My first online social networking experience dated back to year 1992 that I yet on my college. I remember I used by dial-up modem to access the platform which is a BBS (Bulletin Board System) and it is called "Logic". There were realtime forums and chat rooms that each user can communicate with other users at realtime. While the forums are public but private for chat rooms. I nearly everynight logged into the system and chatted with those friends, we discussed and shared idea on everything happened, we treated those friends met everyday as good friends, though we had never seen each other. We though the discussion whatever it is only gossip or something important to the society, to build up everyone character. Something funny I still remember, people performed normal at the public forum could turn to be totally different in private chatroom if they were chatting with girls or claimed to be female. In fact, those females involved in the private chat also performed different that would involve to discuss something immoral. It is indeed even now to me, as an odd experience, how can we treat people so close but we have never met, how can people treat someone they chat as girlfriend but you even don't know if she is "she"? Amazing.
Recently, there are a lot of groups formed in facebook discussed about the identity of HK people and there are many discussions about the topic which involve HKer and also people from mainland. I'm not interested to discuss about the content they have been discussing but I believe there are many people influenced by their own communities that both sides made many non-sense comments and the most disgusting idea to me is about we need to appreciate Japan ever invaded us that led to the uniformity of mainland China, it's absolutely ridiculous. Also, today, I read a news which is about a mainland student studying in CUHK published some stupid messages in facebook about his impression on HK got tremedious responses may threaten his study here in HK. The society had changed since online social networking existed, because of the popularity of the online social networking, his idea spread out on internet quickly and feedbacks that against his idea also given spontaneously in a short timeframe. People through the discussion group in facebook collected ideas from other people and provided their own idea also quickly. I wonder, such similar idea may had been given by other people but may not been spot out or this mainland student because influenced by other discussions between HKer and mainland citizen, intended to give out such "funny" idea?
