Affordances
Apart from allowing you to reveal some parts of yourself, either a true self or an ideal you anonymously, CityU Secrets, like many other Facebook ‘Secrets’ Pages of other Universities (HKU Secrets, PolyU Secrets, SPACE Secrets, CUHK Secrets and more), changed the one-way communication of a Facebook Page into a multimodal webpage where users can interact with each other, have huge influence by the strength of “weak ties”, and arouse attention.
We can use this online affinity space to strengthen the bonding of the originally distant groups of people, especially CityU’s students. Users are able to add people as “friends”, “poke” them, create different kinds of “relationships” on Facebook that no such multimodal webpage was so pioneer in being creative and able to link people together.
CityU Secrets allows free exchange of opinions and attracts all sorts of posts and comments due to its low power distance among the community. Such digital media successfully erased the power differences between users. This Facebook page empowered all users to express their ideas and spread the posts by liking, commenting, or sharing, it provides opportunity for all to get noticed.
We agree with Michael Schrage (2001) that such revolution is actually a “relationship revolution” rather than an “information revolution” because it changed how users of the community interact with each other. CityU Secrets changed the way students know more about other schoolmates or the school.
Time and Space
CityU Secrets provides an online affinity space for individuals to express their opinions by posting, reposting, commenting on others’ posts, or even just giving ‘likes’, ‘love’, 'yay', ‘dislike’, ‘haha’, ‘wow’, ‘sad’, and ‘angry’.
Such activities on CityU Secrets formed a community for people to freely express their views anonymously, and because the spreading speed on this Facebook Page is rapid, some of the posts may even arouse reactions from authorities or the stakeholders of the posts.
