I was looking into the internet in China, and despite not having Facebook nor Twitter, apparently there are like a half billion people using social media. That's incredible. And apparently there are 100's of sites with more than 10 million people. I'm curious to learn more. What's different there about social media than the states? how does censorship impact it? Is there a bunch of popular blogs that are seen as the cutting edge? Are there forums such as these? Would love to learn more.
Government banned them. That said, the Chinese don't really care too much for American social media. Even back when youtube, google, etc. were available in China, very few people actually uses them. Language and culture barrier are much wider than you may think. Generally the only reason people use them are the few people who knows English, and use them to pass on news from other countries. Chinese people in general have never really embraced western social media outlets. Two prominent examples would be google and MSN(or Yahoo messenger or AOL or whatever). Google once had a lionshare of China's market, and eventually dropped into obscurity behind Baidu. QQ is basically THE method to communicate with other online, and people use them to create online groups, meet friends... Heck, I know someone who met her fiance on QQ. The things Chinese care about many times are very different from Americans and westerners in general. Just because we think something is superawesome doesn't mean they do too
Hmm...I suspect the language and cultural barrier are less than you might imagine. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and the Phillipines are some of the heaviest facebook using places. Probably more a function of government interaction and just a general state of being behind the times regarding technology vs. other places.
Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and the Philippines all have had a long term American presence, also they don't have available local copied versions of the social media like those widely available in China.
China are smart I guessed. In China they terrorize terrorists. But in all seriousness I wonder if they didn't censor alot of things I bet it would be a lot more violent and terrorists in the country.
You're expecting bigtexxx to understand that China doesn't equal Asia. I'm afraid that is a lost cause.
Yes, but you must admit, that Taiwan and Hong Kong are not THAT far off from China. Yes, there have been additional outside influences in those two places, but especially places like Hong Kong aren't exactly night and day from modern China.
Taiwan and HK are further away from China than Mexico's distance from the US. Anyway, this is the last post I'll make on the matter. Because your response basically confirmed what I speculated earlier.
ok, this is not what i was trying to figure out here. I want to understand what social media Chinese do use, not why they don't use American social media brands. What's different about how Chinese use social media than everywhere else? Does the the character set create limitations. Are their very popular chinese bloggers? Please tell me, I'd really like to learn.
First of all HK was occupied by Britain for the longest time, There are a lot of schools there that still teach using English, The same goes for Philipino people. In fact many of the Philipino immigrants didn't even have to go through the ESL process because their English is almost as good as the natives. I think you totally overestimated the level of English in China, and it is very poor in my opinion. I mean why would they go to a sight like youtube or facebook when they have to open a dictionary while using it, when they can just use very similar websites that uses Chinese. I mean, I'm not going to go to a French version of youtube, if a English version exist
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I'm not sure if it's true, at least I don't remember that clearly But out of all the websites that are banned by China, 4chan isn't one of them lol
Do you want links or something? I can give you the youtube equivalent: www.youku.com and www.tudou.com(there are others but these two are the biggest). The QQ phenomenon is pretty hard to describe without writing an essay. Perhaps you can google it or something. At its core it's just an IM service. But it's a lot more than that. I think they have an English website so you can try it out. A lot of other sites are pretty worthless without knowing Chinese. They're in Chinese, made by Chinese, receive feedback by Chinese users, so tailored to Chinese taste? Not sure what else you want to know. Not sure why this could be a problem. Chinese computers all have Chinese language support. google.com.hk/baidu blog + your favorite topic in Chinese and you'll find them. The same way you find American blogs.
