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Global social media practice: Great firewall of China

China has been recognized as the most populated country in the world. And it is not just about numbers of population, the users of the internet are also considered as the most. However, with this much people in the country, restriction of the internet access to the foreign countries sites has been made strictly. We all know that social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google are not accessible via china and instead, they create their own social medias and even their own search engine, named Baidu to replace the mentioned platforms to ease the inconvenience. Such is indeed a strategy of china to lead their people in using the “made in china”.

The great firewall of china

When all the connections from outside have been shut out tightly, chances are that citizens of China have no choice but to rely on the Chinese made platforms. Again, this is a drastic measure from the perspective of an outsider. But why is Chinese government doing this to their own people? According to Batt (2018), Chinese government believes that they should have a complete control over something like internet to prevent the criminal activities and attacks. At the same time, Chinese government can squash all the criticism and outsider views by having the controls over internet. Moreover, some argues that the reason of building up the great firewall is to secure the “cyber sovereignty” and protecting from the foreign influence (Bloomberg, 2018). As how things stand right now, it is very hard for Chinese government to develop an in-between compromise with foreign countries for business opportunities and innovation within the services aspect.

source: http://politicalmemes.com/western-democracy/

The results of the censorship

Due to overwhelmingly having full cyber sovereignty by the Chinese government, many of the citizens are began to frustrate over the censorship of internet which knows no bound. Protests that happened thirty years ago which led by students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square has become an event in Chinese history that witnessed a deadly military crackdown with costing more than 10,000 lives, became a symbol of pro-democracy protest for internet control (Roache, 2019). Hence, more and more users are jumping the great hurdle named great firewall of china by using various kind of VPN. This has also resulted in trolling campaigns that happens between foreign country. An Australian Olympic swimmer Mack Horton made a statement to his Chinese rival a “drug cheat” which then later resulting in Horton being attacked verbally on Instagram and Facebook; which are not accessible unless with the help of VPN. It happened because the fury incited among the Chinese internet users by Horton (Horwtiz, 2016).

source: https://giphy.com/explore/i-told-you-so

The conclusion

While Chinese government has this great firewall of china to serves as a protection for internet security purposes, it reduces the business opportunities with foreign countries and the innovation to broaden the usability. In my opinion, the problems such as protests, and trolling campaigns arise when china isolated themselves far too long by only using domestic platforms which resulting in not blending in with the rest of the countries. It is only a matter of time that china leads themselves towards an unsightly destruction.

source: https://tenor.com/search/heavy-sigh-gifs

References

Batt, S. (2018). What Is “The Great Firewall of China”?. Retrieved from https://www.maketecheasier.com/the-great-firewall-of-china/

Bloomberg. (2018). The Great Firewall of China. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-great-firewall-of-china/2018/11/05/5dc0f85a-e16d-11e8-ba30-a7ded04d8fac_story.html?utm_term=.2e02d6177c3a

Horwitz, J. (2016). China’s internet users are increasingly jumping the Great Firewall – to launch epic trolling campaigns. Retrieved from https://qz.com/757996/chinas-internet-users-are-increasingly-jumping-the-great-firewall-to-launch-epic-trolling-campaigns/

Roache, M. (2019). Tiananmen Square protests and China’s fight for internet control. Retrieved from

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/04/tiananmen-square-protests-china-fight-internet-control-190426023911794.html

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Social gaming

In the modern era such as now, or even the era from way back then, game had existed as a means to entertain oneself or with others. It keeps evolving from the very old way until what we see nowadays. The most popular type of game that played by most of us nowadays is undoubtedly, the social game. Social game, as the name implies, is a type of game where player plays the game in online with another player with an anonymous identity socially. However, even when serves its purposes as a means for entertainment, what are the bad and good sides that player will encounter when they are over addicted to game? How does the game commercialize itself for the purpose of monetization? We will look into these issues one by one.

Is gaming a bad thing to overdo?

