Derek E. Baird :: Barking Robot

Trend Watch: China's 'Angry Youth' Movement

The transcript of Kai-Fu Lee's keynote on China's 'Angry Youth' at The Brookings Institution is a fascinating read full of insight and observations of Chinese youth made by someone with the experience and knowledge to do so.

Dr. Lee was the founder of China-based Microsoft Research Asia and was the founding president of Google China. Kai-Fu Lee, is a household name in China, has written three best selling books and all them aim to help people understand, educate or mentor China's young people.

According to Dr. Lee China’s "angry youth," or fenqing, present a challenging phenomenon to both China and the outside world. These young men and women often use the Internet and other channels of political discourse to publicly express their critical views.

Earlier this year Accenture released a report that found young Chinese (14-27 years old) spend an average of 34 hours each week using real-time communications and social media/networking tools. At 34 hours a week, that number is almost triple the average of the other 12 countries profiled in the report.

So who exactly are China's "angry youth?" According to Kai-Fu Lee:

"So when we talk about angry youth, I think we're talking about post-80's, people born after 1980, that they had access to the internet, and that they often use it to vent their frustrations and that frustration often comes from either their patriotism or their desire to seek that which is righteous, fair, true and transparent.

They care about social issues. They're concerned and they feel that they need to be outspoken to have their voices heard, and they often use the internet to gain knowledge and to have their voice heard.

...when we talk about angry youth, I really don't want to think about this as a very negative term because I think if we think deeply about what angry youth are about, this is people who are young people who have access to information, who have a sense of social repsonsiblity, who have their sense of right and wrong--they are not always right--but they have a sense of right and wrong.

Their hyper-nationalistic and often anti-Western sentiments, which first emerged in the late 1990s and are widely disseminated today, stand in sharp contrast to a generation of Chinese youth just 20 years ago.

What gives rise to the frustrations of China’s "angry youth?" How representative of China’s youth are fenqing? What implications does their existence have for the country’s political trajectory? How will the growing influence of China’s "angry youth" impact China’s foreign policy in years to come?

This keynote aims to both answer these questions as well as educate Westerners on the emerging trends among Chinese youth.

China's 'Angry Youth' Movement

 

Related: Barking Robot@Tumblr > China's Top Social Networks

Global Youth: Chinese Millennials' Use of Technology, the Internet, Social Media & Mobile Devices

Earlier this year Accenture released a report that found that young Chinese (14-27 years old) spend an average of 34 hours each week using real-time communications and social media/networking tools. At 34 hours a week, that number is almost triple the average of the other 12 countries profiled in the report.

Global Research on Millennials Use of Technology

Other key findings from the Accenture report:

• Chinese youth dwarfed other countries’ video game habits (14 hours compared to 3.4 for other countries);

• Online Shopping ( 5.1 hours vs. 1 hour for other countries);

• Virtual Worlds (5.3 hours vs. 1 hour for youth in other countries);

• Chinese youth are more obsessed with real-time chat at work than any other nation in the survey. Reporting that on average they spend 9.2 hours each week on instant messaging;

• Chinese are more enthusiastic about posting personal information on blogs or social networks than any other nation surveyed;

• Social profiling is most common in China where Millennials report that 50% of their time using SNS is spent trying to learn more about peers or superiors.

Chinese Youth and Social Networking

Currently the most popular social networking utilities for Chinese youth include QQ, MSN, RenRen and Kaixin. In China there are 640 million people under the age of 24. Like other markets, the Chinese SNS ecosystem is peppered with lots of niche communities.

Related: China’s Top 4 Social Networks

QQ, with 1 billion registered accounts (keep in mind that users are allowed to have multiple accounts, so that number skews a bit high), seems to be the leading SNS with Chinese youth and its revenues were reportedly four times higher than Facebook.

