Pub Date : 2021-06-17DOI: 10.1163/22142312-12340131
Li Qu
This article investigates Chinese social eating livestreams (chibo) in the context of China’s 2020 campaign against food waste. It argues that the subgenre ‘big stomach kings’, a target of the campaign, evinces the moral implications of Chinese affluence, of which food waste is exemplary. The emerging affluence in China has normalized conspicuous, wasteful consumption and given rise to a local form of flaunting wealth called ‘xuanfu’. Chinese social media are inundated with xuanfu images, a symptom of the necessary psychosocial adaptation to affluence. Isolating the ‘big stomach kings’ livestreams from the social context of xuanfu, the anti-waste campaign glosses over the underlying social issue of the vast wealth gap between the affluent and the poor. To expose the ethical controversy of these livestreams, the article also analyzes their gender politics by parsing the mystifying image of female ‘big stomach kings’, whose slim bodies are in stark contrast to their enormous appetites.
{"title":"Waste on the Tip of the Tongue: Social Eating Livestreams (Chibo) in the Age of Chinese Affluence","authors":"Li Qu","doi":"10.1163/22142312-12340131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22142312-12340131","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article investigates Chinese social eating livestreams (chibo) in the context of China’s 2020 campaign against food waste. It argues that the subgenre ‘big stomach kings’, a target of the campaign, evinces the moral implications of Chinese affluence, of which food waste is exemplary. The emerging affluence in China has normalized conspicuous, wasteful consumption and given rise to a local form of flaunting wealth called ‘xuanfu’. Chinese social media are inundated with xuanfu images, a symptom of the necessary psychosocial adaptation to affluence. Isolating the ‘big stomach kings’ livestreams from the social context of xuanfu, the anti-waste campaign glosses over the underlying social issue of the vast wealth gap between the affluent and the poor. To expose the ethical controversy of these livestreams, the article also analyzes their gender politics by parsing the mystifying image of female ‘big stomach kings’, whose slim bodies are in stark contrast to their enormous appetites.","PeriodicalId":52237,"journal":{"name":"Asiascape: Digital Asia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73911383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-17DOI: 10.1163/22142312-12340132
Jin-seong Gu
Livestreaming platforms, including Huya, Douyu, Huajiao, and Inke, have become extremely popular in China in recent years, resulting in the formation of new industries and new professions. Livestreaming also forms a ‘grey area’ for the production and circulation of content that can be deemed pornographic and obscene by the government. The challenges for effective regulations come mainly from livestreaming’s real-time feature and its problematization of the distinction between public and private. Using theoretical lenses, including a Foucauldian approach to neoliberal governmentality, this article examines the Chinese government’s major attempts between 2016 and 2018 to regulate obscenity in livestreaming and consider them in the context of the government’s history of regulating media, the internet, and pornography. Based on an analysis of the evolving regulatory regime, the article also discusses how livestreaming users are left to their own devices as they navigate the ongoing mediation between the government’s economic and ideological motives.
{"title":"Regulating Obscenity in Chinese Livestreaming: An Ongoing Mediation between the Private and the Public, the Nation and the Market","authors":"Jin-seong Gu","doi":"10.1163/22142312-12340132","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22142312-12340132","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Livestreaming platforms, including Huya, Douyu, Huajiao, and Inke, have become extremely popular in China in recent years, resulting in the formation of new industries and new professions. Livestreaming also forms a ‘grey area’ for the production and circulation of content that can be deemed pornographic and obscene by the government. The challenges for effective regulations come mainly from livestreaming’s real-time feature and its problematization of the distinction between public and private. Using theoretical lenses, including a Foucauldian approach to neoliberal governmentality, this article examines the Chinese government’s major attempts between 2016 and 2018 to regulate obscenity in livestreaming and consider them in the context of the government’s history of regulating media, the internet, and pornography. Based on an analysis of the evolving regulatory regime, the article also discusses how livestreaming users are left to their own devices as they navigate the ongoing mediation between the government’s economic and ideological motives.","PeriodicalId":52237,"journal":{"name":"Asiascape: Digital Asia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76650032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-17DOI: 10.1163/22142312-12340129
Gehao Zhang, G. de Seta
This introduction to the special issue ‘ASIA.LIVE: Inaugurating Livestream Studies in Asia’ briefly summarizes the virtual workshop at which it originated and describes its contributions to the central concept of liveness. After reflecting on the increasingly constitutive role of liveness in digital media, we argue that research on livestreaming should move beyond its focus on gaming and its Eurocentric approach to platforms, drawing on extensive debates over liveness and expanding its scope to the thriving digital economies in the Asian region. To understand how practices such as livestreaming are changing digital cultures in Asia and beyond, it is necessary to account for the ephemeral phenomena and under-documented practices that emerge from these regional contexts. By bringing together articles about China and Taiwan and relating them to workshop contributions about Hong Kong, Indonesia, and South Korea, we inaugurate livestream studies in Asia and offer some directions for future research in this field.
