Studio Session 1 reflection-Tracy Liu

In this session we searched for the popular bloggers and trends in China. We searched for both news articles and primary source from the blogs. While the most popular ones includes a wild range of blogs including fashion blogs and those commenting on stock market, there are some interesting blogs concerned about the political situation in China and we looked at specific activists in China, including those who got arrested in the past due to their blog posts(Ai Weiwei, Liu Xiaobo). Hanhan is one of the most interesting blogger since he often comments on political events and seems to avoid the trouble by saying things implicitly. From that we discussed the censorship and Chinese government's influence on the Internet. We also looked into how actions are initiated on the Internet. For example, the human flesh search engine was a popular term in China. It is a way for a group of people on the Internet to target one person, often anonymous at first, and initiate a search on his or her personal information together. Usually they use this information to attack that person. The umbrella revolution in Hongkong was another interesting example on how they organized protest through the Internet. The drastically different opinions in censored mainland blogs and those in Honkong blogs are also something worth further examination. In general, I'm interested in how people interact and organize in Chinese blogosphere and how the intense censorship and political factors in China affect the online community.