When gaming slowly becoming a subculture in our society since then until now, it became unstoppable for most of the people where they dedicate most of their time into it.  According to Fuller (2017), in the aspect of general health for the players, they will experience detrimental effect on their health if they spend a long period of time playing game. For example, hand and eye strain will occur when players sitting in one position while pressing the same button repeatedly. Moreover, most of the games come at the high cost and to run the most recent games, players will have to spend a large expense for computer upgrade (Fuller, 2017). One cannot deny the fact that playing game can also, at the same time bring positive effects to the player. For instance, according to Kowert (n.d.), social games can help to further develop a greater social and emotional well-being, a stronger sense of identity, and a higher life satisfaction, based on the new research studied on video games. As such, players will need to have self-control when playing and manage their time efficiently.

Gaming for monetization purpose?

For the purpose of commercialized the games in monetization, games are no longer just about playing, but more to money earning. Nowadays, we see more and more games are being published and resulted in gaming boom for most of the players around the world. Meaning to say, many players are monetizing the game play of the game content through livestream on YouTube, Twitch and Ps Now as their primary career. However, with some policies, restriction and copyright applied, not all companies are willing to let the player monetize the game play content as they pleased. According to Callender (2018), Nintendo allows players to monetize their game play videos after finally get what other companies have known for years. Before that, games from Nintendo will not be able to livestream even when YouTube creators who participate in Nintendo’s Creators program (Alexandar, 2017). It is very clear that games are not about playing anymore, but most of the players are taking the gaming opportunity to earn some money at the same time.

The verdict

While we all know that spending a lot of time in gaming will cause some health issues, it also has positive effects on player. It all comes down to self-control and moderation when playing games. Besides, gaming in our modern society nowadays where digital platforms are getting more advanced resulted in more people especially gamers dedicating their time in gaming for monetizing purpose. In my opinion, I would still say gaming has more cons than pros and gamers should really take appropriate amount of break in between so that the practice of gaming itself would minimize its negative impact to the society.

References

Alexander, J. (2017). Nintendo restricts livestreaming games for YouTubers in Nintendo’s partners program. Retrieved from https://www.polygon.com/2017/9/29/16384236/youtube-nintendo-livestream-monetization

Callender, S. (2018). Nintendo Finally Gets with the Times and Lets Player Monetize Gameplay Videos. Retrieved from https://screenrant.com/nintendo-gameplay-videos-monetize-regulations/

Fuller, S. (2017). The Disadvantages of Playing Games on the Computer. Retrieved from https://itstillworks.com/12531815/the-disadvantages-of-playing-games-on-the-computer

Kowert, R. (n.d.). Benefits of social online play. Retrieved from http://smartsocialgamers.org/2017/08/31/benefits-social-online-play/

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Fandom and Fan Activism

In our modern society, internet has expanded its functionality not only just for the user to look up for the things they do not know, many communities had born as a group to share their common interest for tv series, movie, celebrities and so on. However, what these communities do when sharing what they interested about were just only for their own sake? What about the contributions people give through the encouragement from the communities and how does other people perceive them as? We will dive deeply into these matters, so we will have the overall understanding for them.

Fandom

As what I have mentioned earlier, the communities formed as a group to share their common interest about something is what we called as Fandom. According to Morrison (2016), larger Fandom is broken down into several fractions, called fandom instead of capitalizing the word “f”. With the term of Fandom in mind, do we ever consider where does the term came from? I doubt we all do. According to Rutherford-Morrison (2016), the word “fandom” came from the very old word called “fanatic”, and it didn’t take long for the people to shorten the word “fanatic” into “fan” and finally make it appearance as “Fandom” when “Fandom puzzled over Johnsonian statements” was printed by Cincinnati Enquirer. It is also a combination of “fan” with the suffix “-dom” (Rutherford-Morrison, 2016). With many people accessing the Fandom communities, we can view the whole from the perspective of an outsider to see how actively people contribute to the communities.  According to Lee Cooper (2015), Fandom rooted as reinforced via social participation through individual engagements. He also mentioned that Fans rather than passive, are active.