Chinese Youth, Mobile Phones and the Internet

Other key facts about Chinese use of the internet based on China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) data:

• By June 2010, Chinese internet users has reached 420 million, up 9.38% since Dec 2009;

• 41% of Chinese interet users are above 30 years old;

• 88% accessed the internet from home;

• 77% use mobile phone to access the Internet in their leisure time;

• Mobile IM is most popular application, used by 61% of Chinese Internet users;

• Chinese boys are more likely to own a mobile phone  before Chinese girls. In addition, the "network effect" appears to play a stronger role in the adoption of mobile technology among Chinese youth.

Going Native: The Anthropology of Mobile Apps

Think of mobile OS platforms as cultures. Deciding which platform to target and how to design for each—whether web or native—doesn’t hinge only on tech specs or audience reach.

In an era where consumers suddenly perceive mobile apps as richly personal, where software is content instead of tool—culture matters.

 

Going Native: The Anthropology of Mobile Apps

View more presentations from Josh Clark.

Josh Clark is a designer, developer, and author specializing in mobile design strategy and user experience. He’s the author of the O’Reilly books "Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps" and "Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders."

 

Game Changers: Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg [VIDEO]

A new original documentary series, Bloomberg Game Changers gives viewers a compelling look into today's most influential leaders in technology, finance, politics and culture.

In this episode Bloomberg Game Changers follows the career of Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive officer of Facebook Inc. and one of the world’s youngest billionaires.

 

This program features interviews with Tyler Winklevoss, Cameron Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, who accused Zuckerberg of stealing their idea for the social-networking website, Yuri Milner, chief executive officer of Digital Sky Technologies, Michael Wolf, former president and chief operating officer of Viacom Inc.’s MTV Networks, and David Kirkpatrick, author of “The Facebook Effect."

Trend Watch: People Are Online What They Are Offline--Divided, and Slow to Build Bridges

IN 2007 Danah Boyd heard a white American teenager describe MySpace, the social network, as “like ghetto or whatever.” At the time, Facebook was stealing members from MySpace, but most people thought it was just a fad: teenagers tired of networks, the theory went, just as they tired of shoes.

But after hearing that youngster, Ms Boyd, a social-media researcher at Microsoft Research New England, felt that something more than whimsy might be at work. “Ghetto” in American speech suggests poor, unsophisticated and black. That led to her sad conclusion: in their online life, American teenagers were recreating what they knew from the physical world—separation by class and race.

A generation of digital activists had hoped that the web would connect groups separated in the real world. The internet was supposed to transcend colour, social identity and national borders. But research suggests that the internet is not so radical. People are online what they are offline: divided, and slow to build bridges.

via www.economist.com

In Google We Trust: Young Adults’ Evaluation of Web Content [Research]

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting piece about a research study, Trust Online: Young Adults’ Evaluation of Web Content, out of Northwestern University which found that the much lauded "digital natives" aren't so savvy and that they may trust Google a little too much.

Sure those digital kids can surf the web and text, but when it comes to web credibility and media literacy, they are lacking the skills necessary to properly vet digital resources.

As readers of this Barking Robot are aware, this is a topic that I've been talking about for some time.

Here's the RWW with a breakdown of the study:

"In Google we trust." That may very well be the motto of today's young online users, a demographic group often dubbed the "digital natives" due their apparent tech-savvy.

Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others.

That may not be true, as it turns out. A new study coming out of Northwestern University, discovered that college students have a decided lack of Web savvy, especially when it comes to search engines and the ability to determine the credibility of search results.

Apparently, the students favor search engine rankings above all other factors. The only thing that matters is that something is the top search result, not that it's legit.

During the study, one of the researchers asked a study participant, "What is this website?" Oh, I don't know. The first thing that came up."

That exchange sums up the overall results from this study: many students trusted in rankings above all else. In fact, a quarter of the students, when assign information-seeking tasks, said they chose a website because - and only because - it was the first search result.

Trust Online: Young Adults' Evaluation of Web Content

Study: Video Games May Sap Attention Span

Parents who believe that playing video games is less harmful to their kids' attention spans than watching TV may want to reconsider -- and unplug the Xbox. Video games can sap a child's attention just as much as the tube, a new study suggests.

Elementary school children who play video games more than two hours a day are 67 percent more likely than their peers who play less to have greater-than-average attention problems, according to the study, which appears in the journal Pediatrics.

