Page 74 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Feasibility Study of New Media Technology
on Constructing Online Public Sphere

2013 The year of 2013 witnessed the rapid development of e-commerce. The
online retail transactions reached 1.85 trillion RMB Yuan. China sur-
passed the United States and became the world largest online retail
market.
2013 Internet finance emerged in 2013. Alibaba launched an online deposit
service product Yu E Bao on the basis of Alipay; Tencent launched Micro
pay. Internet financial products enriched the public’s way of investment
and influenced the traditional financial industry.

3.3 The era of Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999 to refer to software de-
signed in such a way that it is completed only by the intentional and creative use of the

consumer. As she predicted:
‘The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially static
screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0
are beginning to appear and we are just starting to see how that embryo might de-

velop… The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as
a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will still
appear on your computer screen… The Web will also appear, in different guises,
on your TV set, your car dashboard, your cell phone, hand-held game machines

and maybe even your microwave’ (DiNucci, 1999, p.32).
According to O’Reilly (2005), a Web 2.0 site, rather than enabling users merely to
read the content, invites them to contribute: to comment on published articles, to create
a user account or to publish articles on the site, which enables the increase of user par-

ticipation. Corresponding to DiNucci’s prediction, a Web 2.0 site encourages the user to
rely more on their browser for the user interface, application software and file storage
facilities, which promotes user engagement in a variety of forms. It has been referred
as ‘network as platform’ computing (O’Reilly, 2005). The major features of Web 2.0

include social networking sites, self-publishing platforms, tagging, ‘Like’ buttons and
social bookmarking (ibid). Users can provide data and exercise some control over it
(Hinchcliffe, 2006).
In social science, Web 2.0 was defined as a ‘service-oriented architecture that en-

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