Page 176 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Feasibility Study of New Media Technology
on Constructing Online Public Sphere

to improve their position. The only goal is to introduce reading enjoyment for au-

diences. It is a pure writer-reader relationship, which is a habit derived from the
BBS age’ (Li, 2013, N.P.) .
28
Many people perceived Bullog as a commentary site, but Luo has indicated that
commentary was not the initial plan for this blog site. Only a quarter of the writers that
he invited to Bullog paid close attention to current affairs, but because they were all

very productive writers, their blogs made up nearly 80% of the site’s updates.
In the Xiamen PX plant case, both large-scale website portals such as NetEase and
local sites republished news reports about the plant. They were forced by related gov-

ernment departments to delete relevant content afterwards. Whereas Bullog survived
in maintaining content on PX and became one of the few websites that had information
updates. On 1 June 2007, during the collective stroll, a writer from Bullog used short
message service to live broadcast the protest with text updates every three to five min-
utes. The coverage was republished by major media sites (Li, 2013).

At the time, people were worried that this may have caused trouble to Bullog. On
the next day, Luo arrived in the office early and anxiously worried about the conse-
quence. However, no government departments contacted Bullog for covering the story.

He then nervously sought an update with the local department and the reply was ‘we
have not heard anything. You may do what you like’. Luo then confirmed that the gov-
ernment had not ordered them to delete the content related to PX on Bullog. He said
that:
‘We never challenged the authority. If the order [had been made] to delete blogs

and relevant content, we follow the order. Because most of the website will take
the initiative of deleting articles and content that they believe are “risky”. “Cour-
age” is the characteristic that is often overrated about me. In fact, I am not that

brave. […] I follow the authority’s instructions. Foreigners often question whether
I delete articles on Bullog. Of course, I do, it is impossible not to. If I resisted the
government order, Bullog would have been shut down long before’ (Li, 2013,

28 Translation provided by the author.

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