Playing video games and watching TV appear to have roughly the same link to attention problems, even though video games are considered a less passive activity, the researchers say.

"Video games aren't less likely than television to be related to attention problems," says the lead author of the study, Edward Swing, a doctoral candidate in the department of psychology at Iowa State University, in Ames. "They were at least as strong as television at predicting attention problems."

However, the study doesn't prove that video games directly cause attention problems. It could be that kids who have short attention spans to begin with might be more likely to pick up a joystick than a book, for instance.

via www.cnn.com

Facebook and BBC iPlayer Lead U.K. Online Video Growth

While monthly video viewing in the U.S. may be showing signs of leveling off, the British market is in serious growth mode. As in the U.S. Google's YouTube has the lion's share of that market, with slightly less than half of all videos served. While the market fragments quickly from there, the TV networks are growing rapidly.

The BBC more than doubled its videos viewed last year to come in second place. Each visitor to the broadcaster's site consumes 15.7 videos a month. Before many U.S. networks and Hulu started pouring prime time onto the Web, the BBC was developing its robust iPlayer portal and player.

While the BBC’s video viewing audience tends to be male and spread between the ages of 25 and 54, Channel 4 skews heavily toward the 15-24 year old age group. The site was visited evenly by males and females but women watched five more videos then male viewers on the site during the month.

Facebook is the big up-and-comer in U.K. video, however and clearly the one to watch. The social network saw the number of videos viewed rise 205%, to 42.6 million in February.  

The importance of Facebook to all online businesses, including video, was underscored last week by no less a video maven than Mark Cuban, co-founder of HDNet.

In a post at his blog, Cuban mused that Facebook has become the new Internet, the place we now go to fill time in much the same way we channel surf TV. With its increasing knowledge of users and alternative means of discovering content via social sharing, he sees the network as a challenge to two of the biggest stakeholders in the digital universe.

via www.mediapost.com

Weekly Wrap: Facebook Social Plugins, How to Create Foursquare Events, Apple Shutters Lala, What is Facebook Saying About You, Social Metrics Tools & More!

Facebook’s New Social Plugins: 50,000+ Websites in One Week: Phase one of Facebook’s strategy for world domination: complete. Facebook announced that more than 50,000 websites have integrated Facebook’s new social plugins in just one week. The plugins are a core component of the company’s new Open Graph initiative. [Mashable]

Apple To Shut Down Lala: In a brief message that was just posted on the Lala.com website, Apple has announced that the service will be shut down on May 31st, 2010. Does this mean we can start raising our hopes for iTunes in the cloud? [TechCrunch] 

What is Facebook Saying About You?: Yee’s tool shows you exactly what data a developer would get when it asks Facebook for info via the API, such as your name, birth date, location, etc. and also any public information such as your “likes”, your photos and so on. [GigaOm]

Summer Music Watch: Jennifer Lopez Does a Cover of Donna Summer's "On The Radio" [Ryan Seacrest]

The Future Of The Web is HTML 5: Did we mention that 2010 would be a big year for HTML5? Apple and Google are pushing it big time, and now so is Microsoft. When Internet Explorer 9 comes out, it will support HTML5 and help make it more common across the Web. [TechCrunch]

Millennials: This generation is diverse, educated and plugged-in: Gio Acosta says that on any given day there are only two hours in which he is not texting, doing something on his cell phone, or on Facebook, or playing games on his laptop or PS3. Acosta is exactly what Kaiser Family Foundation recently found in a study: That to say today's young people are wired is an understatement. It’s an integral part of their daily lives. [PennLive.com] [Barking Robot]

Edelman Digital Social Metrics Tools: Last week Suzanne shared a few tools to help you find new folks to follow on Twitter to kick-off a new focus on tools and resources for online engagement. I wanted to continue this trend by introducing you to a few blog analytics tools! [Edelman Digital]

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Teen Driver Program: NHTSA has developed a multi-tiered strategy to prevent motor vehicle-related deaths and injuries among teen drivers: increasing seat belt use, implementing graduated driver licensing, reducing teens' access to alcohol, and parental responsibility. Related: Get the 'No Phone Zone' Lesson Plan [NSTSA] [Barking Robot]

