By Tao Wang
Frankly speaking, I certainly do not belong to that group who never use social media technologies (S. M. T.) at all. As a matter of fact, I use them a lot. My social media experience started with the form of forum almost 10 years ago. Nowadays, there are many types of forums out there on the WWW. However, there are mainly two types of them attracting me most. The first type can be categorized as entertaining-based one, and the other can be called the problem-solving-based. I am not going to say I am a frequent visitor to the first type. However, I did go to these forums when I felt like needing a little break from the busy life as well as having some spare time. As for the second type, it can help you solve your practical problems effectively. For example, when I decided to come to Sweden for master study, my friend told me a very useful forum with the URL http://www.kina.cc/, which provided up-to-date information about studying in Sweden as well as other countries in the Scandinavian area. At that time, I did become a frequent visitor of that forum, and was aggressively searching information about Sweden and its schools.
My second contact with social media is blog. My blog is like a portal of myself to my friends and family, with whom I got less chance meeting, especially when I am abroad. On my blog, I usually posted a lot of pictures I took at that time. That means my friends and family can actually know where I am and what I am doing. At the same time, I also visit my friends’ blog to see what they are doing and how they are living their wonderful lives.
My third contact with social media technology can be associated with one computer game I played. This game is called Microsoft Flight Simulator, and it can be played solely as well as on the internet or local LAN. There are a less number of people playing this game when comparing to games like WarCraft, mainly because it is a niche game. However, I liked it very much, and I also noticed that every real player of this game seemed really into it and quite loyal. We have forums regarding this game, which serve as a community where we can learn more about this game as well as a place where we can show how well we could play it, to a large extent, by posting the screen shots. Moreover, some people are organizing activities for the game fans, who are geographically close, in the real life. These activities include a party in a restaurant, which everyone knows, a field trip to a nearby airport to photographing the landing and taking off of the airplanes, a visit to some local airports where short-term real flight training is provided, etc.
My other contacts with social media consist of YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia and miniclip. Each one of them solves me a lot of problems accordingly, and I found them quite useful and easy to use as well. Generally speaking, social media technologies help me live my life much easier and I cannot imagine my life without them. Since social media technologies are widely used now, more and more problems associated with them are appearing as well, such as irresponsible posts on the forum, unacceptable video clips on the YouTube, etc. However, more regulatory system are being built, and I strongly believe that all these currently existing problems will be solved sooner or later by the effective regulating on the web. Thus, I look at social media technologies and their consequences with great hope, and I definitely believe that their future is going to be brighter and brighter.
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Firstly, thank you for reminding me about the kina website!I nearly forget it at all:) I used to be a frequent visitor on it as well before i came to Stockholm. It's a omni-tool for chinese students!!
Secondly, i would like to say that i prefer Forum rather than Facebook or Xiaonei(Chinese Version of facebook,hehe).Because Forums, as you say, it's always straight to the point so that people are easier to follow the line and find out what he needs.Besides, the interface of it combines less elements so that each topic is clearly enought to see; Original version of Facebook or Xiaonei was much like personal blog in the beginning but in nowadays , it transforms with too many additional applications. I think too much information makes the website a bit mass and it’s complicated for new users. And comparing Facebook and Xiaonei, I think the common ground for both of them is that most of topic of these software applications are related to entertainment but the difference is that Facebook is filled with small installed games and funny videos which mainly done by current users; While in Xiaonei, it’s basicly domainated by pictures and jokes. From my perspectives, Maybe the dissimilarity is due to the different development stage of each company or various culture backgroud.
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