In the article “The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flow During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions”, Gilad Lotan, Erhardt Graeff and others use the term ecosystem by referring to the relationships between different actors in a networked online environment. Providing snapshots of the information flow in 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions, they point out that the nature of news work is experiencing the shift from the era of mass media to the networked digital media. Traditionally the news organizations are considered as the agency of professionalism, but in networked news environments, the production of news is described in terms of connected actors including non-professionals in various geographic locations, which challenges the normative models of journalism. Within the context of Twitter information flows during Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions, they demonstrate a recurring pattern that professionals interacted with bloggers, media organizations, non-media groups, activists, researchers and many other actors through commenting, retweeting, and hashtagging. In Tunisia revolution, bloggers played an important role in disseminating news while in Egypt data, journalists and activists served as the main sources of flows. The networked environment in Twitter is more of a site where people without previously existing relationships gather around a particular topic and the individual personality is more likely to influence audiences to participate than the organizational identity. In short, their findings portray a dynamic network in Twitter where a variety of actors share news information and interact with each other and offer details of the contemporary journalistic practices.
Searching for the network analysis of Chinese online environments in scholarly articles, I found two of them are worthy of attention. “What Trends in Chinese Social Media” by Louis Yu, Sitaram Asur and Bernardo A. Huberman discusses the differences of the functions and topic trends between Twitter and a Chinese popular micro-blogging Weibo. Weibo enables embedded videos and pictures in tweets while Twitter only has plain texts. Through analyzing randomly sampled tweets they discovered that people tend to share jokes, images, and videos in Weibo, while in Twitter most retweeted users are news sources such as CNN, the New York Times and ESPN. They explain that the trends that are formed in Weibo are almost due to the repeated retweets of jokes, images, and videos. I think this article indeed captured one of the important features of Weibo, that is, heavy retweeting, and it is the first step to understand the complex network of the information flow in Chinese online environment though in comparison with the aforementioned analysis on Twitter network it is still not developed. Repeatedly retweeting might be true on Weibo and this article only focuses on the retweeting of content of entertainment. However, we should also be aware that the sampled tweets are not in specific times when social events happen, which makes it difficult to directly respond to the study of the network analysis during political crisis. If they could do a network analysis of tweets on some social events, they might not easily reach their conclusion that the characteristics of Weibo is about sharing jokes.
The other study on Chinese online network analysis is from a younger scholar Liu Yusi’s master thesis “Homophily and Proximity of Network Links in Forming Chinese Journalists’ Online Professional Group by Micro-blogging”. She sampled 295 journalists who have accounts on Weibo and she visualized the network of the journalists in Weibo and in blogs.
The figures clearly show that the adoption of micro-blogging by Chinese journalists helps them form a closer and more intricate network. In the following analysis, she pointed out that these journalists’ offline networks ( geographic locations and work unit) are still strong predictors of the online networks in Weibo. What is similar to the conclusion of the article on Twitter is that Weibo also enables the formation of new online networks based on shared topics among Chinese journalists. I think she effectively complicates our understanding of the ecosystem in Chinese online environments though she did not include more actors and trace the information flow in her analysis. Her demonstration on the connected journalists is a more stable network where information flows not only when the social crisis happens, but it comes from the institutionalized professional practices. Based on existing works on trending topics and networks of journalists, further future researches can focus on questions such as the flow of information among various actors, the centralization or decentralization of the network of information exchange, and the cultural factors that shape the network in Weibo in comparison with Twitter.