| In2011, a movie called "Love is Not Blind" became one of the best sellers inChinese film market. This now let everyone understand the marketing magic of Weibo.However, now that the Chinese film market is confronting with the big environment ofMedia Convergence, for one certain movie, doing marketing job is obviously not whatall Weibo can do. Because for the film industry as a whole, driven by the digitaltechnology, Media Convergence not only means a totally different terminal, but alsomeans a converted way of producing, habit of watching, expressing and consuming.Based in the same era of Media Convergence, what would the emergence anddevelopment of Weibo bring to Chinese films and especially the film market inmainland? This is what we’ll try to figure out later in this essay. First, by tracking thepace of Twitter and Weibo, we’ll prove it that the dissemination of information isalready entered the era of microblogging. And further more, when we focus on itsprivate, automatic and civilized way of communication, it is inevitable to say that thismicroblog thing introduces us a totally new item of expressing ourselves, and athorough revolution for us stepping into a world of the so-called “we-media”.When summing up the research data of Sina Weibo which worked out by variousresearch institutions, Weibo is rapidly used by the people who are highly educated. Thefirst4big ranking cities take up forth of the market share, which also shrinks for thenon-big ones. Meanwhile, for the users, the younger ones spend much more timeaccessing SNS than the mid-aged. Further more, female seems to occupy more timethan male using SNS. Also, Sina Weibo has a large quantity of users among studentsand company staff, nonetheless, by ranking the3rd place, the middle and senioradministrative staff takes a larger market share too. However, what’s worth mentioningis the users’ favorite utility and that raises the fastest are both the function of “accessing to the newly happened”. This tells us that accessing to information is popularly used bythe Weibo users. Moreover, we’ll never overlook that, Sina Weibo enlarges the contentof every single message, and for the first in the world, it provides the utility for user toup-and-down load their own videos and films. This new version of add supports a lotmobile phones to take videos, then snap and share them through Weibo. Resulting fromthe investigations, sharing videos and films has undoubtedly became the most popularwhen accessing Weibo. Therefore, in the era of Media Convergence, microblog isbound to become a media platform of movie.But for an ancient art, movie has gone a long way from a century ago. What wouldit be like when it’s gonna crash with a totally new trend of communication, microblog?We’ll just start from their characteristics and status nowadays. First of all, microblog isable to communicate at any time. By this means, movie is no longer liner, it fulfils one’sspare time. Secondly, microblog has a character of fragmentation, and which has twoways of understanding referring to its means and contents. For its way ofcommunication, it places the films into a certain context which is fragmentary itself.The behavior of watching a film became one of the entertainments. And for its contents,a limited140-long message intensifies the attention economy and breaksmeta-narrative. The classical theory of McLuhan’s “medium extension of” tells us thespecific media experience may bring to the behavioral tendencies of the media to theuser trends. And this year, Innerscope has published and strongly suggests that the newgeneration of Americans has an unprecedented fragmental media consumption patterns.In addition, the spreading way of microblog has the characteristics ofconsume-participation. Excessive forwarding, comments tendencies and long-timenetwork contact directly results in the lack of contacting social activities. Jump intopublic events with no cost is actually a so called consume-participation. At last but notthe least, microblog has the characteristic of the citizen media. Especially when filmswere put in the mobile media platform, the “public media” definition of the microblogwill be more broad. From now on, effective transmission of video is no longer just amonopoly for a few groups, with microblog, users could make a own film citizen mediaby shooting and sharing.In order to study what impact would the use of Weibo bring to Chinese films andaudience, we’d also like to know the Chinese film, especially the general developmentstatus of the mainland movie. First, the cinemas are clearly insufficient in small andmedium-sized cities. Description of the local theater, cinemas in Xingtai are far lessthan the local people’s needs. And also, there’s a sever shortage of movies, and not until recently, three mainstream theaters has just set up. But all of them are concentrated inthe downtown business district, it’s still beyond their reach for the suburb people.Second, the domestic ticket prices are generally high. Through the transverse andlongitudinal comparison of the income of the domestic audience and foreign fare, ourticket price has a great disparity between the high and low income groups. At the sametime, because the income of the pyramid-shaped form, it can be imagined, for mostaudiences, the ticket prices is not easy to enable them to get into the cinema. Thirdly,the film type is very limited and not referring to the audience demand while there’s alsono absolute distinguishes between a large number of domestic cinemas. Actually, theseblockbusters, whether from the schedule set, the selection of new sources or farepositioning, there is no clear distinction and personality.So, based on the status of the above mentioned character of Weibo as well as thedomestic film market, how would the use of the Weibo experience impact on theirmovie viewing behavior? To solve this problem, I made a survey conducted in twocities of Beijing and Xingtai and the crowd of Weibo users on the network and find outthat, Weibo has became an important way for its users to get video information, and itslarge amount of young-aged users just meet the age of the movie-goers. Andfurthermore, fragmented media content is widely used and popular. At the same time, along time internet media exposure and the criticism of the domestic film marketdevelop a consume-participation. Anyway, experiences of using Weibo can bring thecertain type of habit or tend of transmission to users with their movie viewingexperience. Although we’re not sure about how powerful this effect could be, combinedwith the features of the domestic film market, we are fully capable to see how it wouldlike.The combination of Weibo and movies will also bring us some problems. Such asthe differentiation of the film market demand, the domestic network communicationindustry, especially the instability of the profit model of video content on the mobilenetwork terminal, as well as the difficulty of monitoring in the face of theanonymization resulting from Weibo. But, only in this way could the entire mediaenvironment move forward, the collision between old and new would provide a greatopportunity for the ancient art of film to be truly timeless. |
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