Guide to Creating Foursquare Events: There are some reasonable and relatively simple ways to incorporate Foursquare and encourage audience participation at your next event. [Tradeshow Insight]

Texting Poetry Inspires Kids: Once considered a disturbance in the classroom, cell phones, texting devices and other wireless technology are being embraced by some of the very same people who used to malign them: teachers. [Record Online]

End Bullying Now: Here's the link to the Josh Shipp & Brooks Gibbs 'End Bullying Now' Teleseminar! [Barking Robot]

2010 Totally Wired Teacher Award: After listening to feedback from our friends in the educator community, we've made some important changes to this year's Totally Wired Teacher Award provided by Dell. Please help us spread the word to any public school teachers you are in contact with. [Ypulse]

Infographic: If Web Browsers Were Modes of Transportion

via neatorama

Weekly Wrap: Foursquare Nabs MTV & VH1, Linguist Urges Kids to Embrace Twitter, Saving the Google Students, COPPA & Youth Marketing, Free iPad eBooks & More!

Six Reasons to be Skeptical of the 'Digital Natives' Discourse: Almost all of the claims of the net gen discourse are in popular media and if they are based on research, it is proprietary and full methodological details are not provided. All of the sound research that refutes the claims is published in scholarly journals and has been subject to peer review. [Net Gen Skeptic]

Saving the Google Students: For the Google generation, closing school libraries could be disastrous. Not teaching kids how to sift through sources is like sending them into the world without knowing how to read. [LA Times]

Weekly Wrap, Foursquare Edition: Meet Gatsby, Fresh off the heels of hooking up with Bravo TV and Harvard Foursquare signs a similar deal with MTV & VH1, Microsoft adds Foursquare data to Bing Maps & a really cool visualization of Foursquare check-ins at SXSW. [Iconoculture] [Mobile Entertainment News] [Mashable] [TechCrunch] [SimpleGeo]

10 Reasons Students Are Tuning Teachers Out: You’re teaching to a generation of students that can access more information more quickly than any other generation. Don’t tell students that you don’t want to figure out how to use the internet or that you don’t answer email. You’re putting yourself into a category you don’t want to be in. [GYJoe]

US Census Bureau Adds Mapping App to Facebook: In an effort to reach out to young people, the U.S. Census Bureau is launching a huge nationwide campaign incorporating social media, broadcast media and print to encourage people to fill out their census forms this year. [Inside Facebook]

Ypulse Interview| Jamie Tworkowski: Jamie is the founder of To Write Love on Her Arms, a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with addiction, depression, self-injury and suicide. Related: MTV Poll: Generation Stress [Ypulse]

Preparing Your Content for iPad: Platform-specific considerations and UX Guidelines for web content in Safari on iPhone OS devices, with specific information for iPad. Also, iPad to Offer 30,000 free eBooks at launch. [Safari Technical Notes] [Apple Blog] [UX Magazine]

Marketing to Kids | A Time for Playing by the Rules:Whether it’s Quiksilver, Monster Energy Drinks or ESPN X Games, the look and feel of the typical action sports-related website is young, edgy, authentic. Action sports marketers need to be aware, however, of the panoply of laws that regulate marketing to kids, including the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). [GroupY]

Quote O' The Week: “I hate being thought of as a product. I am not a doll, and people want to treat me that way. I’m older now. I have an opinion. I have my own taste.” - Miley Cyrus on why being a Disney pop princess is so difficult. [Gossip Girl] [Barking Robot]

Blogging, academia, and the new public intellectual: John Holbo admits he and his fellow pioneers have lost the “revolutionary fervor” of blogging’s early days. “I’m fortunate to be at the top of the food chain, to have these bully pulpits where I can stand up and know thousands of people will hear me,” he says. “But we all thought blogging was going to transform academic life, and that didn’t really happen.” [Cal Alumni Association]

