PTT in Close Shot
--a primary survey of the Biggest BBS site in Taiwan
The scale of the impact of the Internet and its by-products on the world is, with no doubt, global. The Internet has brought a wide range of changes in people's ways of living; it brought a digitalized world that is interwoven into the physical world which human beings have long inhabited. The planet is fluctuating in the flood of the Internet. The waves sweep over the whole world and run in all kinds of direction. Each trend brings hardly the same result; there is no single default way of tracking and framing the development of a virtual society. Yet, while the majority of discussion and investigation of online activities is targeting phenomena in the West, the ecosystems of the Internet in Asia are often filtered out, or labeled as "weird" or "funny", because they don't fit in with the western ethnocentric logic (quoting and paraphrasing parts of Michael Netzley's blog entry #110).
As Michael Netzley points out in his blog entry #254 as well as FIR: The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #408, "the popularity of BBS sites in parts of Asia" is one of the features that indicate how different the landscape of Internet development in Asia is compared to that of the West. BBS (Bulletin Board System), as a rather old kind of way to connect and communicate, not only survives from the dominance of world wide web, but also transforms into an unique type of social media that stands out and keeps prospering in the Chinese-based areas. So, here I would like to look into one single BBS site--PTT, the largest site in Taiwan--and to sort out three major questions: Why is PTT distinctive from other social media? What impacts does it have on the local society? and, To what ends is PTT a valuable site that worth all the resources that have been pouring into it?
PTT, the largest BBS site in Taiwan, was founded in 1995, by a sophomore student in NTU (National Taiwan University). As many other BBS sites gave way to the web, PTT wasn't wiped out in this global flood, and nowadays it remains to be the leading force among the few survivors. The current number of PTT's registered members is circa 1,500,000, each day there are 400,000-600,000 attempts to connect/log in, and its average number of users each hour is around 40,000. The numbers might be relatively not impressive compared to sites on the global level like Facebook or Twitter. Yet being a local social media, in a country with a population of 23 millions, the records are indeed significant.
BBS can be described as a collection of many different forums. The public forums, or public boards--as the BBS users may call them, can be accessed by all users (even "guests", the non-registered ones), and are nearly all available for any registered members to open up new topics, to post replies, or simply make a comment or feedback. Now PTT gathered over 20,000 public boards which cover almost every single issue in a person's life. There are boards for left-handed people (Lefty), for cross culture couples (CCRomance), for people who are losing their hair (hair_loss), for people who want to let out their anger (Hate, HatePolitics), just to name a few. The great variety of themes covered by the boards in PTT is a major attraction for its users. One can easily find a comfortable spot--or many, of course--there to sit back and read the discussions, experience sharing, debates that appeal interesting to him/her. It is also very easy to jump in the conversation. One can either choose to give comments (just to test the water) or to jump right in and post.
BBS can be described as a collection of many different forums. The public forums, or public boards--as the BBS users may call them, can be accessed by all users (even "guests", the non-registered ones), and are nearly all available for any registered members to open up new topics, to post replies, or simply make a comment or feedback. Now PTT gathered over 20,000 public boards which cover almost every single issue in a person's life. There are boards for left-handed people (Lefty), for cross culture couples (CCRomance), for people who are losing their hair (hair_loss), for people who want to let out their anger (Hate, HatePolitics), just to name a few. The great variety of themes covered by the boards in PTT is a major attraction for its users. One can easily find a comfortable spot--or many, of course--there to sit back and read the discussions, experience sharing, debates that appeal interesting to him/her. It is also very easy to jump in the conversation. One can either choose to give comments (just to test the water) or to jump right in and post.
Most of PTT's members consists of university students, grad-students, and newly graduated (or the "freshmen in workplace", a term that coined by the local media). According to TWNIC's report on the usage of broadband Internet 2007, in the list of "Purposes of Broadband Usage", BBS cannot get into the top 10 at all. Nonetheless, in researches where the target group is college/university students, BBS is always rated as the top 5 purposes students using the Internet for. Also, in the user statistics that given by PTT itself, the number of registered users would reach the high peek between age 20-27 if analyzed and divided by age. This special feature of PTT indirectly makes it the place where a big part of pop culture among the younger generation in Taiwan is produced, circulated, and reproduced.
-Want to know more about PTT? See the entry of PTT in Wikipedia
-Want to experience PTT?
telnet://PTT.cc
(have to use specially designed browsers to navigate)
-Some browsers designed for BBS
PCMan X http://pcmanx.sourceforge.net/
PCMan plug-in for Mozilla/Firefox http://pcmanmoz.mozdev.org/index.html
PCMan plug-in for Mozilla/Firefox http://pcmanmoz.mozdev.org/index.html