这是《亚洲》特刊的简介。“LIVE: Inaugurating Livestream Studies in Asia”简要总结了它的起源，并描述了它对生活中心概念的贡献。在反思了直播在数字媒体中日益重要的作用之后，我们认为对直播的研究应该超越其对游戏和以欧洲为中心的平台的关注，借鉴关于直播的广泛辩论，并将其范围扩大到亚洲地区蓬勃发展的数字经济。要了解直播等实践如何改变亚洲及其他地区的数字文化，有必要解释这些区域背景下出现的短暂现象和记录不足的实践。通过汇集有关中国大陆和台湾的文章，并将其与有关香港、印度尼西亚和韩国的研讨会贡献联系起来，我们开创了亚洲的直播研究，并为该领域的未来研究提供了一些方向。
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Pub Date : 2021-06-17DOI: 10.1163/22142312-12340134
Avishek Ray
{"title":"Mediality and Lulz in Uncyclopedia’s Entry on Hinduism: Reading into Satire","authors":"Avishek Ray","doi":"10.1163/22142312-12340134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22142312-12340134","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52237,"journal":{"name":"Asiascape: Digital Asia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79351560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-17DOI: 10.1163/22142312-12340133
KENNETH C.C. YANG, Yowei Kang
Livestreaming platforms have emerged as an important political communication tool for engaging with constituents. Twitch, YouTube Live, Mixer, and Facebook can broadcast real-time video contents via Web-based services and mobile app platforms. Our case study aims to determine whether livestreaming influencers generated political participation during Taiwan’s 2020 presidential election. This case study is based on a framework that integrates the literature on political communication and influencer marketing. In this article, we describe the rise of livestreaming platforms and explain the role of livestreamers in political communication. We also examine whether the characteristics of livestreaming influencers and the type of influence they exert increased political participation by their fans and followers and whether this accounted for the success of Tsai Ing-wen’s victory in her 2020 campaign for re-election as president.
{"title":"Livestreaming Influencers, Influence Types, and Political Participation: A Case Study of Taiwan’s 2020 Presidential Election","authors":"KENNETH C.C. YANG, Yowei Kang","doi":"10.1163/22142312-12340133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22142312-12340133","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Livestreaming platforms have emerged as an important political communication tool for engaging with constituents. Twitch, YouTube Live, Mixer, and Facebook can broadcast real-time video contents via Web-based services and mobile app platforms. Our case study aims to determine whether livestreaming influencers generated political participation during Taiwan’s 2020 presidential election. This case study is based on a framework that integrates the literature on political communication and influencer marketing. In this article, we describe the rise of livestreaming platforms and explain the role of livestreamers in political communication. We also examine whether the characteristics of livestreaming influencers and the type of influence they exert increased political participation by their fans and followers and whether this accounted for the success of Tsai Ing-wen’s victory in her 2020 campaign for re-election as president.","PeriodicalId":52237,"journal":{"name":"Asiascape: Digital Asia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74291793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-22DOI: 10.1163/22142312-bja10004
B. Barendregt, F. Schneider
This article introduces the special issue on ‘Digital Activism’ by exploring some of the trends in social media activism and scholarship thereof. The authors ask to what extent this literature helps us understand Asian forms of online activism, which forms of activism have relatively done well, and whether Asian activism requires its own theorizing. Most of all, it is a plea for a careful and ethnographically informed approach to digital activism. Although outwardly they look similar and use the same templates, manuals, or even similar media strategies, not all forms of online activism promote democratic values. Furthermore, we argue that much of what happens under the banner of digital activism is not necessarily politics with a capital P but, rather, consists of everyday forms of engagement, with sometimes seemingly vulgar contents and often familiar routines and natural forms, yet in their impact such ‘banal activism’ may have political implications.
