Weibo of China
This chapter studies the design case of Weibo from China and explores how a local social media service, which at first was regarded as a copycat of a Silicon Valley technology, arose in the Chinese social media market and beat its Western competitor on Wall Street with its culturally sensitive design features. It reviews Weibo’s two stages of development to explore the complicacy of technology design and the dynamic and dialogical structuring process behind the formation of a technological genre for microblogging. Through the case, it unpacks three sensitizing concepts of the culturally localized user engagement and empowerment (CLUE2) framework for coming up with empowering global designs: a genre of technology as normative and performative practice, a dialogic model of communication, and hybridity as creative mixing for empowerment. Together they outline a pathway to connect the macro and the micro in cross-cultural design: A rhetorical genre view helps us to see how a culturally sustaining technology functions as a technological genre, instantiating both normative and performative practice as local uptakes. The local uptake develops and evolves by following a dialogic model of communication in design practices to generate new meanings and produce new practices, and it forms through the process of hybridization as a creative mixing for agency. Various local uptakes make up an open, globally networked technology assemblage with dialogic relations flowing between.