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Internet brings cool connection

By Gan Tian (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-04-09 11:27

College student Zhao Song, 21, has never been an early bird. He lives alone in an apartment near his campus and has long been in the habit of getting up at about midday.

Now, though, he has no chance of sleeping in so late. He is often bombarded from as early as 6 am by calls from complete strangers up to 30 of them.

His dramatic lifestyle change began by accident last November when Zhao happened to visit a popular website, www.douban.com. There, he was drawn to a group with the strange name: "There are many people waking you up early in the morning".

The 200 members all had trouble getting out of bed and had decided to keep calling each other until they woke up. Zhao immediately signed up and left his mobile phone number. He felt lucky to join the virtual community and has since befriended quite a few fellow "lazy birds".

"Those friendly voices lift my whole day," he says. Now he calls up to 10 people every morning. Theirs is clearly not a rare problem - the group now has an amazing 7,000 members and growing.

Not surprisingly, there is another quirky group called "There are many people asking you to sleep early at night", whose members call each other to go to bed earlier than usual.

The modernization of China has widened the distance between people. Many blame the Internet but some, like Zhao, thank it for finding friends and bringing them closer together.

Since being launched in 2005, Douban has evolved from a place for people to publish events and share their views on music, movies and fashion to a huge hotpot of groups with different habits and eccentric behavior.

In its unique way, Douban is just reflecting the many faces of new Chinese society.

Yang Bo, Douban's CEO, says there are 130,000 groups on his site, which function as an extension of the reviews on music, movies and books. While one page may be enough to review one of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's films, a group is an ideal forum to probe into his life and style, he says.

Douban's groups connect people in many ways. Lu Ruanwei, 28, an office worker for a big IT company, recently decided to learn how to play the piano. Instead of learning by herself or finding a professional coach, she visited Douban's "trading skills" group and published a notice: "I can teach you English in exchange for piano lessons."

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