Perspectivas de la Alternativa Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra

Weibo never stopped evolving since its launch in 2009, whether as a result of the pressure from other social networking platforms or due to its long-range development planning and policies. Since it is not the intention of this thesis to give a panoramic description of Weibo’s history of development, in this part I am going to list the relevant capabilities that Weibo provided to its users.

Generally speaking there are two kinds of Weibo accounts: unverified accounts and verified accounts (where the user pays a monthly or yearly subscription fee). Verified accounts include four sub-categories: individual accounts who are real- name authenticated individual users; official accounts which covers organizations of government, enterprises, higher education, the media and so on; accounts for different interest groups, such as entertainment, sports, relationships, animation, food and so forth; and finally, we-media accounts which in order to be valid need to contribute to a specific area continuously, and, prior to the application, have a total click rate over one million a month. Weibo now signs those verified accounts with a ‘V’ (for ‘verified’) icon in different colours: a blue V for official accounts (followed what Twitter did), and an orange V for individual accounts.

In her article about Twitter and the interpretative flexibility of microblogging, Jose Dijck drew up a list of six potential activities that microblogging enables. In that article, she wrote that Twitter could be used in the following scenarios: conversation and dialogue; collaboration and exchange; self-expression and self- communication; status updating and checking; information and news sharing; marketing and advertising (Dijck, 2013b: 227). Following this classification,

individual Weibo users mainly perform functions like status updating and checking, self-expression and self-communication, conversation and dialogue on Weibo, while official accounts often carry out information and news sharing, marketing and advertising.

With regard to each Weibo, users can like, comment, forward and favourite. Among all of those choices, ‘like’ expresses approval of the content; ‘comment’ is a way to show approval and interact with the micro blogger; ‘forward’ could help to spread the content; ‘favourite’ is useful for further review. The comment function in Weibo differs from Twitter: users can glimpse over, and like or reply to what others have commented. With the continuous promotion and optimization of its mobile apps, the four functions mentioned above enable more and more users to enrich their interactive experiences of Weibo. Apart from that, the rewarding function through which users could give tips to those high quality content creators and the promotion of streaming shows live also makes the interaction among Weibo users more diversified.

In April 2016, China Internet Network Information Centre (China Internet Network Information Centre, 2016a: 21) released their 2015 Annual Report on Chinese Social Networking Applications Users' Behaviour, in which they reported the main functions of Weibo users in 2015, as shown in Figure 2.3. From it we could have a detailed idea of what Weibo enables its users to do.

Unlike what is happening outside of China, where Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are dominating the global social media ecology, none of these were available

behind China’s firewall since 2009. However, Chinese internet users are not lacking local services to choose from, most of which are specially tailored for the Chinese market (Sullivan, 2014). Among all of the domestic social media sites in China, Sina Weibo is one of the leading platforms. Till now, six years after its launch, Weibo has been deeply integrated into users’ everyday lives, and caters for users with a wide range of media needs (Zhang and Pentina, 2012).

Figure 2.3 Activities Weibo Enables Its Users to Do

Data source: 2015 Annual Report on Chinese Social Networking Applications Users' Behaviour (China Internet Network Information Centre, 2016a: 21)

There are several reasons behind the popularity of Weibo among youth in China. In the first instance, because of the differences between Chinese and English writing. With 140 words Chinese could express more than English does. Therefore, Weibo users can post nuanced messages and even cite the other’s comments in their own

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Get trending news in time Follow interesting content Get useful knowledge and help Share useful knowledge Comment on trending news Make new friends Interact with friends Find potential clients opportunities Get a sense of belong Others

posts. As a result of that, it is much easier to follow and participate in online conversations using Weibo. Furthermore, Sina Weibo is more interactive than Twitter. This is due to the fact that ‘one can comment on anybody’s posts on Sina Weibo and follow the chain of comments under the original posting, as well as make a comment while forwarding the post’ (Svensson, 2014: 172). Lastly, during six years’ of development, Weibo has evolved. Several new functions have emerged which ‘contain more features and have been adapted to local conditions and tastes’ (Sullivan, 2012: 775). For example, short videos, and long articles in the form of photographs could be inserted in a Weibo. Overall, these characteristics have supported Weibo in becoming increasingly informative and attractive to Chinese netizens. And Weibo has become one of the most popular mediums among Chinese internet users, especially among youth.

Judging from the daily trends on Sina Weibo, and popular Weibo users – most of whom are celebrities such as actresses and TV personalities – Sullivan (2012) concludes that the Chinese internet is dominated by entertainment. This conclusion concurs with a former study on trends within China’s social media, which shows that: popular trends on social media are created almost entirely due to retweets of media content such as jokes, images and videos (Yu et al., 2011). Another recent study on digital inequalities/divides on Sina Weibo has similar findings:

Two groups of people are more visible on microblogs than others: celebrities and opinion leaders. A majority of those with the most followers on microblogs are in the entertainments business, which

testifies to the rise of celebrity culture in China […] The category of opinion leaders includes a diverse group of people: traditional and new elites such as public intellectuals, business people and media professionals (Svensson, 2014: 169-70).

Similar to what happened in the developed countries decades ago, a young generation growing up with new technologies has appeared in China now. This generation was born and brought up in contemporary China which is at a stage of rapid social transformation. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, and many other gadgets and tools of the digital age. Also, Prensky (2001: 1) proposes that as a result of a staggering growth of economy along with the emerging development of technologies around them, this generation of digital natives ‘think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors’.