Are fans weird and overly?

While Fandom communities are actively building up strongly and steadily, some fans might be over reacting to everything centered on what they like where they are too over obsessive with certain celebrities and become overwhelming worship to them; as what we called Celebrity worship syndrome. According to Dong (2018), a professor of psychology at Seoul National University, Kwak Keum-joo mentioned that, teenagers in Korean gave birth to the phenomenon called sasaeng, which means private life in Korean because the teenagers are lacking the opportunities to enjoy cultural activities. This has resulted in fans chasing the stars all day because of the sasaeng phenomenon. While some sasaeng fans even go as far for some extremely activism. For example, a rapper from K-pop band GOT7 named Jackson Wang was involved in a car accident in 2016 because of the involvement of sasaeng in the taxi. This was because the fans wanted to stand out from the competition among themselves to get more attention from the stars, according to Kwak (Dong, 2018). From this case alone, we can already see the seriousness of the act from the over obsessive and weird fans to the point they victimized the stars.

In the nutshell

Fandom communities are the place where people share what they interested in because fans are usually perceived as active rather than passive. On the other hand, some fans might be overly reacting to everything and act extremely when its concerned about the stars they love and can even go as far as to hurt them just to get the attention. Such an act must be put a stop, so it can be kept under controls from getting worse.

References

Dong, SH. (2018). Where K-pop superfans turn ugly – the dark side of the Korean pop culture phenomenon, where admiration turns to obsession. Retrieved from https://www.scmp.com/culture/music/article/2158408/when-k-pop-superfans-turn-ugly-dark-side-korean-pop-culture-phenomenon

Lee Cooper, B. (2014). Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to Study of Media Fan Culture. Popular Music and Society, 38(1), 109-111. Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03007766.2014.908524?journalCode=rpms20

Morrison, M. (2016). What Is Fandom And Why Is It Important? Retrieved from https://www.theodysseyonline.com/what-is-fandom-and-why-is-it-important

Rutherford-Morrison, L. (2016). Where Did The Word "Fandom" Come From? Behind The Term That Changed The Internet Forever. Retrieved from https://www.bustle.com/articles/144396-where-did-the-word-fandom-come-from-behind-the-term-that-changed-the-internet-forever

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Crowdsourcing & Crowdfunding

We might have heard of these terms all the time. However, do we truly understand what are the differences between these two terms? What good will these two does to society? For that, we will first look at the definition for two of these terms. 

What are crowdsourcing & crowdfunding?

While we might have thought that these two share the same meaning, but in fact, they are not. According to McGowan (2018), crowdfunding is a process where a group or groups of people sourcing the money or funds. On the other hand, crowdsourcing is a process where a group or groups of people sourcing the information or skills or end products. In my opinion, these two processes are extremely beneficial for the society where information and funds are much needed. Crowdfunding doesn’t require big investors or bank loans to raise money. Instead, it only requires the collective efforts of friends, family, customers and individual investors to source the funds (McGowan, 2018). The most renown crowdfunding platforms that existed until today are Fundable, Indiegogo, Kickstarter and GoFundMe (McGowan, 2018). Crowdsourcing, where the knowledge and power of the crowd to speed up the sourcing process (McGowan, 2018). Example of the crowdsourcing websites are such as, Wikipedia, Fandom, Reddit, 4Chan and so on. It is without a doubt that, with these crowd-based process, campaigns and communities are growing stronger and steadily day by day with the power of crowd.

source: http://www.writethings.net/crowdsourcing-and-crowdfunding-a1/

Social media movements to mobilize the youth to vote

During the general election 14 back in 2018, a social media group from Twitter called #UndiRabu managed to raise the funds with more than RM65,000 for a social media movement, #pulangmengundi to get the youth voters back home to participate in the election polls, reported by Malay Mail (Elankovan, 2018). It was far surpassed the initial amount which was RM47,750. The subsidies of the fare include:

        RM 200 – flights to East Malaysia

        RM 100 – trains to West Malaysia

        RM 50 – buses to West Malaysia

        RM 50 – for those who drive

This is to help most of the voters that are student from private higher learning institutions and public (Elankovan, 2018). According to Mohan (2018), the #pulangmengundi helped few dozens of Malaysians to return home and participate in their votes. Based on the #pulangmengundi social media movement, we can see that many youths take the opportunity to get home for the votes with the funds provided by #UndiRabu to cover their travel expenses. The patriotism spirit shown by the #pulangmengundi is what we as a Malaysian should have.

source: https://siakapkelinews.blogspot.com/2018/04/sukar-nak-pulang-netizen-malaysia.html

Effect of fake news on crowdsourced information

Crowdsourcing is greatly beneficial for building communities to provide more accurate information to public. However, what kind of effect will the fake news have influence on the crowdsourced information? Provided with the information on the internet, many of us will most likely indubitably to use the information for any kind of purposes. The consequence of doing so will lead to the “echo chambers” effect, where we still have a strong belief of the fake basic facts and current events (Wert, 2018). One cannot deny the fact that crowdsourcing will help against the wide spread of fake news. According to Carufel (2019), Rand and Pennycook found that the approach to fight fake news is by utilizing the survey to layperson by asking various outlets where they trust the most and promote the high trust ratings content from sites. By the help of crowdsourcing, the reliability of the content will increase thus eliminating the fake news from spreading all over.

source: https://giphy.com/gifs/OqAeQrGmU7lS6tENnQ

Conclusion

Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing are as the name implies, are crowd-based process where many funds and information are accessible through crowd. Meaning to say, without the helps from many people, the process of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing couldn’t be possible to utilize efficiently and effectively.

References

Carufel, R. (2019). Fighting the spread of fake news-why crowdsourcing is effective. Retrieved from https://www.agilitypr.com/pr-news/public-relations/fighting-the-spread-of-fake-news-why-crowdsourcing-is-effective/

Elankovan, V. (2018). M’sians Raise RM65,000 to Fund First-Time Voters’ Travels Back Home This GE14. Retrieved from https://www.worldofbuzz.com/msians-raise-rm65000-to-fund-first-time-voters-travels-back-home-this-ge14/

McGowan, E. (2018). Crowdfunding vs. Crowdsourcing. Retrieved from https://www.startups.com/library/expert-advice/crowdfunding-vs-crowdsourcing

Mohan, C. (2018). From #PulangMengundi to #CarpoolGE14: Malaysians unite to ensure voters turn up. Retrieved from https://sg.news.yahoo.com/pulangmengundi-carpoolge14-malaysians-unite-ensure-voters-turn-230800335.html

Wert, K. (2018). The Real Impact of Fake News. Retrieved from

https://medium.com/nonviolenceny/the-real-impact-of-fake-news-9b52d99407d7

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Trolling and Social media conflict

When social media has become part of our daily necessity, things can become nasty. From our understanding, many cases such as trolling and verbal abuse from the users have make their appearance one after another on the posts or comments where the victimizer find them amusing. These have resulted badly in a serious matter where the victim could no longer endure all the trolling, ultimately ended their own life. With that said, we are going review the chanciness of trolling on social media and ways to prevent.

Why trolling? And the impact?

