Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/20594364231198289
Nicolas Huppenbauer
Technical standards are a topic of intense geopolitical competition. This article introduces standardization as a practice constitutive of meaning and social order, and, in particular, one that coproduces political space. It engages with the argument that China in international standardization aims to make itself more central, and increasingly rejects domestic adaptation, in order to promote a new spatial vision of Sino-centric connectivity for international relations. After situating this argument in the literature on standardization and space-making, the article analyzes China’s policy discourse on the standardization of Intelligent and Connected Vehicles. The analyzed discourse reveals a position towards connectivity that is partially Sino-centric, but also reproduces established narratives of openness, technical expertise, and cooperation. The article adds to the debate on the coproduction of political space by introducing standardization as a site through which connectivity as a geopolitical vision is negotiated. Empirically, it adds to recent findings that China's different national goals for digital infrastructure development may compete with each other, reducing the country's potential to coherently connect with the world on its own terms.
{"title":"Connectivity, centrality, and adaptation: The coproduction of political space in China’s standardization of autonomous driving technologies","authors":"Nicolas Huppenbauer","doi":"10.1177/20594364231198289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231198289","url":null,"abstract":"Technical standards are a topic of intense geopolitical competition. This article introduces standardization as a practice constitutive of meaning and social order, and, in particular, one that coproduces political space. It engages with the argument that China in international standardization aims to make itself more central, and increasingly rejects domestic adaptation, in order to promote a new spatial vision of Sino-centric connectivity for international relations. After situating this argument in the literature on standardization and space-making, the article analyzes China’s policy discourse on the standardization of Intelligent and Connected Vehicles. The analyzed discourse reveals a position towards connectivity that is partially Sino-centric, but also reproduces established narratives of openness, technical expertise, and cooperation. The article adds to the debate on the coproduction of political space by introducing standardization as a site through which connectivity as a geopolitical vision is negotiated. Empirically, it adds to recent findings that China's different national goals for digital infrastructure development may compete with each other, reducing the country's potential to coherently connect with the world on its own terms.","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135434289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-24DOI: 10.1177/20594364231195934
Tanner Mirrlees
This article considers the growing media power and influence of China in the global South through the lens of a critical media imperialism framework derived from the geopolitical economy of communications research tradition. While extensive research exists on US media imperialism and the challenge to it posed by China’s global media rise, the idea of China as a media imperialist in its own right has received limited attention. This article addresses this gap in the field by summarizing ten key postulates of a media imperialism framework for critical research on China’s media power and influence in the global South. This article study does not seek to prove China’s status as a new media imperialist power or provide a detailed case study of China’s media imperialism in a specific country. Instead, it synthesizes the ten postulates of a media imperialism framework, examines China’s corporate and state media organizations in relation to these, and draws from relevant scholarship, evidence, and anecdotes. The article argues that each postulate can serve as a foundation for future case studies of different facets of China’s media power and influence in countries across the global South. These postulates can be refined, disproven, or expanded through further research. By considering China’s media power and influence through the lens of the media imperialism framework, this article aims to stimulate further meta-theory, empirical research, and scholarly debates on this pivotal topic, which while contentious, is significant to the future of the global South, and the wider world system.
{"title":"Ten Postulates of a Media Imperialism Framework: For Critical Research on China’s Media Power and Influence in the Global South","authors":"Tanner Mirrlees","doi":"10.1177/20594364231195934","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231195934","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the growing media power and influence of China in the global South through the lens of a critical media imperialism framework derived from the geopolitical economy of communications research tradition. While extensive research exists on US media imperialism and the challenge to it posed by China’s global media rise, the idea of China as a media imperialist in its own right has received limited attention. This article addresses this gap in the field by summarizing ten key postulates of a media imperialism framework for critical research on China’s media power and influence in the global South. This article study does not seek to prove China’s status as a new media imperialist power or provide a detailed case study of China’s media imperialism in a specific country. Instead, it synthesizes the ten postulates of a media imperialism framework, examines China’s corporate and state media organizations in relation to these, and draws from relevant scholarship, evidence, and anecdotes. The article argues that each postulate can serve as a foundation for future case studies of different facets of China’s media power and influence in countries across the global South. These postulates can be refined, disproven, or expanded through further research. By considering China’s media power and influence through the lens of the media imperialism framework, this article aims to stimulate further meta-theory, empirical research, and scholarly debates on this pivotal topic, which while contentious, is significant to the future of the global South, and the wider world system.","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":"140 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86613980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-16DOI: 10.1177/20594364231196547
Weili Wang, John K. Downey, Fan Yang
A growing body of work insists that artificial intelligence (AI) must be regarded as a sociotechnical imaginary in the manner of earlier technologies. In this paper we contribute to this field by investigating the representation of AI across very different countries and across time to assess whether these representations are influenced by their socio-economic, political, and cultural contexts, and whether they change over time. By applying computational topic modelling methods, we investigate narratives around AI in 9 newspapers across the UK, China and India over a time frame of 12 years, from 2011 to 2022. Our results indicate that there are both dystopian and utopian narratives associated with AI, as indeed there have been with other technologies. Debates about AI tend very much to reflect national priorities, preoccupations, hopes and fears, all of which are projected onto emerging AI technologies.
