Social Media

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GUEST OBSERVATION
The Australian government has indicated that “diaspora communities” are crucial to Australia’s public diplomacy mission to promote the country abroad. It has also identified online and social media as essential “public diplomacy tools”.
But in terms of projecting an attractive image of Australia to potential tourists, students and investors in China, the task is not that simple.
Too often, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s earnest soft power goals are undermined by various political agendas and <a href="https://www.propertyobserver.com.au/https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-18/chinese-influence-on-australian-universities-worrying-mps-say/11425276" target="_blank">concerns over foreign interference</a> and <a href="https://www.propertyobserver.com.au/https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-14/chinese-communist-party-gtcom-connection-australian-universities/11586118" target="_blank">national security</a>.
As for the media, the ABC has attempted to connect with Chinese audiences by <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/chinese/" target="_blank">offering</a> some of its online content in Mandarin. But the ABC’s coverage can still feel alienating to Chinese migrants. This stems from a feeling that <a href="https://insidestory.org.au/is-the-biggest-story-getting-the-best-coverage/" target="_blank">much of its reporting</a> conforms to a pre-determined narrative of the danger of China’s rising influence in the country.
What Chinese migrants think of Australia
The role of Chinese migrants in public diplomacy, meanwhile, is little understood.
Earlier this year, we conducted a survey of more than 800 Australia-based, Mandarin-speaking social media users as part of a <a href="https://ozchinamedia.org/" target="_blank">study</a> of Chinese-language digital and social media in Australia.
Our aim was to determine how Chinese migrants view both Australia and China, how news coverage of both countries shapes these views, and whether they feel they have a role to play in promoting either country.
We asked participants whether they have generally positive views about their experience of living or studying in Australia and how often they share these views with potential Chinese visitors or migrants to Australia.
Perhaps surprisingly, our survey respondents answered with a resounding “yes”, despite the alienation they sometimes feel from English-language media and a sense their allegiance to Australia is regularly being questioned.
When asked how often they share <a href="https://www.sydneytoday.com/content-101731470828011" target="_blank">positive stories</a> about Australia via Chinese social media platforms, 72% of respondents said they often or sometimes shared such information.
A similar level of pro-Australian sentiment was evident when participants were asked how often they share negative stories about Australia from the local Chinese media or English-language media. (For example, stories about the high cost of living, <a href="https://www.sydneytoday.com/content-101728755134800" target="_blank">racism against Chinese</a> or the boring lifestyle.) Nearly 77% said they rarely or never share such stories.
When asked with whom they share positive or negative stories about Australia, nearly two-thirds said “Chinese people living in China”, while 28% said Chinese immigrants living elsewhere in the world.
Interestingly, our survey participants’ willingness to promote Australia to Chinese people worldwide did not mean they had negative views about China. Nearly 80% said they would also be willing to promote China to Australians as a tourist destination or potential place for business opportunities.
Not overly pro-China on sensitive issues
This speaks to the ability of Chinese migrants to sustain dual loyalties to Australia and China, without much apparent conflict between the two.
Our respondents also showed a considerable degree of sophistication in their views on China–Australia relations and issues the Australian media typically present in a polarising manner. When asked whether they sided with China or Australia on these issues, we saw an interesting split.
For example, a significant number of participants said they sided with China in relation to disputes over Huawei (73%) and the South China Sea (79%). However, support for China was dramatically lower in relation to China’s influence in Australia (40%), trade disputes (38%) and, perhaps most surprisingly to many Australians, human rights (just 22%).
Even though they didn’t back China on these last four issues, participants didn’t give their unambiguous support to the Australian viewpoint, either. The number of respondents who chose “not sure” on these four issues ranged between 32% and 45%.
Human rights was the only issue where more respondents sided with the Australian viewpoint rather than China’s (46% compared to 22%).
Negative news on China leads to unhappiness
Similarly, when respondents were asked how they felt about negative news about China or the Chinese government in the Australian media, they expressed a range of opinions.
Respondents were nearly equally split on the fairness of such reporting, with 27% saying they felt the Western media portrayed China in an overly negative light and 22% saying they felt such reporting allowed them to know the truth about China.