According to Hanson (2018), the term trolling is defined as writing some off- topic messages where they lead to the quarrels or upsetting people. Meaning to say, it was caused by someone who wrote about unrelated massage to purposely brings up the controversial into the massage itself to get a rise out of other users. However, victimizer who thought of immediately criticized the comment of the victim will also unintentionally brought forth the negative impact to it. On July 2018, a man name Leon Jenkins 43, livestreamed his own suicide on an internet forum because of some vicious trolling that caused the depression on him from the online community (Synnott, Tzani-Pepelasi & loannou, 2018). Nevertheless, is it possible for the victims to turn a blind eye to all the vicious trolling and resolve the problem eventually? According to Johnson (2017), Ms. Gee Bee, which was one of the victims of trolling, tackled the attackers head on where she reached out to her community of online bloggers. They successfully identified and arrested the man who was responsible for all the trolling. From what Ms. Gee Bee had done, we can see how she did not give in herself to all the trolling. Instead, she stood up and confronted the man directly.

How to deal with the trolling?

When trolls on social media were getting worse and worse, there are some ways to deal with the trolling and they could be very subjective from each person. To do that, one should establish a policy to show what kind of comments can be post (Rampton, 2015). Also, users could just ignore the trolls because all the trolls want were the attention. According to Pew Research Center, most opted option was to ignore online harassment which 60% of users were able to do so (Rampton, 2015). Last but not the least, take time to process with the emotions. Trolls can easily let up the flare that contains within the victim because trolling is literally a disturbing insult which will stir up the emotions of victim. Hence, the victim should sort out their emotion by crying or shouting so they could let them out of their minds (Ellice, 2017). If victims can effectively utilize the good ways to deal with trolls, I believe trolling issue would not lead to a very disastrous outcome. Meanwhile, victimizer should also understand what kind of trolling would not triggered some serious issues, so they could moderate it and prevent the trolling issues from getting worse and out of control.

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knwRAYC3-fE

References

Ellice. (2017). 12 Ways to Stop Internet Trolls from Ruining Your Blog. Retrieved from https://www.dreamhost.com/blog/how-to-stop-internet-trolls/

Hanson, J. (2018). Trolls and Their Impact on Social Media. Retrieved from https://unlcms.unl.edu/engineering/james-hanson/trolls-and-their-impact-social-media

Johnson, V. (2017). Cyberhate: Internet ‘trolls’ are far more dangerous than you’ve imagined. Retrieved from https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2017/08/cyberhate-internet-trolls-are-far-more-dangerous-than-you-ve-imagined.html

Rampton, J. (2015). 10 Tips to Dealing With Trolls. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnrampton/2015/04/09/10-tips-to-dealing-with-trolls/#283b867154f4

Synnott, J, Tzani-Pepelazi, C & Ioannou, M. (2018). Online suicide and the dark psychology of internet insult forums. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/online-suicide-and-the-dark-psychology-of-internet-insult-forums-101686

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Activism and Protest

In the recent years or even now, protest and activism have always been the ways to reform the society no matter in the real life or in the social media. The question is, how do they affect the society? Even though these terms are being heard widely, what exactly are these two means? What kind of important roles do they play in the society? To that, we need to have a better understanding of what these two are.

What are the differences between activism and protest?

Let’s talk about the activism first before we move into the protest. According to Martin (2007), activism goes beyond what they called the conventional and routine on behalf of a cause. It plays an important role in ending slavery, challenging dictatorships, protecting workers from exploitation, protecting the environment and more from what happened before. It is what we call a revolutionary movement that change the system of a society from a bottom up social revolution approach. Meaning to say, people oppose to something with a crowd by acting, so they could hope of topple over the unjust and unfair from the society. On the other hand, the purpose of protest is emphasizing on an issue which brought attention to many people (Weiss, 2017). In short, both activism and protest work the same way but with different method. According to Resnick (2017), Fabio Rojas, a sociologist at Indiana University said that, the effects of activism and protest depends on the power of people’s influential to the powerful people to make the decisions, and if they can’t, they fail.  