{"title":"AI anxiety? Comparing the sociotechnical imaginaries of artificial intelligence in UK, Chinese and Indian newspapers","authors":"Weili Wang, John K. Downey, Fan Yang","doi":"10.1177/20594364231196547","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231196547","url":null,"abstract":"A growing body of work insists that artificial intelligence (AI) must be regarded as a sociotechnical imaginary in the manner of earlier technologies. In this paper we contribute to this field by investigating the representation of AI across very different countries and across time to assess whether these representations are influenced by their socio-economic, political, and cultural contexts, and whether they change over time. By applying computational topic modelling methods, we investigate narratives around AI in 9 newspapers across the UK, China and India over a time frame of 12 years, from 2011 to 2022. Our results indicate that there are both dystopian and utopian narratives associated with AI, as indeed there have been with other technologies. Debates about AI tend very much to reflect national priorities, preoccupations, hopes and fears, all of which are projected onto emerging AI technologies.","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74322631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-10DOI: 10.1177/20594364231194670
K. Ma
Research on whiteness in Western cinema has effectively revealed how cinematic representation contributes to formulating, perpetuating, normalizing, and contesting white superiority in Western cultural discourses. However, little research considers how Chinese cinema imagines and negotiates whiteness. Using the visual-textual analysis method, this article examines the representations of white identities in Big Shot’s Funeral (2001, dir. Feng Xiaogang) and Crazy Alien (2019, dir. Ning Hao). These are two well-received post-socialist Chinese dark comedy films depicting encounters between Chinese people and Westerners in contemporary China. Approaching racial identity as a form of social positioning, I analyze how various meanings are ascribed to white identities in the films, and how these meanings articulate Chineseness and Chinese nationalist sentiments. I show that white superiority is simultaneously reinforced and contested in the two films. While doing so, I will also highlight Western cultural theories’ lack of analytical power in explaining how white superiority in cultural discourse transforms across different geographical locations.
{"title":"The cultural politics of race in Chinese cinema: Nationalism and the changing representation of whiteness in Big Shot’s Funeral and Crazy Alien","authors":"K. Ma","doi":"10.1177/20594364231194670","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231194670","url":null,"abstract":"Research on whiteness in Western cinema has effectively revealed how cinematic representation contributes to formulating, perpetuating, normalizing, and contesting white superiority in Western cultural discourses. However, little research considers how Chinese cinema imagines and negotiates whiteness. Using the visual-textual analysis method, this article examines the representations of white identities in Big Shot’s Funeral (2001, dir. Feng Xiaogang) and Crazy Alien (2019, dir. Ning Hao). These are two well-received post-socialist Chinese dark comedy films depicting encounters between Chinese people and Westerners in contemporary China. Approaching racial identity as a form of social positioning, I analyze how various meanings are ascribed to white identities in the films, and how these meanings articulate Chineseness and Chinese nationalist sentiments. I show that white superiority is simultaneously reinforced and contested in the two films. While doing so, I will also highlight Western cultural theories’ lack of analytical power in explaining how white superiority in cultural discourse transforms across different geographical locations.","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75678672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-07DOI: 10.1177/20594364231194671
H. Shum
In the Hong Kong Chief Executive’s 2020 Policy Address, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government implemented strategies to integrate arts and technology as a new trend in cultural development. With the co-existence of a governmental initiative in ‘arts and technology’ (‘arts tech’) development and the rapid advancement of new technologies, it is frequently seen that new technologies (e.g., virtual reality [VR] and augmented reality) have been widely adopted in interactive media art productions in Hong Kong. Drawing on ethnographic research on a commercial virtual event, and a VR theatre performance produced by a Hong Kong cross-media creative studio, this study unveils discrepancies existing between government officials, commercial marketers, and art creators, ranging from objectives to practices in applying technologies to virtual art production. The juxtaposition of a market-driven commercial virtual campaign and the Chinese nationalist agenda embodied in the government-funded arts tech project reflects how the socio-historical background and changing political situation in Hong Kong extends its postcolonial neoliberal nationalism (PNN) to the arts tech arena. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: first, by adopting ‘China as method’ as epistemological analysis, the mediation of PNN by arts tech explains a ‘southbound imaginary’ in Hong Kong’s arts and cultural practices through a changing relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China. Second, in contrast to the current scholarship focusing on human governance in the formation of neoliberal nationalism, this paper underscores the ‘power’ of techno-cultural material in mediating the neoliberal nationalism of Hong Kong, after its reversion to China, through arts tech development.
