Editor, Designer, Writer, Director… You can be ALL of them!

Thanks to the internet, the whole world is open to all the people. Common people can make use of the academic knowledge and the high-technoledge they have to try to accomplish some tasks that used to be impossible for them. everyone can post their ideas online and write a piece of blog to express his own idea on certain issues—to be a critic; everyone can make a micro movie and put it on YouTube—to be a director; everyone can add his knowledge to the items listed on Wikipedia—to be an editor…Examples are endless, and this is what is called as “PRODUSAGE”. And we have the reason to believe that we have been in a YOU AGE!

In the past, the production chain is simple and single: producer, distributor and consumer, those three elements make up the whole process of production in the industrial society. The consumers in the past were the receiver at the end of the production chain. However, things changed a lot in today’s society. The consumers are not the end of the production, but a very important step in the production, even the beginning of the production in some cases. Just like Axel Bruns (the author of the book, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage,) introduces it, produsage is a kind of user-lead content creation exists in this web2.0 era.What we were in the past:

   What we are now:

(PRODUSAGE.org  http://produsage.org/produsage)

Just a few days ago, one of my Chinese friends (now he is studying English in America) told me about his amazing idea--“I am going to make a movie about the difficult pronunciation in English for Chinese people, and I think that will be a hit.” I call it amazing because I was amazed by his idea—“do you find a company to support you in making the movie?” I was curious, because I thought he had to get some support from certain company, or at least hire some people to make a team to produce a movie. “No, it’s just me and another two boys. We three will make a movie and then put it on YouTube. That’s it!” that was the answer I got at last. Well, he was telling the truth, making movie today is no longer an extremely complex work as people thought before. With the help of a laptop and the popularity of YouTube, everyone can be a director.

Unlike the newspaper and magazines that once published then cannot be changed, Wikipedia can be updated whenever and wherever you are, as long as you have some new resources. The same with the YouTube, instead of waiting for months even years for a now movie to be seen, common people can just post a simple video online to let the whole world see what is happening. The blog helps a lot in letting the common people have a platform to speak out their own thoughts without being examined by the “professional” editors.  

Now we are in the produsage era and enjoying the advantages brought by it. We are freer to express our own opinion and have more channels to see the real world instead of being led by the mainstream media. This doesn’t mean that we are not creative anymore; on the contrary, we have to be very creative so that we can make something new by using the existing resources.Although the produsage does have some limitations, such as the spread of unreal information or rumor, I do believe that the common people like me can benefit a lot from the produsage era.

 

This is a video designed and made by two Chinese girls，who are not professional director nor actor. Here is a very useful link to the website about produsage: http://produsage.org/

The Secrets about the Website that Reveal Secrets…

    One of my friends has told me that it seemed like everyone was fascinated about gossip, and I think that is definitely true. Actually, people are especially curious about the “gossip” of the mysterious person and the government. Now, people can satisfy their curiosity to some degree by having a look at the secret government documents thanks to a website established by an Australian man in 2006 which aims at bringing the government of countries all over the world to light. That man is Julian Assange and the website is wikileaks. Thousands of people view wikileaks as an excellent website because it gives the common people a chance to learn more about the mysterious and serious government. However, because of curiosity, I have some questions about this new type of website, and I want to know the secrets about this secret-reveal website.

                                                  

     My first question is about one interesting phenomenon I found on wikileaks. When I looking at the wikileaks, I think that the truth it talks about different governments seems has different focuses. For example, many of its reports about China focuses on China’s censorship over the internet, while the articles about Japan talk a lot about ACTA and there are more articles about 9/11 and Iraq war in the category of United States. Maybe it is hard for one website alone to find out all the secrets that the public want to know or may be the authors are more interested in those topics. But I am still curious that whether it is that wikileaks has its own preferences or it has chosen some topics on purpose. I want someone to tell me the secrets about the wikileaks’ topics.

    What comes from my first question is my second question—should we believe all that the wikileaks says, or is it really telling the truth? Since I come from China, I know that the public cannot get connect to some foreign websites and some software are unavailable in china neither. But I am still wondering why wiki leaks focusing on making a list of the Chinese government state TV censorship. And “Green Dam”, the name of content-control software for Windows appears a lot in the articles under China category. I don’t think it is wikileaks‘priority to analyze the technology the green dam uses. By looking at the “popular China related articles”, I find that there are 5 titles mention about “censorship” among the total 12 titles. After reading the list the wikileaks made about the information that is forbidden on TV state, I found that they mainly centering on the Falun Gong meditation movement, Tibet, and some political leaders. Although I understand why the Chinese government forbids these topics in China, (because some of them are not totally true and may cause a spread of murmur among the Chinese citizens), there are still many a people don’t understand the reason why the Chinese government doesn’t give freedom to these messages. Therefore, I think wikileaks should try to find out the reason why some keywords, some messages are forbidden on the internet or TV in China, rather than just make a list of some words. If wikileaks aims at unmarking the lies in this duplicitous and complicated world, it should dig deep enough to find out the truth instead of looking at the surface. I cannot keep myself from wondering whether wikileaks really wants to find out the truth or it just wants to make some bad impression about some countries.