Social Media as the heart of protests

As social media growing strongly and widely, it quickly becomes a place where political issues are widely regard to many people. At a time, it also becomes a place where civic-related activities are being engaged in there (Anderson, Toor, Ranie & Smith, 2018).  The most famous example of activism that can be seen was the “Me Too” movement which aims to raise the awareness for sexual harassment and assault. Besides, the protest of “Black Lives Matter”, which was born in 2013, when a policeman shot an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, was responded by a California activist to jury’s decision on Facebook with a statement goes by: “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” Hence, the hashtag of “Black Lives Matter” was born and the protests continue to grow strongly (Tedeneke, 2016). The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag has comes to its fifth anniversary of the use to bring a cause using social media platforms as it was the most sustained efforts (Anderson, Toor, Ranie & Smith, 2018).

In conclusion, the willingness to participate in activism or protest differ from each person whether in real life or have an anonymous identity on social media. However, even with the power of the existing social media, we cannot get carried away by using the prominent effects of social media to regard the downfall of a leader. Otherwise, this could be the misuse of social media to spread the bad information to all, resulting the social media to be a lethal weapon.

Reference

Anderson, M, Toor, S, Rainie, L & Smith, A. (2018). Activism in the social media age. Retrieved from https://www.pewinternet.org/2018/07/11/public-attitudes-toward-political-engagement-on-social-media/

Martin, B. (n.d.). Activism, social and political. Retrieved from https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/07Anderson.html

Resnick, B. (2017). 4 rules for making a protest work, according to experts. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/31/14430584/protest-trump-strategies-experts

Tedeneke, A. (2016). The Black Lives Matter movement explained. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/08/black-lives-matter-movement-explained/

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Political Engagement

What does political engagement mean?

Political engagement, as the word itself suggests, is an act which one involves itself into a politic participation; in other words, a political activity. By taking part in political activity, it will influence the distribution of social goods and values (“What Is Political Participation,” n.d.). There are different types of form for how people take part in political activity. Those forms of political activity are voting, protest, public consultations and jury duty (White, 2019).

How does political engagement shape the society?

With the existence of political activity, it is very essential for the citizen and politician to actively taking part in it, so they can make a difference in the society and reshape it. If citizens are engaging in politics, they will realize what has gone wrong with the government and prepare with a solution to solve the problems with an amount of time of understanding the root problem (Right For Education, 2017). With more people participate in politics, the problems of the people will become clearer to government which will ultimately make the government unable to ignore the problems of people (Right For Education, 2017). Meaning to say, if more people take part in politics, the problem lies within the society will be resolve, hence reshaping the society for greater good.

How does the social media influence the politics?

When social media has made everything become much more convenient, it also makes politics equally convenient for campaigns and various political activities. Social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube has greatly changed how they run the campaigns and the interaction between citizens and election candidates (Murse, 2019). The ability to publish content and the live broadcast to millions of people allows candidates’ image to get recognize in real time with hassle-free (Murse, 2019). The social media changed the politics in the way of direct contacts with voters, advertising without paying for advertising, tailoring the message to the audience, fundraising and so on (Murse, 2019). While social medias are being widely used in western politics affair, Japanese people on the other hand, still run their campaigns in the traditional way by stump speech which occur outside of the shopping malls or train stations by law (Sim, 2017). From this statement, it is very clear that not all countries have applied the use of social media to widespread the politics affair, but some countries still maintain the original way of running a campaign, showing their public image and practicing different kind of activities to the society.

To conclude

Political engagement comes in different forms and different methods to execute. All in all, political engagement is a practice that must be done as a citizen because it is the duty of citizen to resolve the problem lies within the society, so the society itself can be improved and reshaped for the future of new generations that have yet to come.

References

Murse, Tom. (2019). How Social Media Has Changed Politics. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/how-social-media-has-changed-politics-3367534

Right For Eduction. (2017). The importance of your political participation. Retrieved from https://rightforeducation.org/2017/10/political-participation/

Sim, W. (2017). Election campaign, the Japanese way. Retrieved from https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/election-fever-hits-japan

What Is Political Participation?. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_american-government-and-politics-in-the-information-age/s12-01-what-is-political-participatio.html

White, D. (2019). What is Political Participation? – Definition, Forms & Examples. Retrieved from https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-political-participation-definition-forms-examples.html

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Is Tumblr a blog or a social network site?