The most popular response, however, was telling: 35% of participants said they felt unhappy because of the hostility of the Australian media to China, regardless of whether or not the reporting was truthful.
This suggests that while most Chinese-Australians are generally supportive of Australia, the mainstream media’s narrow focus on China’s influence seems to impact negatively on their happiness and overall feeling of connectedness with Australian society.
What this means for public diplomacy
Overall, Chinese migrants in Australia are spreading a positive message about the country voluntarily. They do so without any support from the Australian government, and despite the often negative reporting about China in the Australian media and hyperbolic public aspersions cast on them.
Based on our findings, it would behove the Australian government to try and find ways to harness this largely bottom-up, pro-Australian, word-of-mouth energy in the service of public diplomacy.
This is especially important now, given the dire state of diplomatic relations between our two countries.<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/126677/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important;">
Wanning Sun, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of Technology Sydney.
This article is republished from <a href="http://theconversation.com" target="_blank">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/new-research-shows-chinese-migrants-dont-always-side-with-china-and-are-happy-to-promote-australia-126677" target="_blank">original article</a>.
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New research shows Chinese migrants don’t always side with China and are happy to promote Australia

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The Australian government’s new <a href="https://cities.dpmc.gov.au/performance-framework" target="_blank">Smart Cities Plan: National Cities Performance Framework</a> identified “professional networks” as one indicator for measuring the progress of Australia’s largest cities.
It has based the indicator on social media data gathered from LinkedIn. This is the first case of government really using social media data to gauge the impact of urban policy on traditionally hard-to-measure issues.
<h2>What is the data?</h2>
The framework defines professional networks as:
<blockquote>
… the average ratio of workers’ LinkedIn connections in: the same city; other parts of Australia; and overseas.
</blockquote>
It is based on the premise that knowing a city’s professional network ratio helps to understand how connected its inhabitants are to other markets, customers and ideas – all of which support innovation, adaptation and city growth.
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional online network; it has <a href="https://www.smartcompany.com.au/people-human-resources/leadership/powerful-australian-chief-executives-founders-linkedin-revealed/" target="_blank">more than 500 million members</a> in more than 200 countries. In Australia alone, more than 9 million people have a LinkedIn profile: this is almost 75% of the working-age population.
The Regional Australia Institute and LinkedIn since 2016 <a href="https://www.regionalaustralia.org.au/home/2016/12/connecting-great-small-cities/" target="_blank">have mapped data</a> on local skills and job mobility of workers in eight regional Australian cities: Townsville, Sunshine Coast-Noosa, Greater Newcastle, Wollongong, Launceston, Darwin, Geelong and Hobart.
This work has been providing local leaders with critical near-time data on the skills, connections and mobility of their workers.
<h2>What do the data tell us?</h2>
Network data tell us how one node or person is connected to another. There are many different types of links, such as personal, professional, business, financial, or friends.
Your professional network is the people you do business with, learn from, get inspired by, or who may have snuck in under false pretences.
Depending on who you are, your professional network may or may not include family and friends. It may or may not be up to date, and it certainly is not the same for everyone.
We are looking at a city’s professional network, not individuals. So, it is an amalgamation of people who together form a city’s professional network.
For the eight cities in these reports, a general trend is that the average number of connections per member increases with city size.
But every city has a mix of local connections, national connections and international connections. The government is particularly interested in this breakdown of data when measuring city performance.
For the first time we can see what these data look like for eight regional cities. The data show that Newcastle and Hobart are very inwardly connected (31% and 32% local connections), while Darwin and Sunshine Coast (27% and 25%) are very internationally connected for Australian regional cities.
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184085/original/file-20170831-24230-1rt06xl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184085/original/file-20170831-24230-1rt06xl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt=""></a> Regional Australia Institute, Author provided
A challenge for any city’s performance framework is that once indicators are identified, how are the data generated?
Importantly for professional networks, what are the targets? What types of networks are measured? What identifies better city performance? Is it more connections? Or more local connections? Or more overseas connections? Is it a general rule, or is it city-specific?
In addition to what the National Cities Performance Framework is proposing, LinkedIn data can add a unique dataset not of qualifications (which is what most data measure), but of actual skills in demand for on-the-job performance.
