Participatory Culture & Social Media

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What is Facebook?

Facebook based in Menlo, California and it is an American online social media and social networking service company. Its website was launched by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum,  and Chris Hughes on February 4, 2004. This social media first be used in some universities then spread to the senior high school. From February,2012 been hold the first IPO and valuing the company at $104 billion, the one of largest valuation to date for a newly listed public company. Facebook has more than 2.2 billion a month active users as of January 2018. Users of Facebook can post their name, occupy or photo and can also add their friends. There are some different groups for people to choosing.

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What is WeChat?

WeChat is a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment application developed by Tencent. And it’s literally is means mirco-message. It was released in 2011 and it was one of the world's largest standalone mobile apps by monthly active users in 2018. Over 1 billion people every month, near 902 million daily people. It also a China’s "super app"  and "app for everything"  because of its the range of functions and platforms.

What is participatory culture?

As with participatory democracy, a participatory culture is one in which the audience acts not as a receiver, but as a citizen, participating in the tapestry of media life. The new culture as it relates to the Internet has been described as Web 2.0 and make young people in participatory culture respond to a plenty of electronic signals and cultural products in ways that surprise their makers, finding identities and meanings never meant to be there and defying simple nostrums that sorrow the manipulation or passivity of "consumers."

How to link participation culture and social media?

Social media and the affordances of digital technologies have made it possible for new possibilities of participation to rise. People are no longer just users or consumers but also producers as well. Hinton & Hjorth (2013) explains that “social media sites support many kinds of offline actives and have real social, economic and cultural consequences.” First, probing fan community crowd financial support projects and then looking at citizen journalism and fashion blogging as an example, it will be obvious how social media and the internet has driven a new century of participatory culture and communication.

With the internet and the networked society that social media platforms allow, the masses funding activities are a form of participatory act that is very normal. Social media are tightly linked with participatory culture and now every citizen can exercise their rights and they can also do what they like. 

For example, Facebook is one of the most popular social media all over the world so various of people focus on it. Some news are attract people’s sight which is Facebook post a portal camera. It can make people very convenient to chat with others but this product also may monitor human’s life and make people insecure.

There are more than billions of users in China, it is sure to say that WeChat has played a important role in the daily living of Chinese. It is observed that additional users have took advantage of WeChat for education functions, including both studying and teaching. There are some school are using WeChat for class.The usage of WeChat has contributed to the spread establishment of participatory culture in EFL in the forms of promise in citizen or political discussion, information sharing, informal mentoring system and solve collaborative problem.

WeChat is most famous in China and have some different functions with Facebook. People can pay the money in WeChat or we can scan QR code to add friends for instance. And WeChat is more privacy than Facebook because all the people can see what you talk about or what is your interest but if people use WeChat, they can only see their friend’s post and cannot see the information of strangers.

Participatory culture is a good way to spread the development of social media and make it more popularized. Although Facebook cannot be used in China and WeChat is not very famous in foreign countries, I hope can through this blog let more and more people know what is participatory culture and how to linked to social media, make the world more global. Social media is make people get closer and more convenient for their life so people need to find which is the best way to use it.

Reference

IGI Global(2018).igi-global.com. Retrieved November 6, 2018 from: https://www.igi-global.com/dictionary/participatory-culture/21929

Mackay.J(2015).meco6936.wordpress.com.Retrieved May 29,2015 from:https://meco6936.wordpress.com/2015/05/29/social-media-participatory-culture/

Qiao,L(2017).depace.library.uu.ni.Retrieved 2017 from: https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/353863

Wikipedia(2018).en.wikipedia.org. Retrieved November 6, 2018 from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

Wikipedia(2018).en.wikipedia.org. Retrieved November 6, 2018 from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat