2011-10-15

Social mood in China

This video is not suitable for children or those easily disturbed by violent or graphic images. Little girl crushed by two cars, passerby's ignore her.

I haven't covered these types of stories before and they are not rare in China. It's a big issue that opens up a lot of questions, but for now, the narrow social mood implication is that these stories are gaining a lot more coverage in the media. They are also being spread rapidly by services such as Sina's Weibo, which is where I saw this story. The man is speaking Cantonese and there are no subtitles, so I can't understand the audio, nor can most of the Chinese who are sending it around, but you can understand from the video. Camera footage begins around 1 minute.

Socionomic theory states that sad people don't choose to listen to happy music, as one might think, instead people choose what reflects their mood. Some social networking studies have shown mood to be assortative: happy people seek out others who are happy. Thus, as the amount of depressing or angering videos and stories spread on Weibo and outnumber the happy, cute or funny videos, one can get the sense of a declining social mood. As for whether I'm viewing a negative slice of the social mood due to who I follow, I am dealing with a limited sample size on weibo, but my friends are more likely to send jokes than these types of stories and I usually skip these stories when I see them in my weibo feed. This one comes via a mainstream economic writer's weibo and most of my friends don't forward these types of videos, so I'm going based on popular and mainstream weibo accounts. Adding one anecdotal point, my friend who forwards lots of funny items also sees an increase in negative news stories, but she doesn't forward them. A more detailed investigation would be necessary to quantify the impact, but I'm confident in saying that social mood is darkening here in China.

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