For the eight cities, healthcare management was a top-five skill, as were IT infrastructure and system management, and education and teaching.
The data also show the skills with the highest mobility are a mix of hard skills (like software engineering and social media marketing) and soft skills (such as business development and relationship management, and management and leadership).
<h2>How data could be used to measure city performance</h2>
Data from LinkedIn provide a collective picture of skills and connections. The insights this provides rely on the sheer scale of membership, as the nature of membership and the level of activity of members are highly variable and depend on the line of work they do, or would like to get into.
These data tell us about each city as an island of people. It explores which places have more or less links.
This is a great step for understanding, in context, how outward-looking a city might be. It is therefore a reasonable proxy for what the Smart Cities Plan is trying to achieve when looking at city context. But we have to acknowledge that LinkedIn data are a sample of any location’s population, and the connections do not tell us anything about the type or quality of links.
This work has the potential to build on several strands of topical <a href="https://www.urbannetworks.org/" target="_blank">core research</a> into urban networks.
But, to do this, we would need to use LinkedIn data for what they are: network data. They have much greater depth and capacity than just as a measure of a city’s “professional connections”.
These data could test the current rhetoric on the benefits of mobile working arrangements, digital connectivity, or understand how the whole network of Australian city hubs and spokes functions.
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83297/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1">Measuring city performance through LinkedIn data uses only a very small part of the analytical capacity these data offer. However, it is an important step in getting our national policy discussions to use big social media data as a tool to inform decision-making.
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/leonie-pearson-151626" target="_blank">Leonie Pearson</a>, Adjunct Associate, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-canberra-865" target="_blank">University of Canberra</a>
This article was originally published on <a href="https://theconversation.com" target="_blank">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/heres-what-social-media-data-can-tell-us-about-the-performance-of-australian-cities-83297" target="_blank">original article</a>.
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Here's what social media data can tell us about the performance of Australian cities

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GUEST OBSERVER
Our experiences are heightened when we travel. Removed from our day-to-day rituals and familiar terrain, even the most pedestrian things - street signs, passersby, sidewalk cafes - can become fascinating.
But in the age of Google Street View and the relentless posting of holiday snaps on Instagram and Facebook, experiencing unfamiliarity has become harder.
Social media is reconfiguring our experience of the city, and tapping into our increasing appetite for unique and authentic urban experiences.
<h2>Architectural icons in the age of social media</h2>
In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), Walter Benjamin argues that artworks embody an “aura” – a kind of authenticity that cannot be captured in a reproduction. Each time an artwork is reproduced through film or photography, the cultural value of the original is diluted.
Architect Hans Hollein made a similar observation in response to the increasing access to television in the 1960s:
It is almost of no importance if […] the pyramids exist in physical reality, as most people are aware of them through other media anyway.
Benjamin and Hollein’s concerns for the dwindling cultural value of the original has never been truer than in the current image-saturated context of social media.
<div class="enlarge_hint">We have exhausted our global architectural icons – they have been reduced to photogenic backdrops for our selfies. We want to be seen at these sites because they allow our audiences to instantly locate us. But, as cultural experiences, they have become empty and clichéd.</div>
Enter Airbnb.
Whether coincidentally, or strategically, Airbnb’s appearance is well-timed. In the company’s Mankind, Belong Anywhere marketing strategy, Airbnb promises something much more immersive: a day in the life of a local.
<h2>Interpreting buildings: from spectator to participant through Airbnb</h2>
It is widely acknowledged that there is a shift in mentality among Millennials, who privilege the consumption of experience over the consumption of material things. We could understand our changing relationship with buildings as an extension of this logic.
In Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown investigated the architectural strategies casinos developed in response to the drive-by experience of tourists to the Strip.
They categorised buildings into Ducks and Decorated Sheds. By their terms, Ducks are architectural icons whose meaning is conveyed through their form. Sheds are everyday generic buildings, whose meanings are conveyed through applied signage.
But through platforms such as Airbnb, we are no longer spectators reading a visual language. Meaning is derived through experience, through our active participation.
We are invited to interchangeably experience the ordinary and the extraordinary varieties. Both the Le Corbusier-designed apartment and the suburban bungalow are up for grabs.
