For this week we had to chose a social issue to write on, and Hong Kong with it’s political turmoil is not short on issues waiting to be solved.
Having done my daily check-ins on Facebook, I started to think about all these articles that came up. I am a believer of randomly following groups and people in getting more information, having stopped posting much on FB a long time ago, it has became a source of news for me.
In HK’s political status at the moment, the general Yellow and Blue posts contradict in wording and even style when I come to think of it, comment sections are being filled with fights and opinions thrown at each other from live feeds of protests, a simple news article to the most harmless “cute kitten” picutres; people have made every platform possible a place to express their concerns and to rip at who ever is not on their side. Out of all this, a lot of online bullying emerged, and any one is up for punishment which could lead to tragic results.
I started with a simple sketch to brainstorm and to trace what the average user is going through online: The single user tends to phase out articles and opinions that are not of their own beliefs ; or are those own beliefs to begin with? What I found out from this practice is that behind every angry blogger are all these others’ that helped fuel him/her, worst of all, Hong Kong people although having always been criticised for our lack of cultural rootage, it is actually super easy for us to be living in our own “bubble of perceptions”. First of all : HKers are not as open minded as they would like to be, just by reading what is typed by another, any foreigners outside of HK are easily identified, for example: the use of Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese, the tone and vocab of choice and profile checks. In this era of anti-Chinese gov., the citizens of HK are very on edge. Now, once you have said something to tick someone off, it is actually very much a war, with the fight having been initiated by 2 bloggers, very often some reflective fights could be seen signifying a whole crowd of opinion.
More details are explained in the article itself, however the main point in raising this subject is that I think that despite the big divide of for or against HK X China, ultimately we’ll still have to learn to get a long with each other, and to do that, I think awareness or the willingness to understand the background story of one another is of importance, and to fix that problem steps need to be taken.
I want this piece to first lure attention, thats why I went to my cartooning ways and referenced an old style of cartooning, clean simple characters with exggerated expressions in communicating action. Green was chosen in signifying the mix of Yellow and Blue, in hopes to express the neutral stance that this article is taking. The web of users are scattered in the fashion based on my sketches, but I have left out all the arrows and such thinking they will be too much of a distraction from a clean, easy on the eye layout.
ANDY WAS HERE
ANDY was here 🤓 