Mobile media in China: Media practice as a research orientation

Abstract

With the explosive spread of mobile media represented by mobile phones and the rapid iteration of mobile Internet technology, various social media applications have emerged, such as Facebook, Twitter, and China’s WeChat and Weibo. When mobile media as nonhuman actors were adapted into our daily life, the state of “permanent online, permanent connection” turned out to be the routine for mobile media users (Vorderer & Kohring, 2013), who started to use domesticated media as a resistance tactic to balance between the media system structures and action power (Haddon, 2003, p. 43). In this sense, the mobile media extend the time and space for social interaction. While the context of mobile communication has undergone drastic changes, the “media practice” carried out by users has also been increasingly treated as the core concept for the research on media action that is co-constructed among the public, technology, and environment. It should be noted that the scholarship on mobile communication effects achieved during the past decade mainly took a perspective from either the technological determinism or social construction of technology. However, neither the relationship between structure and action, nor that between technology and society, should be viewed as simply binary. Rather, the bilateral interaction perspective that was originally emphasized in communication research should be revisited, and the recent affordance perspective should be reintroduced and refocused. The concept of affordance was first proposed by eco-psychologist Gibson based on his interest in visual perception. Affordance refers to the action possibility of the perceiving subject in an object or environment, which is independent of the actor’s experience but