Emily, an American girl living in Beijing, spends much of her time bike riding through the city and snapping photos with her smartphone. She uses Instagram for her photo-sharing, which she has an audience of more than 73,000 people. Emily said gaining so many followers has changed the way she uses Instagram.
Since most of her audience is Chinese, she is more thoughtful now about how she portrays life in China through her camera phone. Chinese user will feel upset or betrayed if Emily post shabby pictures, for example, trash collector in China. Because those images didn’t represent China in a good way, it will somehow offend the Chinese people. Last year, Facebook bought Instagram for a billion bucks. The photo touching app is still freely accessible here in China and apparently has a growing user base. It seem Chinese Instagram users are getting very sensitive on what international users are posting about related to their national image. There is a cultural differences regarding on pictures sharing …
Despite Instagram’s lack of an office branch in China, the company has seen steady adoption in the world’s most populous nation. Last year, Instagram added support for Chinese microblog service Sina Weibo, and the blockbuster app was reported to have seen 100,000 photos shared to the Twitter-like site within one month peroid. After a whole year of cultivation, it’s properly getting an even higher figure right now. A very important factor is that Instagram is the only mobile application that in China can connect directly with most of the popular foreign social network. But average Chinese user doesn’t have (or have access to) a Facebook or Twitter account. With Facebook infamously blocked in China, Instagram as having the potential to offer the social network a launchpad back into the country. Facebook is still keeping the app running separately, which will bode well for it in communist China.
At the time of writing, more than 491,000 photos have been posted to Instagram with the #Beijing hashtag. The #Shanghai tag has about 568,000, while the broader #China tag had over 2,146,000 photo. So do you need to pay any responsibility if you have a lot Chinese followers following your Instragram pictures ? We think all Instagram lovers should continue to take pictures of what they have seen in China, and you are always allowed to share it freely with anyone, as long as the subject remains objective. Anyone is allowed to record the authenticity of China and share it to the world.