Elitist microblogs promote celebrity opinions
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What is the most time-consuming online pastime for journalists in the office? Well, in 2009 it might have been Plants vs. Zombies, where they could enjoy the feeling of being overwhelmed. Since 2010, the answer was perhaps a more serious one, the microblogs, in which they could be overwhelmed or swamped by information.
We can tell this from the statistics of both microblogging service providers and worried employers.
It seems that microblogs have somehow bridged the gap between traditional media and Internet. More and more journalists have started microblogging and interacting with the audience. More importantly, virtually every microblogger is an information generator so that by microblogs' democratic nature, they seem to be creating a new form of media comparable with the traditional one.
The optimism exactly ensues from these aspiring phenomena. In the May 8 edition of the Global Times, Liu Shengjun argues that microblogs are doing what traditional media is incapable of, and that we should be positive about their rising power. This sound plausible.
But I wonder if we have already been too positive toward China's microblogs.
There are many theories accounting for the question "Why," while I'm more interested in the question "Why now."
China's microblogs have been thriving since 2009. Then, from the outset of Twitter's global popularity in 2007, what was happening in the meantime before Sina.com inaugurated itself as the leader of China's microblogging?
Nothing.
There were some attempts to copy Twitter's success to China. But they all failed. Fanfou and Digu were two pioneers of this approach, which has now fallen into practical oblivion, suggesting that the Twitter model doesn't apply to China.
What Sina Weibo and many other microblogging providers have done doesn't repeat microblog pioneers' fiascos, in part contradicts the Twitter-like populism that liberals expected to see. Sina Weibo spent two years on completing one mission, not advertising microblogging to the Chinese populace, but selling it to celebrities and elites.
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