Lin Maoxian

    bigapple2007@126.com

    MIN BYOUNG-CHUL may not be a household name in China now, but the campaign called Sunfull he launched aimed at promoting a friendlier cyberspace environment by encouraging more pleasant interactions among netizens will surely be soon widely known in China. He plans to start hiring Chinese volunteers this year.

    Min, a well-known educator of English and a professor of business communication at Konkuk University, assigned his English students an odd bit of homework in 2007.

    His students were asked to post positive, inspirational comments of encouragement for those being attacked or bullied on the Internet. The result was that 570 students left 5,700 encouraging posts on the blogs of stars who were being called names or receiving abuse.

    Min originally did this just to see what might come of it after reading about the death of a South Korean singer who had committed suicide after the singer became fed up with vicious, highly personalized attacks on the Internet.

    Schools in South Korea soon started participating in support of the Sunfull movement, asking students to be considerate and inspirational to others and leave positive comments online. The number of volunteers began to multiply across the country, some even holding free concerts.

    “Last year, the Ulsan, South Korea Office of Education saw a 52 percent drop in campus violence (fighting) as well as a significant decrease in the use of profanity six months after launching the Sunfull movement,” he said.

    In September last year, Sunfull Internet volunteers, consisting of mainly Korean and Chinese students, gathered in South Korea in the first attempt to broaden the movement’s reach overseas.

    A seemingly small good deed can go such a long way! A few inspirational words of encouragement — be it unintentional or intentional — may make a significant difference in the lives of other people! Conversely, malicious or negative replies can cause great stress to the victim and may result in deep regrets.

    Recently, a 19-year-old man surnamed Zeng reportedly aired his suicide live on his Weibo account. He allegedly split up with his girlfriend and began to leave posts on Weibo threatening to take his own life by suffocating himself with a coal burner in his room.

    During the four hours it took for him to die, he kept writing posts depicting his status.

    The poor boy’s online posts were forwarded thousands of times. While many netizens wrote encouraging replies and spurred him to live on and reported the matter to police, quite a few of them left sarcastic comments and “watched” the suicide as if it were a mere show.

    It is time for us to establish clear government policies or laws regulating the online environment and effectively implement such laws and policies. As individuals, we need to disseminate positive energy and values to create a friendlier online environment.

    (The author is a foreign trade salesperson in a Shenzhen-based import and export company.)