot of posted information as content and users as potential audiences. For the same reason, some people wonder whether Sina Weibo can be the next influential tool that can cause an ideological revolution in China. After conducting user interviews as well deliberating on my own participation and observation concerning the visual communities, I discovered that technological features of Sina Weibo enable users to include both subjective and objective content in a single post. This combination benefits both the publishers and subscribers, generating stronger public opinion as indicated in Gladwell’s article (2010) and acting as a technological determinant that causes social empowerment of the once powerless public.
Since China has blocked several mainstream western social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook, the domestic social media in the country has taken the responsibility of entertaining people and exposing news. Sina Weibo shares similarities with Wechat, a Chinese domestic messaging communication tool. However, Sina Weibo is more open to public. Wechat has 650 million active users and is considered a social media platform with large user percentage just like Sina Weibo. Nevertheless, the nature of messaging communication available in Wechat is focused on one-to-one messaging interface. Even in the supplementary sharing page, Moments, only the friends from the users' contact are able to view the Moments’ contents and comments. Considering this feature, it is obvious that Wechat values the strong ties between users and intends to build private intimate circles for every user. On the other hand, Sina Weibo is a social media face to public. Users can see, ‘like’ comments, and forward the post(s) of other users that they do not follow. Meanwhile, users can not only grasp content from friend-feeded timeline but can also access popular searched list for users to get more contents that they are interested in.
The above discussion suggests that Sina Weibo is more public to users as compared to the Wechat. On the other hand, it is also a fact that the features of Sina Weibo make this social media website more private than Twitter. Sina Weibo also possesses various similar formatting features as Twitter including the140-character-limit post, mentioning format “@UserName”, hashtags “#Subject#”, and popular searched list. These succinct features facilitate the process of displaying brief news, gaining public attention and archiving relative contents. Sina Weibo also advances these features to fit the unique Chinese culture. For instance, users of Twitter may forward a post with no comments. Users of Sina Weibo can add text or picture as comments above the post that they forward to their timeline. They can also include up to 9 pictures in a single post. Some of them generate texts into pictures as a means to break 140-character’s limitation. On the other hand, Twitter only allows users to include one image in their post. Both Twitter and Sina Weibo have popular search list ranked by hash tags. However, each hash tag on the popular search list of Twitter contains the statistics of overall content. As far as Sina Weibo is concerned, it demonstrates a more detailed abstract of that incident. From these advanced features, Sina Weibo is not strictly bonded by word or image limitations. Users have more room to describe subjective feelings beyond making succinct 140-characters objective announcement. Therefore, content-based features position Sina Weibo in the middle ground between private Wechat and public Twitter.
As I am a regular user of Sina Weibo, my method to investigate this virtual community for the preceding five weeks is by reading the posts and opening the videos that I am interested in on my timeline. I participated in the discussion about an incident called #Woman Has Been Attacked in Heyi Hotel# by commenting under several posts as well as forwarding news with my feminist comments for a whole week. I also interviewed one of my relatives about her experience of finding her lost child via Sina Weibo. In the following part of essay, I will first use my relative’s experience to support how the features of Sina Weibo empower the users by displaying sufficient information and benefiting from user diversity. Secondly, I will use my observation on two different posts on #Woman Has Been Attacked In Heyi Hotel# to show how the formatting feature influences public attention and how the empowered public opinion fosters the social justice later on.
On April 5, Wanwan_2016, the victim, posted two posts about #Woman Has Been Attacked In Heyi Hotel# on Sina Weibo. Public reacted on these two posts rather differently. In the first post that reported this incident on the morning of April 5th, Wanwan_2016 uploaded a video recorded by surveillance camera. Although this video is a solid objective proof of the attack that she experienced, her post only included a vague title of her video. As a consequence, this video without a clear description did not attract too many people to forward or comment on her post. In the evening of the same day, Wanwan_2016 forwarded her previous post to her timeline by utilizing the features of Sina Weibo to a larger extent. She shortened the whole incident to a hashtag called #Woman Has Been Attacked in Heyi Hotel# (long as translated but only eight characters in Chinese). Following this hash tag, she used 125 characters to briefly explain what happened in the video. She explained how she was followed and attacked by a male stranger in a hotel and did not get help by several passers-by (including an employee of that hotel). She also warned public how dangerous it is for a young female to go outside by herself, even in a four-star hotel assumed to be safe and private. She later mentioned the head office of the hotel by @Homeinn and Beijing Police Office by @SafetyBeijing. She also included an image, a text update of latest development on this incident in about 500 words. The formatting and text picture together with the sufficient proof of video went viral on Sina Weibo, gaining 924 thousand forwards, 283 thousand comments and 218 thousand likes. The hash tag #Woman Has Been Attacked in Heyi Hotel# also became the third popular topic on the real-time searching list on Sina Weibo. Her later posts with the same hash tag earned 20 thousand forwards, comments and likes in average.