{"title":"Digital Activism in Asia: Good, Bad, and Banal Politics Online","authors":"B. Barendregt, F. Schneider","doi":"10.1163/22142312-bja10004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22142312-bja10004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article introduces the special issue on ‘Digital Activism’ by exploring some of the trends in social media activism and scholarship thereof. The authors ask to what extent this literature helps us understand Asian forms of online activism, which forms of activism have relatively done well, and whether Asian activism requires its own theorizing. Most of all, it is a plea for a careful and ethnographically informed approach to digital activism. Although outwardly they look similar and use the same templates, manuals, or even similar media strategies, not all forms of online activism promote democratic values. Furthermore, we argue that much of what happens under the banner of digital activism is not necessarily politics with a capital P but, rather, consists of everyday forms of engagement, with sometimes seemingly vulgar contents and often familiar routines and natural forms, yet in their impact such ‘banal activism’ may have political implications.","PeriodicalId":52237,"journal":{"name":"Asiascape: Digital Asia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90497398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-08DOI: 10.1163/22142312-12340116
D. Jin
{"title":"Thought-Provoking Play: Political Philosophies in Science Fictional Videogame Spaces from Japan, written by Martin Roth","authors":"D. Jin","doi":"10.1163/22142312-12340116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22142312-12340116","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52237,"journal":{"name":"Asiascape: Digital Asia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2019-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73637665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-08DOI: 10.1163/22142312-12340113
M. Andrade
Instead of exploring ‘smart cities’ as future utopias, this paper concentrates on historically constructed, yet actively contested socio-spatial inequalities. Drawing upon Chandigarh’s master-planning experience, it explores epistemic, material, and civic dimensions of Chandigarh’s Smart City Proposal to ask whether vernacular reinterpretations of ‘smart citizenry’ help the subaltern reclaim their ‘right to the city’. Thus, following a critical genealogy that shifts attention from ‘smart cities’ towards ‘citizen centeredness’, this research focuses on the construction and contestation of ‘smart citizenship’. Overall, technocratic and city-branding discourses, which legitimate restricting funds to a ‘smart enclave’ at the cost of evictions and banning ‘encroachers’, are confronted by housing rights activists. This motivates scholars to theorize a subversive identity, in which ‘smartness’ gains new meaning. However, epistemic contestations are not enough to create recognition for the needs and rights of the working poor, who work for but cannot reside in Chandigarh. Further alliances and political will are required.