Linguist Urges Kids to Embrace Twitter: Language is forever changing -- and forms such as tweets and text messages are no less valid than any textbook version, says the linguist David Crystal, whose latest book encourages children to engage with the possibilities of their lingua franca. [The Independent]

More People Are Watching TV While Surfing the Web: This is some decent news for the TV industry, since the fear is that Internet time is eating into boob tube viewing. Overall, TV viewing is up 1%, year over year, according to the report.  [Business Insider]

Why Apple’s iPad Can’t Succeed in Schools (Yet): You see, tablets-as-books is a great idea until the battery dies, and then the student has no textbook and no computer. She will have to plug-in to a power outlet if she wants either of those things back. Related: A Kindle in Every Backpack [The Apple Blog] [Barking Robot]

Weekly Wrap: Microsoft Courier, Conan vs. Leno (again), Simon Fuller's Social TV Experiment, Content Strategy, Teen Brain, Cybertots, 39% in USA Don't Use Internet & More!

Microsoft's Courier 'digital journal': We're told Courier will function as a "digital journal," and it's designed to be seriously portable: it's under an inch thick, weighs a little over a pound, and isn't much bigger than a 5x7 photo when closed. [Engadget]

Conan Vs. Jay, Round Two: Hulu users tag Jay Leno’s return as “Vomit Inducing” (and worse) and Conan rallies his 'Facebook Army' for his next battle with Jay. Can't we all just get along? [Mashable] [Business Insider] [Barking Robot]

Simon Fuller Aims for Social Networking TV Reality Hit: The man behind Pop Idol, So You Think You Can Dance? and the Spice Girls is rarely wrong about trends and if this latest idea takes off it will change the way in which we watch television, paving the way for other producers to cut TV networks out of the loop altogether. [Guardian]

Twitter Safety | Keeping young people safe on Twitter: Twitter is popular with everyone but due to the very open nature of Twitter younger users should take extra caution. Remember everything you post to Twitter with an open profile can be seen by anyone in the world and is very easy to search for.  [BullyingUK]

The 10-Step Content Strategy: Embed social media into your content — even if your content is PDFs of case studies, e-books or white papers. Give readers the opportunity to engage in your content and share it with their networks. Lightweight ways to encourage reader engagement include adding a “like” button to your content, plugging in Facebook Connect and including discussion threads for blog comments. [Smart Blog on Social Media]

Study Finds 39% of Americans Don't Use the Internet: But even more to the point, in this day and age, not having internet access is almost like being illiterate. There is just so much of the world that is off limit without the ability to get online. So the fact that the majority of people who aren’t online in the US see their lack of an internet connection as not important is somewhat scary. [The Next Web]

The Teen Brain | It's Just Not Grown Up Yet: Nature made the brains of children and adolescents excitable. Their brain chemistry is tuned to be responsive to everything in their environment. After all, that's what makes kids learn so easily. But this can work in ways that are not so good. Take alcohol, for example. Or nicotine, cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy... [NPR]

Content Marketing Lessons From the 2010 Vancouver Olympics: If you want to stand out online, you need to create a plan and invest in it properly. [IdeaLab]

The Secret To A Better Social Media Strategy: By tailoring marketing strategies to account for statistics such as these, small businesses can maximize the effectiveness of their social media efforts and focus on reaching their desired audiences. [American Express OPEN]

Cybertots: Fisher-Price Targets the Preschool Set: Set aside the Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys. Fisher-Price is cyberfying your kids. [BrandChannel]

Teachers Not Adequately Prepared for Education Reform: A report released in December by the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning (CFTL) indicated that in California, where schools are pursuing ambitious education reform, while many teachers are well qualified to take on the demands of such an effort, many more simply are not up to the task. [THEJournal]

Weekly Wrap: Slacktivism, Open Source Social Innovation, Boomers & Social Media, Helping Google Get Social, Sundance 2010 Round-Up, Texting Party in the USA, Steve Jobs' Wardrobe & More!

