Page 80 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Feasibility Study of New Media Technology
on Constructing Online Public Sphere

By the end of the second quarter of 2015, the number of monthly active QQ users had

reached 843 million (627 million using the mobile application), and online QQ users
reached 233 million at peak time (Tao, 2015).
QQ Group is an additional feature which supports multi-person chat. The ‘group
manager’ (a user who creates the group) invites friends, colleagues, relatives or other

users with shared interests to the group. Group members can communicate via text,
voice or video within the group space. Information sharing and resource exchange are
also feasible through the group forum, group album and group file sharing. The group

manager can appoint someone as a group manager (multiple group managers are sup-
ported in QQ), dismiss the group, and invite and remove group members.
WeChat is an application designed for IM on smartphones. It is another popular
product launched by Tencent in 2011 and by 2018 it was one of the world’s largest

standalone mobile apps by monthly active users, with over 1 billion monthly active
users (902 million daily active users) (Long, 2017). WeChat is a mobile social network-
ing application that provides text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, group talk,
video chat, sharing of photographs and videos and location sharing. It can exchange

contacts with people nearby via Bluetooth and provides various features for contacting
people at random if desired. Users can send previously saved or live pictures and vid-
eos and other items either individually or in a group chat. It is currently available on
Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Symbian phones. Web-based OS X

and Windows application are also available.
‘Moments’ is the friend-sharing feature in WeChat but since this research focus on
ICT-mediated public participation from BBS to the Weibo age, the influence of WeChat

will not be involved. However, WeChat is gradually growing into an influential tool in
information exchange and dissemination in China.

3.3.3 Blogs

‘Blog’ is a contraction of ‘web log’. It is the fourth online communication form
since the emergence of Email, BBS and ICQ. It is a discussion or information site pub-

lished on the Web consisting of discrete entries (posts) displayed in reverse chronolog-

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