Page 213 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 7. The Yihuang incident

blog service. This implies that the prosperity of the blog age has already passed, and

Weibo is becoming the most popular and most widely-used platform, which represents
the transition of new media to We Media.

Figure 46. Distribution of social networking sites.
Figure 46 also indicates that the numbers of all respondents who registered and

used WeChat Moments and QQ zone are also relatively high, at up to 90% and 77.30%,
respectively. Because this research focuses on the period between the BBS/forums era
and Weibo era, it would not extend to the application of WeChat; the researcher also

believes that WeChat Moments has many limitations for online public participation as
it is only visible among close friends and family members, and thus has a higher degree
of privacy than BBS/forums, blog and Weibo. For Weibo as a communication platform,
its openness and transparency are much higher, which makes it easier to promote the
establishment of public voices from different communities and to gather public opinion

under one particularly hot Weibo post, or under the same Weibo topic.
One of the interviewees from the media industry explained the evolvement of so-
cial media sites as:

‘The time when BBS/forums were popular represents the pioneers of internet us-
ers in China, it was merely the assembly of people with common interests. The
difference between Weibo and BBS/forums is the acceptance of diversity in the
user community. Weibo gathered people with different interests and standpoints
in one platform, which is beneficial in enhancing the information flow and the

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