2nd Annual Sino-U.S. Forum
Journalism in the Global Media Environment: Comparative Online & Social Media
July 9, 2014
University of Hawai'i - Peking University
Abstracts
School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University
Peking University School of Journalism and Communication
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Anonymity and the Future of the Internet
Jenifer Winter, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
This presentation explores threats to privacy and anonymity accompanying underlying technical changes related to the social media and the Internet. The U.S. government and corporate entities have focused on creating sophisticated graphs of citizens’ social media connections and aggregating these data with other sources, such as physical location, public records, and online search habits. The increased instrumentation and tracking of natural and social processes, coupled with enhanced data storage and analytic tools, enable the construction of unique profiles that may expose personal information that could be used by corporations or governments to disadvantage certain individuals or groups. These developments threaten to destroy anonymity when engaging in public affairs, and therefore pose a grave risk to public participation in democratic discourse. We require a more nuanced understanding of how these changes affect existing political and social relationships and must determine in what instances the collection of these data is necessary.
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa School of Communications
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa School of Communications
Peking University School of Journalism and Communication
New Media Empowerment:
Information, Expression, & Action
Professor SHI Zengzhi
The Internet has brought deep changes to China's society. New empowered media have brought changes to communication and power relations. Self-empowerment has increasingly related to social relationships among people and events. It is easier for citizens to get information, express opinions and take action on the mobile Internet. New media empowerment changes the power structure. Self-empowerment has increasingly influenced mass and social empowerment and even organization and system empowerment. The public space and the private space essentially are divisions of power. On this basis, a new understanding of the subjectivity of people on the Internet, the strengthening of people's positions as subjects, and the development of mass society towards a different community have provided a basis for the legitimacy of Internet governance under conditions of Internet empowerment.
The Interaction between Traditional and New Media: A Case Study of @JadeRabbit
WANG Xiuli, PhD
Associate Professor, Director, the Center for Social Media Research
As a very successful cooperation between traditional and new media, the Weibo (China’s Twitter) account @JadeRabbit is jointly run by Xinhua News Agency and Chinese popular science social networking website Guokr.com. @JadeRabbit began publishing scientific information at 9:00 p.m., Dec. 1, 2013 (four hours before the launch of the Chang'e-3 lunar probe), and attracted over 500,000 followers and generated nearly 3 million Weibo topics in less than three months. The most popular Jade Rabbit post was re-posted over 110,000 times. This garnered widespread attention from Chinese domestic and international media. The presentation will illustrate how and why @JadeRabbit became popular, and the different roles Xinhua News Agency and Guokr.com have played in this cooperation. A personable speaking style and lively personality, serious and informational content, endorsement of nationallevel media, and other factors all contribute to the success of @JadeRabbit.
Imagining Community: Can Microblogs Afford Community Among Rural-Urban Migrants in China?
Wayne Buente, PhD
Assistant Professor
One of the fundamental debates about community is how to conceptualize what exactly community means. One way is to consider community as culture, a set of people who share sociability and a set of ideas that develop identity. In addition, the Internet enables "virtual communities" where online relations demonstrate psychological and cultural characteristics of community despite the lack of geographic co-location. The popularity of microblogs has been well documented in China. Their organizational and logistical affordances speak to their potential for facilitating coordination among citizen activists and the state. For example, microbloggers have called upon the government to address the physical health of children and grandchildren. Yet little is known about the microblog practices of rural-urban migrants, who are known as a "floating population" where community as a geographic space is constantly in flux. The concept of an imagined community may prove useful for considering how rural-urban migrants appropriate microblogs as community.
American News Coverage of Chinese Lunar New Year
HE Shu, PhD
Associate Professor
This presentation aims to compare coverage of the U.S. online websites with the traditional media news sites on reports of Chinese Lunar New Year. Through analysis, this presentation tries to observe how a typical Chinese festival story is told to American readers and to observe the difference between Sino-U.S. news media stories and coverage of Chinese Lunar New Year.
News Coverage and Online Discussions in the Philippines, the U.S., and Guam regarding the Spratly Islands Territorial Dispute with China
Francis Dalisay, PhD
Assistant Professor
This presentation provides an overview of the sentiment of news coverage and online discussions in the Philippines, the U.S. and Guam regarding the Spratly Islands territorial dispute. Specifically, this presentation unravels how local media in these five areas of the world frame this dispute, and the stances that local residents of these three areas hold regarding the dispute as expressed in online comments. Theoretical concepts from the system-maintenance function of mass media are also introduced as explanations for the sentiments found. Given recent plans to increase U.S. military presence in the Asia-Pacific region and potential tension between the U.S. and China, this presentation highlights a critical issue that will likely be salient in news reports for the coming years.
Hybrid Media Consumption: How Live Tweeting During a Televised Political Debate Influences the Vote Decision
Misa Maruyama
Doctoral Student
Television viewers increasingly use microblogs to broadcast their thoughts in real time as they watch live political events. Microblogging social network sites (SNSs) such as Twitter generate a parallel stream of information and opinion. It is presumed that the additional content enhances the viewing experience, but our experiment explores the validity of this assumption. The experimental study compared affect, recall and vote choice by participants who actively posted on Twitter versus those who only observed during a live political debate. For most measures, participants’ feeling and recall toward the candidates did not depend on Twitter activity, but Twitter activity did matter for vote choice. People who actively tweeted changed their voting choice to reflect the majority sentiment on Twitter. Results are discussed in terms of the possibility that active tweeting leads to greater engagement but that it may also make people more susceptible to social influence.
Training Journalism Students Over Cyberspace: An International Model
LI Kun, PHD
Associate Professor
The Peking University School of Journalism and Communication partnered with UPI Next in 2010 to train Chinese journalist students. Distance learning via video instruction and individual mentoring proved to be a very efficient model. Students with little or no international news writing experience got their stories published on UPI.com. Cross-border/cross-cultural training broadened the students’ vision, and they benefited from direct mentoring by established U.S. journalists. This presentation will share students’ experiences and insights in this new model of training journalist in a globalized world.
Peking University School of Journalism and Communication
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa School of Communications
Eating Time By Using Mobile Contents: How do Chinese Cell Phone Users Use Content via Mobile Phones
CUI Kai
Doctoral Candidate
The number of users in China accessing the Internet via mobile phones exceeded the number of users accessing the Internet via PC for the first time in June 2012. This indicates that mobile phones have become the first medium used to connect to the Internet by most people in China. This is also a milestone in the history of China’s Internet development. Considering the huge population, large area and imbalanced development in different areas of China, the rapid development and popularity of mobile phones definitely provides more entrances into the information society for people in less-developed areas who have low education and income levels. Mobile phones have provided people with more options, such as using their phones in privacy to gain more information and knowledge. This presentation introduces the current features of mobile phone usage and habits in China and then analyzes the factors that influence the usage of the mobile phones.
Peking University School of Journalism and Communication