A Time and Place for 'Slacktivism': Slacktivism; (v.) action 4 social change w/o much effort beyond a click/text. Known causes: social media, cellphones. [Ypulse]

Baby Boomers Get Connected with Social Media: Boomers are turning to social media, where they keep up their offline social connections and make new ones. Online marketing messages that help them build on their connections—and foster other online relationships—will get their interest. [eMarketer]

Lady GaGa's Lessons for the Music Business: Underneath Gaga's haystack wigs is a case study of what it takes to succeed in the music business today. Gaga, 23 years old, has made shrewd use of new digital platforms, while still leveraging the clout of a major label, an institution deemed obsolete by many proponents of DIY culture (Thanks Ypulse!). [WSJ]

Conan O'Brien's Fate a Sign of the Times: While the "Tonight Show" ratings fell under O'Brien's tenure as a whole, ratings amongst the younger demographics were better than those of Jay Leno's "Tonight Show." According to the New York Times, the median age of "Tonight Show" viewers fell by 10 years, from 55 to 45, in O'Brien's first month alone. [Colorado Daily]

Social Media Marketing, How Pepsi Got it Right: Social media marketing campaigns are proving to be goldmines rich with customer engagement and insight that companies wouldn’t likely have otherwise. Companies like PepsiCo are going to extensive lengths to foster this type of collaboration with fans, and the payoff has been big. [Mashable]

Will Creating a SWAT Team Help Google Get Social?: As successful as Google has been with plenty of other things — including a little thing called search-related advertising — it has struck out big-time in virtually every attempt at the social side of the web. [GigaOM]

Reflections from the Sundance Film Festival: Lois Vossen, ITVS vice president and Independent Lens series producer, shares her reflections on this year’s festival, which wraps up this weekend. [Beyond the Box]

College Students Hate Email: In fact, the student joked that she only uses her email to “communicate with her boss and adults.” She uses Facebook as her preferred method of peer-to-peer communication – she has had a Facebook thread running between the three of them for three years now. [Off Campus Media]

Tweet O' the Week: Can someone please buy Steve Jobs a new outfit! The man has more money than God and Oprah! A simple button down will do!" (via Scott Nevins) [Twitter]

Americans Sending 4 Times as Many Texts as Brits:There was a turning point a couple of years ago when it was suddenly undeniable: It was either text message or be left behind. If you were paying for it by the message, you suddenly had to find a plan, because you started having more and more friends that wouldn't talk any other way. Well, we're wondering if it has finally reached that point in the U.K. - or if it's yet to come. [ReadWriteWeb]

Teen Drinking May Cause Irreversible Brain Damage: For teenagers, the effects of a drunken night out may linger long after the hangover wears off. A recent study led by neuroscientist Susan Tapert of the University of California, San Diego compared the brain scans of teens who drink heavily with the scans of teens who don't. [NPR]

Open Source Social Innovation: Last week Bill Gates entered the digital publishing world by establishing the Gates Notes - an online evolution of his now annual January letter sharing his thoughts on the progress of the issues central to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It’s interesting and symbolic that the next chapter of his life story would include an “open source” platform for sharing IP on social innovation. [Cheskin]

Razorfish FEED Report: Meet the 'Connected Consumer'

How do consumers engage with brands in an increasingly digital world? That's the fundamental question Razorfish set out to answer with this year's Digital Brand Experience FEED report.

Sorta Related: PBS > Frontline > The Persuaders > Interview: Douglas Atkin

Disney, Xbox 360 & the Jonas Brothers "It's More Fun Time" Sweepstakes

Disney and Xbox 360 have teamed with the Jonas Brothers to star in a national campaign for Xbox 360 called It's More Fun Time.

The campaign can be seen across multiple digital platforms including Disney Channel, Disney XD, ABC Kids, Disney Online and Family.com's Get Plugged In.

The campaign also includes the It's More Fun Time with the Jonas Brothers sweepstakes for K-8+, which can be entered at Disney.com/MoreFunTime or by texting "Xbox" to Disney (347639).

In conjunction with this campaign Xbox Live members will receive a single episode of the series Jonas free to view on Xbox Live Zune Marketplace through December 31, 2009.

Sorta Related: Watch Disney's 'Prep & Landing' Online--for free!