Smartphone snapshots encourage participation(2)

In addition to allowing people to engage in supervision, smartphones have also become effective tools for boosting public interest programs. Internet celebrities sometimes call on the public to participate in such campaigns using their smartphones.

Since March, netizens have been encouraged to find and photograph manholes that lack covers after a university student in Changsha, capital of central China's Hunan Province, drowned after falling into an uncovered manhole without a lid.

The campaign has resulted in 140,000 related posts on Tencent, another popular microblogging website.

In 2011, Yu Jianrong, a professor from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, launched an online campaign calling on netizens to take photos of children abandoned on the streets. The campaign had attracted more than 200,000 followers and aided 56,000 children as of the end of 2012.

Realizing the influence that such campaigns can have, some government departments have encouraged the public to aid in urban management efforts by using their smartphone cameras.

On May 6, the municipal government of Liuzhou in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, opened an account on Weixin, a social networking platform operated by Tencent.

Local residents have been encouraged to take photos of any damage done to public facilities and send them to the account. The government has received 6,000 such tips from local residents and authorities have followed up on 520 related cases.

Xia Xinping, an assistant researcher of sociology at the Guangxi University of Science and Technology, said the popularity of snapshots indicates that modern technology not only enriches people's material lives, but also provides an opportunity for people to supervise and participate.

"The government should make full use of modern technology and make innovations in social management," she said.