     It is true that wikileaks does open a door for the common people to learn more about their government and it does have some effect on urging the government to behave well and do their work more efficiently. I also agree that wikileaks does give me a lot of information that I didn’t know before and I do think it is a useful and valuable tool to some degree. It is just that I think we should view everything objectively and think more about them and have our own thoughts about everything.

Say NO to Extremism

When talking about the extremists, what is the first thing come into your mind? The yelling people, the cruelty riot, the crazy parade or the suicide bomb? It is true that people all have the right to speak out their opinions in the way they like, however, it is not right that what you do bother other people’s normal life or even threaten their personal and property security . As for extremists, it is not only about the common people’s daily life that they may disturb, but also lives of other people are threatened. We call them extremists, because they do something extremely and always in a negative way. Below is an example of the riot done by some extremist in China.

                                     

     This is a picture posted online about the July 2009 Ürümqi riots happened in XinJiang province in China.  It is reported that a total of 197 people died, with 1,721 others injured and many vehicles and buildings destroyed during the riot, and here is the link about the riot on Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_riots.

The riot was incited by the ethnic separatist--Rabiye Qadir, the President of theWorld Uyghur Congress, while even her own children cannot agree with what their mother had done. I cannot agree with any kind of violent no matter what kind of reason it has. Although people all have the freedom to express their own opinions, they should not threaten the safety of other’s life and property, especially those innocent people.

Rebiya Kadeer's daughter, sons, brother speak out for the first time about July 5 Xinjiang riot and showed their disagreement with Rebiya Kadeer's deed on 5^th July.
What surprised me most about this riot is that the extremists got together and plotted the riot through the website and the instant communicating tools, such as QQ. I was shocked when I heard that the extremists used QQ to communicate with each other and plot the riot through it, because QQ is such a popular instant communicating online tool in China that almost every young people has a QQ account and contact with their friends and families on line. A research showed that there are 29 million active QQ users all over China.(http://uir.blog.hexun.com/11819872_d.html) It is hard for me to imagine that what will happen if that violent information had been spread by the extremists to the young people. Just as Mr. Raspal Khosa said,the internet is a powerful tool for extremists to radicalize vulnerable individuals and potentially recruit them to violence. (ASPI ,http://www.aspi.org.au/research/spf.aspx?tid=9  24th February, 2011). 

That causes me to think about the use of internet among the public. Lots of the extremist groups have their own websites and everyone can get access to the websites wherever they are in the world.The problem is that what can we do to prevent the spread of the violent information online. The internet is the most popular media among the Chinese young people. On the other hand, I think the internet is the most dangerous media, because people don’t have to be responsible for the things they publish online or ensure the reliability or accuracy of the content. A number of people just put up whatever they like and sometimes the information they spread online is nothing but rumors. Some people may vent and express their frustration by writing down some extreme comments towards the government or society. The young people, especially children and teenagers, they have no ability to tell right from wrong and they are so naïve that easily to be misled by the information they see online.

Some people hold such an opinion that it is the government’s obligation to keep the internet function well and make sure the online environment online is safe and reliable. However it is very hard for the government to counter the insidious extremists groups on its own. From my perspective, the right thing to do is to help the internet users to have the ability to make their own judgments about the issues published online rather than believe whatever they see online or whatever other people say. Having their own beliefs and values is a very essential skill for the young people, and the most effective way to get to that purpose is education. In the recent years, many primary school and high school have some special classes called “my first class” at the very beginning of the semester. In those classes, the teacher will talk about how to keep yourself safe if some emergency happens, like an earthquake or fire, as well as some basic knowledge of protecting your personal information while using the internet. With the popularity of the internet, more and more young people are using the internet quite often. I remember that when I was in my secondary school, my Chinese teacher had spent a whole class telling us about the underlying threaten of using the internet. Our teacher told us a lot of skills about how to keep our personal information safe, for example, using the birthday of your friends or parents is a better choice than always use your birthday as your password, and do not easily trust the information like “you are the lucky customer of certain product”, which is always used to cheat for money. I think education should be keep in touch with the time and the teacher should teach the students not only the theories, but also some practical knowledge used in the daily life. Because a lot of people form their values when they are teenagers, it is very important and useful if the teachers and parents help the kids to set up the right opinions toward the internet.

The internet can be both a positive and negative tool for netizens, and we should pay extra attention when children are using the internet. People always say that the children are the future of the world and we should instruct them to the right direction. We cannot stop the extremists posting online, but we can help our kids to keep away from the violent information and make their own decisions.