Billy Wang's Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/Billy_wang123
Lau Wai Ming's Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/ming_lau887
 
Bully in school has been a hot issue these days, at such early stage, it can make serious mental harm to victims and the trend needs to be stopped. We want to arouse the awareness of the problem from the public through this project.
Having enough bully at school and online, the victim ended up deactivating the twitter account…
How will the story end?
Technical effort
We used Twitter in this project. As we all know, Twitter is a common social media all over the world. It can not only help us to connect people, but it can also reflect our social network. First and foremost, we chose Twitter as our media because we like its “retweet” function. We can use this function to connect two people, and they can have some interaction with each other, so we can see, Billy and Wai Ming are not only having conflicts and bullies in reality, but also on cyber. Moreover, through Twitter, we can always easily know others’ hobbies and even their characters, as we would follow something that we are interested, or someone/something similar to us. Take Billy as an example, Billy likes Attack on Titan (we can know that by his icon and his Twitter banner), Marvel and DC films (he follows lots of these Twitter), and he likes playing shooting games (from his Twitter posts). It can reflect that he is a boy who is more prefer something violence. Lastly, we chose Twitter rather than blogs or Instagram is because we want to focus more on the texts, which can present the events and express their feelings more clearly.
Aesthetic influence
Different kinds of social media have been used for promoting cultures, spreading information and most importantly, to share our personal feelings or experiences. I have been an active Instagram and Facebook user, I do update my status almost daily. I always share my feelings by writing a short paragraph or sometimes a poem. I think this is quite an effective way and it worked for me. I like it when people react to my works, saying they feel the same or having other thoughts. I think this level of self exposure is acceptable. I remember there was a class about twitter, where some people using a different identity from themselves, and share their very real emotions. This inspired us to do similar things in this project. We think that sometimes we can express ourselves better online. Like it provides a place that you speak freely, or to choose who is the audience (it depends on the platform though). Of course, there will be some drawbacks, like in the case of our project, Lau Wai Ming the victim’s twitter account was discovered by the bully. At the end of the day, everyone has to face their fear and that is indeed inevitable.
Conceptual Ideas
As we have mentioned, social media can be an useful tool not only for commercial use or promoting any types of culture, but most importantly it helps us to express ourselves. Not necessarily using our real identity though. The unique nature of Internet and social media provides us a different experience when we speak of some really personal stuffs. We can either go anonymous or using our real names. From both situations, we can gain very different but beneficial outcomes mentally. We may have the chance to know some people who also use “fake names”, and actually meeting in real life. That would be special. And according to Marshall McLuhan, media technologies should be understood as the “extension of man”. What he was trying to say is very similar to our ideology of this project. He also mentioned that “contemporary peer to peer communication using the Internet might carry a similar content but they are radically different in the way that they configure relationships between the participants. Besides, in the article by Lev Manovich “What is New Media”, the ideology about “the ability to disseminate the same texts, images and sounds to citizens, thus assuring the same ideological beliefs—
was as essential as the ability to keep track of their birth records” was revealed. And we believe that shows that why the activities on social media is as important as those in the real life.
Bio notes
Jamie:
Jamie is a year three student from the Faculty of Arts, majoring creative and professional writing. He likes Chinese poems and hates reading English books.
Mandy:
Mandy – 21 years old, never been bullied even she knew that some children didn’t like her when she was in kindergarten. When somebody bit her, she just pulled other’s hair. Now she is studying Creative and Professional Writing in Hong Kong Baptist University.
References
Lev Manovich. “What is New Media”, 2006
Marshall McLuhan. “Understanding Media: The extensions of Man”, 2011
Lau Wai Ming’s twitter account:
Profile picture: https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5936908531358e03e559e135/416×416.jpg?background=000000&cropX1=1164&cropX2=2970&cropY1=90&cropY2=1895
Billy Wang’s twitter account:
Icon: http://ent.ltn.com.tw/news/breakingnews/1947626
Banner: http://topnews8.com/7020/
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