Before we get into the real question, let us have a basic understanding of what Tumblr is.

What is Tumblr?

So, what is Tumblr? Why has many people use it on weekly or even daily? To answer these questions, we must refer to the creation of Tumblr and how it serves its purposes to people throughout the world. Tumblr is a social media tool that is free to use and was launched in 2007 by internet entrepreneur, David Karp and lead designer Marco Arment (Boone, 2019). Tumblr continue to gain its popularity and as of June 1, 2017, 394.3 million of blogs have been hosted by Tumblr and gained 700 million visits per month. It ranked 45 as an Alexa global rank (Tan, 2017). The use of Tumblr is that It let the users write about their own blog. They can also share the other person’s blog where they find fascinating. It is so popular that even the president of United States himself started to use it (Alfredo, 2013).

Why does people blog?

One of the most common things out of many is that, they blog to share what they like. Why? Because, they find the need to express themselves and at the same time, to connect with the individual who share the common passion (Dekmezian, 2016). Human is a creature which will make the practices of self-disclosure to bring themselves closer to as many people as possible. In other words, human is a social creature by nature. Besides, it is also beneficial to write a blog daily to improve the writing skills of the users over time. Moreover, users can showcase their knowledge and experience by using blog as their platform (Dekmezian, 2016). Sometimes, people will have something that they wanted to voice out and blog provides a place that free from criticism and censorship, so they can speak up what’s in their mind and find the people who can connect with what they believe in (Goins, 2018).

Where is social network site?

Social network site is a place where people create a public profile to share their activities that revolves around them on certain websites (PC, 2019). It is a place where people interacting with each and another to share what they interested in and to have a common topic to talk about. On different occasion, some people use the Social Network Site as an opportunity to start a small business where they start selling different variety of things on the sites. The known Social Network Sites are Facebook, Twitter, Linkedln, Reddit and so on.

So, is Tumblr a blog or Social Network Site?

Back to our real question. Is Tumblr a blog or social network site? In a sense, Tumblr is both a blog and a social network site. Why? As a platform for blogging, I believe Tumblr is surely provides a place for such where people blog about their interest, hobbies and the causes with the world. The term of microblogging was referred to Tumblr as a platform. Each day, 71.6 million of blog entries, photos, videos and audio files are posted as of 2012 (Boone, 2019). While as a Social Network Site, Tumblr provides the similar features as other Social Network Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest which allowed the users to share, post, like and comment. The more the users use it, users will discover how the functionality of like and share is commonly used in Tumblr (Moreau, 2019). As such, I believe the interacting of such will bring people together and connecting them as whole while reflecting the purposes of Social Network Site.

In the nutshell, opinion for either a blog or Social Network Site is a Tumblr differ from each person. Some might think of it as blog and some might think of it as Social Network Site. Hence, there is no right or wrong.

References

Boone, B. (2012). How Tumblr Works. Retrieved from https://computer.howstuffworks.com/tumblr.htm

Dekmezian, G. (2016). Why Do People Blog? The Benefits of Blogging. Retrieved from http://www.citethisforme.com/cite/sources/websiteautociteconfirm

Goins, J. (2018). Why You Should Start a Blog (Even If You're Not a Writer). Retrieved from https://goinswriter.com/why-blog/

Moreau, E. (2019). The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Using Tumblr. Retrieved from https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-use-tumblr-4049305

Pcmag, (2018). Social Networking Site Definition from PC Magazine Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/55316/social-networking-site

Tan, A. (2017). How Tumblr Became One Of The Hottest Social Networks With Over 350 Million Users - Word-of-Mouth and Referral Marketing Blog. Retrieved from https://www.referralcandy.com/blog/tumblr-marketing-strategy/