<h2>Airbnb reconfiguring the city</h2>
Airbnb has reprogrammed the city. The “hardware” or urban fabric remains the same, but the “software” – our use of it – has been radically reconfigured.
European summers have traditionally seen an influx of tourists to historical centres, while the local populations – the majority of whom live outside the centre – vacate to escape the summer heat. Rather than leaving their homes vulnerable and losing money on rent, many locals are choosing to sublet.
As a result, everyday neighbourhoods that would typically be in lock-down during this period have reawakened. The decentralised activity provides incentive for local businesses to continue their operation, and more eyes on the street.
Opening up the tourism industry to grassroots entrepreneurs has been a democratising process. With the redistribution of available accommodation across the city, our urban experience has changed.
A mapping exercise comparing the location of hotels to Airbnb stays in Brisbane in September suggests that the online platform offers a much more diffuse and a largely suburban experience. This is in direct opposition to the almost exclusively urban experience indicated by the concentration of hotels in the centre.
Adding to the allure is that the Airbnb map is always in a state of flux. Tourists may never experience the city in the same way twice. To this effect, the psychology of Airbnb is similar to that of the ephemeral pop-up. The “ordinary” and everyday “back regions” – now much more accessible – have become the fresh, unchartered territory for exploration. 
Each year, governments around the world pour huge amounts of money into the anachronistic preservation and maintenance of historic city centres primarily for the tourist market. Has Airbnb burst the “Disneyland” bubble that has enveloped our historical centres, governing their image and operations for export?
Since Airbnb, the traditional spatial division between urban tourist and the suburban local has been ruptured.
It remains to be seen whether this leads to positive urban outcomes such as the upgrading of infrastructure for our greater metropolitan areas, or whether the “city-as-a-themepark” analogy will persist and spread, sanitising and homogenising our everyday neighbourhoods.
<h2>Architectural implications</h2>
Certainly, the impacts of Airbnb on architectural typologies are already tangible. We are witnessing a shift towards new and modified residential configurations to accommodate co-habitation or dual occupation which, increasingly, may start to drive housing diversity.
Another product of the Airbnb phenomenon is the revival of urban “existenzminimum”: making use of existing left-over spaces that are plainly too small for long-term rental but that resonate and fetch a good price with experience-seeking Airbnb guests.
The more sinister flipside could be the perpetuation of unregulated, high-density apartments. The potential is for such properties to be designed as investments to maximise profits with little or no regard for their presently “itinerant” tenants, or future legacy.
As with the taxi industry after Uber, there has been much speculation about the impact of informal tourism on the hotel industry. Researchers have argued that while Airbnb lowers the financial barriers for travel and will appeal to adventurist tourists, hotels will continue to attract business travellers.
<h2>Consolidating attraction and accommodation</h2>
But there is evidence that hotels are also responding to the shift in the market towards an “experience economy". Melbourne-based entrepreneurs responsible for a number of successful bars in the CBD have reconceptualised the hotel experience around “luxury camping.”
A one-night stay in a luxury tent pitched on top of an urban shopping mall costs A$450, roughly equivalent in price to a junior suite with bay views at a five-star hotel, and without the necessary infrastructure and overheads.
The camping experience gives weight to the argument that, despite the changing nature of tourism, our cities have not yet escaped theme-park status. Only now, the attraction is the accommodation, and it is becoming more elaborate in step with the desires of today’s more sophisticated tourist.
While both the camping hotel and Airbnb promise “unique” new perspectives and exploit temporality to their advantage, the Airbnb brand is one built on everyday authenticity, and a sharing economy.
But the company’s recent acquisition of the tunnels in the Parisian Catacombs for €350,000 in time for Halloween suggests that it could be moving away from this pitch, towards something truly frightening. This brings the revelation that Airbnb is not simply operating as a platform for the publicity of our private spaces, but are also doing the exact opposite: privatising our public spaces.
The acquisition might provide a window into the future of our “tired” global architectural icons – their death and rebirth as part of a privatised, consolidated approach to attraction and accommodation.
 
Jacqui Alexander is lecturer in architecture, Monash University and author for The Conversation. She can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/jacqui-alexander-196982" target="_blank" style="line-height: 1.3em;">here</a>.
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