{"title":"Oculus power! Arts and technology’s mediation of postcolonial neoliberal nationalism in Hong Kong","authors":"H. Shum","doi":"10.1177/20594364231194671","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231194671","url":null,"abstract":"In the Hong Kong Chief Executive’s 2020 Policy Address, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government implemented strategies to integrate arts and technology as a new trend in cultural development. With the co-existence of a governmental initiative in ‘arts and technology’ (‘arts tech’) development and the rapid advancement of new technologies, it is frequently seen that new technologies (e.g., virtual reality [VR] and augmented reality) have been widely adopted in interactive media art productions in Hong Kong. Drawing on ethnographic research on a commercial virtual event, and a VR theatre performance produced by a Hong Kong cross-media creative studio, this study unveils discrepancies existing between government officials, commercial marketers, and art creators, ranging from objectives to practices in applying technologies to virtual art production. The juxtaposition of a market-driven commercial virtual campaign and the Chinese nationalist agenda embodied in the government-funded arts tech project reflects how the socio-historical background and changing political situation in Hong Kong extends its postcolonial neoliberal nationalism (PNN) to the arts tech arena. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: first, by adopting ‘China as method’ as epistemological analysis, the mediation of PNN by arts tech explains a ‘southbound imaginary’ in Hong Kong’s arts and cultural practices through a changing relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China. Second, in contrast to the current scholarship focusing on human governance in the formation of neoliberal nationalism, this paper underscores the ‘power’ of techno-cultural material in mediating the neoliberal nationalism of Hong Kong, after its reversion to China, through arts tech development.","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85300082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-03DOI: 10.1177/20594364231193950
Maxigas, Niels ten Oever
This paper explores how infrastructural ideologies function as tools in geopolitical struggles for dependence and independence between world powers. Meese et al. (2020) suggest that controversies around 5G stem from infrastructural anxieties best examined in the framework of geopolitics. We build on this work by analysing the emerging infrastructural ideology and sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) of 5G in light of the changing global division of labour. Sociotechnical imaginaries refer to the vision of technologies themselves, while ideologies refer to the totality of social relations, translating the objective reality of material conditions to subjective lived experience (Bory, 2020). The Western imaginaries around 5G infrastructures reflect, deflect, translate and sublimate the infrastructural anxieties tied to the development and deployment of new network paradigms by China as an emerging hegemon. The controversial nature, contradictory content and fragmented presentation of 5G is a necessary part of living through the trauma of lost historical agency on the part of Western superpowers. We engaged in code ethnography (Rosa, 2022) of GSM, internet and 5G technologies, as well as participant observation in the main standard-development organisations of the internet and 5G. Our methodological assumption, taken from world systems theory (Wallerstein, 2004), is that the character and content of imaginaries and their underpinning ideologies creatively translate the position of actors in the global division of labour. This paper contributes to the understanding of the role of media infrastructures in geopolitical power tussles and straddles the fields of materialist media studies, science and technology studies and international relations.
{"title":"Geopolitics in the infrastructural ideology of 5G","authors":"Maxigas, Niels ten Oever","doi":"10.1177/20594364231193950","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231193950","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores how infrastructural ideologies function as tools in geopolitical struggles for dependence and independence between world powers. Meese et al. (2020) suggest that controversies around 5G stem from infrastructural anxieties best examined in the framework of geopolitics. We build on this work by analysing the emerging infrastructural ideology and sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) of 5G in light of the changing global division of labour. Sociotechnical imaginaries refer to the vision of technologies themselves, while ideologies refer to the totality of social relations, translating the objective reality of material conditions to subjective lived experience (Bory, 2020). The Western imaginaries around 5G infrastructures reflect, deflect, translate and sublimate the infrastructural anxieties tied to the development and deployment of new network paradigms by China as an emerging hegemon. The controversial nature, contradictory content and fragmented presentation of 5G is a necessary part of living through the trauma of lost historical agency on the part of Western superpowers. We engaged in code ethnography (Rosa, 2022) of GSM, internet and 5G technologies, as well as participant observation in the main standard-development organisations of the internet and 5G. Our methodological assumption, taken from world systems theory (Wallerstein, 2004), is that the character and content of imaginaries and their underpinning ideologies creatively translate the position of actors in the global division of labour. This paper contributes to the understanding of the role of media infrastructures in geopolitical power tussles and straddles the fields of materialist media studies, science and technology studies and international relations.","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":"37 1","pages":"271 - 288"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85748578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-29DOI: 10.1177/20594364231192378
D. Gati
{"title":"Book Review: The art of useless: Fashion, media, and consumer culture in contemporary China","authors":"D. Gati","doi":"10.1177/20594364231192378","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231192378","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91276489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-24DOI: 10.1177/20594364231190313
Qian Li, Xiaotian Li
After its global popularity and commercial success, Genshin Impact, a Chinese-developed, Japanese anime-style mobile game, provokes online discussions on whether such a game of cultural hybridity exemplifies “authentic Chineseness.” Based on online ethnography in the fan communities, this article investigates a two-year debate on whether GI should be considered a symbol of China’s “cultural export” to other countries. It reveals that players construct multiple meanings of authentic Chineseness, including GI’s integration of Chinese cultural elements, telling “the China story,” and its patriotism and “political correctness” in China. This article contributes to the project of de-westernizing cultural studies by revealing how the meanings of cultural authenticity are constructed in a Global South context. Moreover, players situate “Chineseness” in the power relations among China, Japan, and the West, and associate cultural appropriation in the increasing hybridization process with global soft power competition. It reveals that the construction of cultural authenticity as a relational concept is shaped by others defined in a contingent, contextual, and multilateral way, and that the construction process is conditioned by domestic and international power relations, thus contributing to the project of going beyond dichotomous thinking in cultural studies.
{"title":"Debating the “Chineseness” of a mobile game in online communities","authors":"Qian Li, Xiaotian Li","doi":"10.1177/20594364231190313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231190313","url":null,"abstract":"After its global popularity and commercial success, Genshin Impact, a Chinese-developed, Japanese anime-style mobile game, provokes online discussions on whether such a game of cultural hybridity exemplifies “authentic Chineseness.” Based on online ethnography in the fan communities, this article investigates a two-year debate on whether GI should be considered a symbol of China’s “cultural export” to other countries. It reveals that players construct multiple meanings of authentic Chineseness, including GI’s integration of Chinese cultural elements, telling “the China story,” and its patriotism and “political correctness” in China. This article contributes to the project of de-westernizing cultural studies by revealing how the meanings of cultural authenticity are constructed in a Global South context. Moreover, players situate “Chineseness” in the power relations among China, Japan, and the West, and associate cultural appropriation in the increasing hybridization process with global soft power competition. It reveals that the construction of cultural authenticity as a relational concept is shaped by others defined in a contingent, contextual, and multilateral way, and that the construction process is conditioned by domestic and international power relations, thus contributing to the project of going beyond dichotomous thinking in cultural studies.","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":"50 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80621980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-12DOI: 10.1177/20594364231188350
Fan Xiao
This article examines the cultural resilience of the Chinese slash fanfiction subculture. Popular among Chinese youth, the writing and reading of slash are subjected to increasingly stringent regulations due to changes in the political environment. Drawing from the theoretical framework of minor transnationalism, the current study situates the development of the Chinese slash community in the context of post-socialist reform and globalization, arguing that slash fanfiction is a form of non-institutional, border-crossing cultural practice that challenges orthodox heteronormativity in nationalistic discourses. Foregrounding the double-edge-sword role of digital platforms, this article dissects the cultural resilience of the Chinese slash community—manifested as various strategies in keeping the viability of their cultural practices, including cultural enclosure, border-crossing platform-switching, and social media activism. This article contributes to the study of subcultures by bringing a transnational perspective that focuses on continuous, resilient cultural practices in negotiations of alternative cultural and political agendas. Methodologically, it also contributes to social media ethnographic research by testing out a comprehensive toolkit that combines close reading with computational text-mining and visual network analysis in the analysis of multimodal social media discourses.
{"title":"“We are snowflakes”: Minor transnationalism and the cultural resilience of slash fanfiction community in China","authors":"Fan Xiao","doi":"10.1177/20594364231188350","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231188350","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the cultural resilience of the Chinese slash fanfiction subculture. Popular among Chinese youth, the writing and reading of slash are subjected to increasingly stringent regulations due to changes in the political environment. Drawing from the theoretical framework of minor transnationalism, the current study situates the development of the Chinese slash community in the context of post-socialist reform and globalization, arguing that slash fanfiction is a form of non-institutional, border-crossing cultural practice that challenges orthodox heteronormativity in nationalistic discourses. Foregrounding the double-edge-sword role of digital platforms, this article dissects the cultural resilience of the Chinese slash community—manifested as various strategies in keeping the viability of their cultural practices, including cultural enclosure, border-crossing platform-switching, and social media activism. This article contributes to the study of subcultures by bringing a transnational perspective that focuses on continuous, resilient cultural practices in negotiations of alternative cultural and political agendas. Methodologically, it also contributes to social media ethnographic research by testing out a comprehensive toolkit that combines close reading with computational text-mining and visual network analysis in the analysis of multimodal social media discourses.","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79329005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-07DOI: 10.1177/20594364231188353
Lijun Luo, Wonkyung Kim
Virtual influencers (VIs) have become a powerful marketing tool for brands to promote their products, due to their trouble-free experiences, compared with human influencers. However, uncanny valley, a theory that describes the negative psychological responses triggered by humanoid robots or avatars, suggests that VIs might exert negative responses from social media audiences. Thus, this study aims to investigate how social media audiences perceive Ling, the first computer-generated VI in China. Four research questions were proposed: 1) how Ling builds its persona on Weibo, 2) how consumers perceive Ling’s identity, 3) how social media audiences respond to Ling’s VI marketing strategies, 4) how social media audiences express their intimacy towards Ling. As an exploratory qualitative research method, textual analysis was employed to reveal underlying meaning in social media audiences’ perceptions of VI, and 79 Weibo posts and 8442 comments were collected as the research text. The results showed that users’ response to Ling can be summarized into three dimensions: (1) VI identity as a CGI character, (2) endorser identity as a social media marketing tool, and (3) national identity as a cultural ambassador.
{"title":"How virtual influencers’ identities are shaped on Chinese social media: A case study of Ling","authors":"Lijun Luo, Wonkyung Kim","doi":"10.1177/20594364231188353","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231188353","url":null,"abstract":"Virtual influencers (VIs) have become a powerful marketing tool for brands to promote their products, due to their trouble-free experiences, compared with human influencers. However, uncanny valley, a theory that describes the negative psychological responses triggered by humanoid robots or avatars, suggests that VIs might exert negative responses from social media audiences. Thus, this study aims to investigate how social media audiences perceive Ling, the first computer-generated VI in China. Four research questions were proposed: 1) how Ling builds its persona on Weibo, 2) how consumers perceive Ling’s identity, 3) how social media audiences respond to Ling’s VI marketing strategies, 4) how social media audiences express their intimacy towards Ling. As an exploratory qualitative research method, textual analysis was employed to reveal underlying meaning in social media audiences’ perceptions of VI, and 79 Weibo posts and 8442 comments were collected as the research text. The results showed that users’ response to Ling can be summarized into three dimensions: (1) VI identity as a CGI character, (2) endorser identity as a social media marketing tool, and (3) national identity as a cultural ambassador.","PeriodicalId":42637,"journal":{"name":"Global Media and China","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86797796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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