{"title":"Digital India’s Smart Transform-Nation: Enabling or Discouraging a ‘Chatur Citizenry’?","authors":"M. Andrade","doi":"10.1163/22142312-12340113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22142312-12340113","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Instead of exploring ‘smart cities’ as future utopias, this paper concentrates on historically constructed, yet actively contested socio-spatial inequalities. Drawing upon Chandigarh’s master-planning experience, it explores epistemic, material, and civic dimensions of Chandigarh’s Smart City Proposal to ask whether vernacular reinterpretations of ‘smart citizenry’ help the subaltern reclaim their ‘right to the city’. Thus, following a critical genealogy that shifts attention from ‘smart cities’ towards ‘citizen centeredness’, this research focuses on the construction and contestation of ‘smart citizenship’. Overall, technocratic and city-branding discourses, which legitimate restricting funds to a ‘smart enclave’ at the cost of evictions and banning ‘encroachers’, are confronted by housing rights activists. This motivates scholars to theorize a subversive identity, in which ‘smartness’ gains new meaning. However, epistemic contestations are not enough to create recognition for the needs and rights of the working poor, who work for but cannot reside in Chandigarh. Further alliances and political will are required.","PeriodicalId":52237,"journal":{"name":"Asiascape: Digital Asia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2019-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90971445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-08DOI: 10.1163/22142312-12340109
F. Schneider
This introduction to the Asiascape: Digital Asia special issue on ‘smart communities’ discusses how new technologies have created a paradigm of ‘smartness’ that informs how innovators, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and administrators imagine sociality in urban spaces. This is visible in plans for turning Singapore, Hong Kong, or Taipei into ‘smart cities’, and countries such as India, Japan, and South Korea are similarly rolling out initiatives that promise to revamp urban life across the region. Such ‘solutionist’ attempts to address the complexities of contemporary social life through technology cleverly fuse surveillance techniques, capitalist structures, free labour practices, and neoliberal governance to create urban utopias of safety, convenience, and community. We have asked the contributors to this special issue to explore what people do, through and with digital technologies, as they establish, claim, contest, and alter various social relations in the name of ‘smart community’, and this article introduces and discusses their results.
{"title":"Digital Smartness: Rethinking Communities and Citizenship in the Face of ‘Smart’ Technology","authors":"F. Schneider","doi":"10.1163/22142312-12340109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22142312-12340109","url":null,"abstract":"This introduction to the Asiascape: Digital Asia special issue on ‘smart communities’ discusses how new technologies have created a paradigm of ‘smartness’ that informs how innovators, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and administrators imagine sociality in urban spaces. This is visible in plans for turning Singapore, Hong Kong, or Taipei into ‘smart cities’, and countries such as India, Japan, and South Korea are similarly rolling out initiatives that promise to revamp urban life across the region. Such ‘solutionist’ attempts to address the complexities of contemporary social life through technology cleverly fuse surveillance techniques, capitalist structures, free labour practices, and neoliberal governance to create urban utopias of safety, convenience, and community. We have asked the contributors to this special issue to explore what people do, through and with digital technologies, as they establish, claim, contest, and alter various social relations in the name of ‘smart community’, and this article introduces and discusses their results.","PeriodicalId":52237,"journal":{"name":"Asiascape: Digital Asia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2019-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90020114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-08DOI: 10.1163/22142312-12340110
Zane Kripe
Based on an ethnographic study of technology entrepreneurs in Singapore between 2011 and 2015, this article explores ‘community’ as an emic concept for those involved in the production of web technologies. One major area in which the concept was used was in the organization of social relationships amongst those who saw themselves as occupied with technology start-ups. However, successful applications were not free of contradictions and required significant investment. This article then takes issue with the often-implicit understanding in academic as well as popular discussions of (digital) communities as organically emerging and self-organizing. Looking at how the notion of ‘community’ operates in practice makes it apparent that in the digital economy it is applied strategically and is considered a highly productive concept in capital production and extraction.
{"title":"Making Community Work: Constructing Singapore’s Start-Up Community","authors":"Zane Kripe","doi":"10.1163/22142312-12340110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22142312-12340110","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Based on an ethnographic study of technology entrepreneurs in Singapore between 2011 and 2015, this article explores ‘community’ as an emic concept for those involved in the production of web technologies. One major area in which the concept was used was in the organization of social relationships amongst those who saw themselves as occupied with technology start-ups. However, successful applications were not free of contradictions and required significant investment. This article then takes issue with the often-implicit understanding in academic as well as popular discussions of (digital) communities as organically emerging and self-organizing. Looking at how the notion of ‘community’ operates in practice makes it apparent that in the digital economy it is applied strategically and is considered a highly productive concept in capital production and extraction.","PeriodicalId":52237,"journal":{"name":"Asiascape: Digital Asia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2019-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75954335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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