YouTube | UNDERCONSTRUCTION

This blog focuses on the Cooperation of social networking sites on how they affect people through the use of social software; to support blogs, videos, tags and a lot more. A well-known dictionary defines “cooperation” as the process of working together to the same end. An example of this software is media sharing. These days if we want to watch movie trailers or news, we usually visit the site YouTube that has a large variety of videos in the global internet. YouTube has become one of the popular sites that use social software in the consumer space through the use of embedded codes that can be added as well on blogs or web based applications.

Recently as a Facebook and Twitter user, there is a video from YouTube spreading about “Kony 2012”. Joseph Kony is from Africa, mainly Uganda that abducts children and turns them into sex slaves or soldiers. Kony has been doing this crime for more than 20 years and people are not aware of this. Similarly in Twitter, #Kony is one of the top worldwide trends. I realized that the person who made this video has already influenced a lot of people to increase Kony’s popularity, not to be known but to be aware of Kony. In my point of view, this is the power of video sharing, it can make you famous or be in the hall of shame.

From my observation, when you post interesting and controversial topics in a popular social networking site the news spread so quickly. I wonder how celebrities deal with these on-line issues, because it seems like they do not have privacy anymore. These social networking sites are so public and open where people could access and read very private matters of other people . There are parties who are like false accusations about individuals that can also ruin their lives.

There are also some videos that are illegal to share or post publicly because of copyright infringement. Few months ago, Mega-upload got shut down because of this violation. Kim Dotcom the founder of this organization got arrested for breaking copy right laws. People commonly visit this site to watch TV series and movies and this has been their habitual routine, watching clips on Mega-upload. Nowadays, there are a lot of shared pirated movies and clips in the global network. Some people just watch movies through the internet; they do not bother spending money watching in the cinemas anymore.

My first year in Massey University was last year, which was a bit of a challenge for me adjusting with the surroundings and the new environment. As interaction occurs in group projects or team work assignments, I met new friends. Usually most of the students in the course Information Technology (IT) are boys, which make the girls group together.

Since the course IT is all about Computer and interaction with people, most of the assignments also relate to technology and people. For communications matter, I asked my Chinese friend if she has “Facebook” account and she answered me that she does not have one. Well I respected that, but honestly these days you barely know people who do not have an account on Facebook. I became curious so I asked her again, “Why don’t you have one?” and she replied that China blocked the websites Facebook, Twitter & YouTube.

The issue about China blocking these popular sites caught my attention, wondering why the government would do this kind of action. Curiosity made me want to know more about this situation so I read articles and blogs. From the ABC news site, China blocked these sites during the 2008 Olympics in China. After this event, many sites became accessible again. A video about a Buddhist monk being beaten in China was shown in websites which forced the government to re-block these sites once more.

In my opinion the government of China blocked these sites to protect their reputation. It is so easy to ruin organizations, people and even countries through these social media websites for they are popular and too publicized. This issue might affect China’s relationship with other countries, because of someone’s flaw although it does not mean it is everyone’s fault. But I guess, I understand why China has to do this.

For more details about this issue, visit this link from ABC news:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2009/07/chinas-facebook-status-blocked/