While the Coronavirus spreading now and many states have ordered its citizens to stay at home, social media seems to be the only way for family and friends to stay with each other during this special period. During the last few weeks, from Chinese to Italian to American, people seem to dig out so many potentials of social media that we never know before.

For example, for you can no longer go to a movie theatre and watch the shows, under the tag #IsolationFilmClub, a movie is selected every day by a nominated user, anyone can join and watch it, and talk over it under the tag.

For those who want to work out from home, the blogger Big Kitchen Disco holds an online dance club for people to dance together in their own homes with the help of social media.

People also create art together, on social media, as wrote by Carson Ellis“I’m thinking of ways that we can stay connected here through art.”What this illustrator does is, she post an assignment on her account every day, for people to found art and create art with what they have during the isolation. There are already more than 700 people who responded the artist’s first assignment.

With all these, I feel very mixed feelings, before the coronavirus happened, I always hear the critics over the overuse of social media by the young generation. But now, social media are really bringing people together in the case that we cannot meet in person.

reference:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/18/coronavirus-collabs-the-social-media-games-entertaining-the-masses-and-bringing-us-together

https://parade.com/1011597/nicolepajer/ways-to-stay-social-coronavirus/.

The room N incident refers to a large-scale online transmission and sales of sexual crime video incidents in Telegram that happened in Korea. The victims included a large number of pre-adults, with at least 10,000 perpetrators. They forced these young females to film very extreme and cruel porn content using their own devices. If they ever stop or refuse to do so, the perpetrators threatened them by screenshot their friend lists on SNS and saying that they will send all the photos to their parents. In this case, all the chat room are set online with strong security, people who are interested in the content have to pay at least $150 (via cryptocurrency) to become a member, because of the Telegram’s strict security system, it is more difficult to investigate.

I hardly imagine such crim happened in the real world, according to the research, the youngest victim among these females is 10. And the member count by the day this case is exposed is 260-thousand, which means one among one hundred Korean men paid to enjoy such cruel sexual slavery. On the other side, it makes me think of the dark side of the internet.

In nowadays, we enjoy the internet and depend on it very much, social media like telegram in Korea helps us to exchange information quickly and connect with each other. However, the privacy of these chat rooms. It is the anonymity mechanism of the network and the confidentiality of user privacy by social software that has contributed to the wide spread of such sex crimes on the Internet. For these 260,000 members, there is almost no evidence of cybercrime, so the probability of being caught by police is very low. I think it is very necessary to take measures to prevent such criminals from happening again.

reference: https://4w.pub/south-korean-nth-room-chats-are-keeping-girls-in-sexual-slavery/

Online social media, one of the greatest inventions in the internet era. On Twitter, Tumblr, Ins, Archive of our own, people exchange information at an amazing speed, stay connect with friends and family. And more importantly, as described by Jon Ronson, social media is the democratization of justice. When powerful people misuse their power and privilege, we judge them to speak out our opinions online. For example, if an actor flirts with a girl in a disrespectful way in a show, People could shame him, denounce his actions by post their thoughts on twitter.

However, with the rapid development of social media, more and more people are involved in these platforms, which means more and more eyes are on all the users of one platform. Under such circumstances, sometimes an unintentional joke can trigger a whole outrage and attack over the speaker. For example, Justine Sacco, a normal female, post a sentence on her twitter says that

[Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!]

Just this seemingly harmless joke, got her to become the worldwide number one trending topic on Twitter, her name has been Googled 1,220,000 times. Her family, job, education history, and all other personal history has been forward back and forth online. People shame her as racist and wish she been “fired and raped.” Weeks later, she got kicked off from the company and basically, her life has been ruined by Twitter.

As described by Jon Ronson, when we watch courtroom dramas, we tend to identify with the kindhearted defense attorney, but give us the power, and we become more like the hanging judges. From these stories, I feel people should be more couscous about the power in their hands. As human beings enter the information society, it is easy to hurt people even from the opposite of the screen.

Reference:

In the US, we pay our bills and shopping with mostly credit cards and cash. The most typical example would be a meal check. When people finish their dinner in a fine restaurant, the waitress usually brings a check on the table, the customers leave the cards they want to pay with, the waitress go and collect the card, swipe it and then send the receipt on the table again to get the signs. However, when it comes to the same situation in China, people just scan a QR code on the table, pay the fee with their phones and leave. Instead of asking “cash or card?”, the cashier asks the customers “WeChat or Zhifubao(Alipay)?”—-two major online payment platforms in China.

Without exaggeration, China’s economic networks is an ocean of QR codes based on mobile devices. In 2019, about 90% of payments in China are facilitated via mobile payment platforms and at least 577.4 million Chinese consumers use mobile payment systems. Which means it is not common to use wallet anymore in China since people basically don’t use cash anymore. You can shop grocery by scanning a code, you can rent a public bicycle by scanning a code, you can buy film tickets, train tickets on your phone without type your card number over and over again, you can get rid of public transportation card by scanning a code when entering the underground station. Everything can be done so easy with a simple scan and click on your phones.

So the question is, why people trust the online payment system and willing to connect their e-banks on these platforms? While, the technology of fingerprint and facial recognition is heavily used on these platforms. When the customers try to create a transaction, it usually asks for these information and makes sure the transaction is safe and valid. The other reason about why people love to use WeChat especially to pay is that, this is originally an app designed as social media for people to post pictures and chat with each other, it developed online payment function in around 2014, which means the users can send and receive money to their friends or families while they chat. Except for very large sums, both WeChat and Alipay do not charge users for mobile transactions. Which is a really creative move for an app that designed to chat —-imagine you can send money to your friends on Snapchat.

While online payment has already changed people’s way of living in China, it is a growing trend globally as well; Alipay and WeChat Pay are now accepted in about 40 countries all over the world and it is open to foreign cards like visa right now. Overall, Chinese mobile payment systems are great innovations that incorporate technology into people’s daily life, I hope this technology can be more adopted internationally and create a truly cashless society global wise.

Reference:

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