Enregistering cuteness of fashion clothes on Chinese social media

2021 ◽  
pp. 135918352199487
Author(s):  
Kunming Li
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Material Design ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Baby Talk ◽  
Empirical Case Studies ◽  
Chinese Social Media

In the context of cute material culture, this article focuses on the production of valorized cute aesthetic in fashion clothes being sold on Chinese social media. Through corpus-enlightened empirical case studies, the article demonstrates how the baby-talk register converges with the material design and embodiment of clothes to synergically affect the cute materiality of the clothes at issue. With special attention paid to discursive practices of enregisterment, the study tries to recalibrate the existing biased hermeneutics of cute material culture that largely reduce cute clothes to material immediacy and consumerist passivity. The study sheds light on the collegiality and complementarity that enregisterment shows for embodiment and material design in the production of material aesthetics, and by doing so enriches the understanding of materiality within clothing material culture in general.

scholarly journals Fan Culture with Chinese Characteristics: Participatory Engagement in the Web 2.0 Era

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Bo Wang
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Web 2.0 ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Fan Culture ◽  
Community Group ◽  
Fan Communities ◽  
The Web ◽  
Chinese Social Media

<p>This thesis is centred on participatory fan culture in Chinese social media. It investigates how fans gather through social networks, how they produce creative work, and how they use different platforms to circulate their favourite media and fannish texts. By constructing, reshaping and spreading meanings through participatory practices, fans create their own cultures and gradually develop their own discourses. My theoretical approach can be classified as cultural discourse analysis (Carbaugh,2007; Scollo,2011), and I adopted the snowball sampling method to find interviewees and fan communities in which I have conducted observation to collect data for my analysis. On the basis of John Fiske’s concept of “textual productivity” (1992) and Henry Jenkins’s notions of “media convergence” (2006a) and “spreadability” (2013), the thesis is based on a platform analysis as well as two case studies about the Chinese reality TV show Where Are We Going, Dad?and BBC’s crime drama Sherlock.  The platform analysis examines four platforms that Chinese social media fans use most frequently: Weibo, WeChat, Tieba and Bilibili. Through the analysis of the sociocultural contexts, user interfaces and primary features of these four platforms, it became clear that the platforms emphasise differentiated content (e.g. microblogging-style posts, instant text/voice messages, continuous updating posts, video clips and flying comments), and that each platform has its own search and recommendation services to guide users to their target content. By comparing five elements of social media including public posts, direct messaging, group chatting, search tools and information recommendation (Yoder and Stutzman, 2011), the analysis offers insight into the different affordances provided by these four platforms and how Chinese fans employ the platforms to develop fan culture.  The two case studies investigate the formation, manifestation and influence of fan cultures on three levels: fan-platform interaction, fannish texts and fan identity. Analysing data collected from interviews and online observation in the Weibo-based fan chat group 刘诺一全球后援会1群(Liu Nuoyi Quanqiu Houyuanhui 1 Qun; “Liu Nuoyi’s Global Fan Community, Group 1”) and the Tieba-based forum爸爸去哪儿康诺吧(Babaqunaer Kang Nuo Ba; “Kangkang and Nuoyi of Where Are We Going, Dad?Forum”), the case study of Where Are We Going, Dad?demonstrates that the Web 2.0 services that fans use maintain an open structure, which attracts fans to contribute new layers of meaning and value. Discussing the fan-platform interaction, fannish texts and fan identities, the case study of Chinese Sherlockfandom demonstrates that Chinese online fans rely on textual productivity to establish their fan identities, and Chinese social media to facilitate the production and spread of fan translation, which not only bridges the language and cultural gap between the Sherlocktexts (the BBC episodes and the original novel) and Chinese fandom, but also connects different types of Sherlockfans online. I also compare the two cases from the perspective of narrative structure by drawing upon Jason Mittell’s “centrifugal and centripetal complex” model (2015) and argue that the different narrative structures lead a different sense of self-recognition for fans, gender dynamics, power differences in fan communities, and that they shape fans’ cultural citizenship.</p>

scholarly journals Fan Culture with Chinese Characteristics: Participatory Engagement in the Web 2.0 Era

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Bo Wang
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Web 2.0 ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Fan Culture ◽  
Community Group ◽  
Fan Communities ◽  
The Web ◽  
Chinese Social Media

<p>This thesis is centred on participatory fan culture in Chinese social media. It investigates how fans gather through social networks, how they produce creative work, and how they use different platforms to circulate their favourite media and fannish texts. By constructing, reshaping and spreading meanings through participatory practices, fans create their own cultures and gradually develop their own discourses. My theoretical approach can be classified as cultural discourse analysis (Carbaugh,2007; Scollo,2011), and I adopted the snowball sampling method to find interviewees and fan communities in which I have conducted observation to collect data for my analysis. On the basis of John Fiske’s concept of “textual productivity” (1992) and Henry Jenkins’s notions of “media convergence” (2006a) and “spreadability” (2013), the thesis is based on a platform analysis as well as two case studies about the Chinese reality TV show Where Are We Going, Dad?and BBC’s crime drama Sherlock.  The platform analysis examines four platforms that Chinese social media fans use most frequently: Weibo, WeChat, Tieba and Bilibili. Through the analysis of the sociocultural contexts, user interfaces and primary features of these four platforms, it became clear that the platforms emphasise differentiated content (e.g. microblogging-style posts, instant text/voice messages, continuous updating posts, video clips and flying comments), and that each platform has its own search and recommendation services to guide users to their target content. By comparing five elements of social media including public posts, direct messaging, group chatting, search tools and information recommendation (Yoder and Stutzman, 2011), the analysis offers insight into the different affordances provided by these four platforms and how Chinese fans employ the platforms to develop fan culture.  The two case studies investigate the formation, manifestation and influence of fan cultures on three levels: fan-platform interaction, fannish texts and fan identity. Analysing data collected from interviews and online observation in the Weibo-based fan chat group 刘诺一全球后援会1群(Liu Nuoyi Quanqiu Houyuanhui 1 Qun; “Liu Nuoyi’s Global Fan Community, Group 1”) and the Tieba-based forum爸爸去哪儿康诺吧(Babaqunaer Kang Nuo Ba; “Kangkang and Nuoyi of Where Are We Going, Dad?Forum”), the case study of Where Are We Going, Dad?demonstrates that the Web 2.0 services that fans use maintain an open structure, which attracts fans to contribute new layers of meaning and value. Discussing the fan-platform interaction, fannish texts and fan identities, the case study of Chinese Sherlockfandom demonstrates that Chinese online fans rely on textual productivity to establish their fan identities, and Chinese social media to facilitate the production and spread of fan translation, which not only bridges the language and cultural gap between the Sherlocktexts (the BBC episodes and the original novel) and Chinese fandom, but also connects different types of Sherlockfans online. I also compare the two cases from the perspective of narrative structure by drawing upon Jason Mittell’s “centrifugal and centripetal complex” model (2015) and argue that the different narrative structures lead a different sense of self-recognition for fans, gender dynamics, power differences in fan communities, and that they shape fans’ cultural citizenship.</p>

Chinese Social Media Platforms and Microblogging in the Context of Public Diplomacy

Communicology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-179
Author(s):  
E.S. Nadezhkina
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Public Diplomacy ◽  
User Generated Content ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Interactive Communication ◽  
Network Interaction ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Right ◽  
Chinese Social Media

The term “digital public diplomacy” that appeared in the 21st century owes much to the emergence and development of the concept of Web 2.0 (interactive communication on the Internet). The principle of network interaction, in which the system becomes better with an increase in the number of users and the creation of user-generated content, made it possible to create social media platforms where news and entertainment content is created and moderated by the user. Such platforms have become an expression of the opinions of various groups of people in many countries of the world, including China. The Chinese segment of the Internet is “closed”, and many popular Western services are blocked in it. Studying the structure of Chinese social media platforms and microblogging, as well as analyzing targeted content is necessary to understand China’s public opinion, choose the right message channels and receive feedback for promoting the country’s public diplomacy. This paper reveals the main Chinese social media platforms and microblogging and provides the assessment of their popularity, as well as possibility of analyzing China’s public opinion based on “listening” to social media platforms and microblogging.

Syncretisms

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippa Adrych ◽  
Robert Bracey ◽  
Dominic Dalglish ◽  
Stefanie Lenk ◽  
Rachel Wood
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Ancient Religion

The Conclusion to this volume returns to the three main questions posed in the Introduction, examining how a shared name, alongside material culture, can affect our understanding of ancient religious practices. The first section explores the benefits of a collaborative and comparative endeavour, drawing out examples from the earlier chapters and showing how they informed our perceptions of what a name can mean. The second and third parts ask more theoretical questions about how we can use our case studies to explore broader problems of interpreting ancient religious practices, and the role of objects within them. Finally, we return to the main theme of the volume: the name Mithra, and the ideas, expectations, and traditions that have been attached to it in antiquity and in modern scholarship. We suggest a new way of approaching the phenomenon of the shared name, and what that can entail for those interested in ancient religion.

“Tradition,” Vernacularism, and Learning to Be a Folk Musician With Social Media

2020 ◽  
pp. 442-466
Author(s):  
Simon Keegan-Phipps ◽  
Lucy Wright
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Learning Mechanisms ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Shaping

This chapter considers the role of social media (broadly conceived) in the learning experiences of folk musicians in the Anglophone West. The chapter draws on the findings of the Digital Folk project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and begins by summarizing and problematizing the nature of learning as a concept in the folk music context. It briefly explicates the instructive, appropriative, and locative impacts of digital media for folk music learning before exploring in detail two case studies of folk-oriented social media: (1) the phenomenon of abc notation as a transmissive media and (2) the Mudcat Café website as an example of the folk-oriented discussion forum. These case studies are shown to exemplify and illuminate the constructs of traditional transmission and vernacularism as significant influences on the social shaping and deployment of folk-related media technologies. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the need to understand the musical learning process as a culturally performative act and to recognize online learning mechanisms as sites for the (re)negotiation of musical, cultural, local, and personal identities.

Feminist Cyber-Artivism, Musicing, and Music Teaching and Learning

2020 ◽  
pp. 291-312
Author(s):  
Marissa Silverman
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Music Teaching ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The Voice

This chapter asks an important, yet seemingly illusive, question: In what ways does the internet provide (or not) activist—or, for present purposes “artivist”—opportunities and engagements for musicing, music sharing, and music teaching and learning? According to Asante (2008), an “artivist (artist + activist) uses her artistic talents to fight and struggle against injustice and oppression—by any medium necessary. The artivist merges commitment to freedom and justice with the pen, the lens, the brush, the voice, the body, and the imagination. The artivist knows that to make an observation is to have an obligation” (p. 6). Given this view, can (and should) social media be a means to achieve artivism through online musicing and music sharing, and, therefore, music teaching and learning? Taking a feminist perspective, this chapter interrogates the nature of cyber musical artivism as a potential means to a necessary end: positive transformation. In what ways can social media be a conduit (or hindrance) for cyber musical artivism? What might musicing and music sharing gain (or lose) from engaging with online artivist practices? In addition to a philosophical investigation, this chapter will examine select case studies of online artivist music making and music sharing communities with the above concerns in mind, specifically as they relate to music education.

scholarly journals Uncovering the low-profile #MeToo movement: Towards a discursive politics of empowerment on Chinese social media

2021 ◽  
pp. 205943642110314
Author(s):  
Xiao Han
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Chinese Context ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Low Profile ◽  
Potential Possibility ◽  
Collective Reading ◽  
Discursive Politics ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Chinese Social Media

In China, a few posts related to #MeToo movement survived and remained online well after its peak and the state’s response in July 2018. This article proposes a theoretical framework that pays attention to discursive meaning-making and employs a broad notion of empowerment, referred to as ‘empowerment through discourse’, in order to offer a more nuanced understanding of the low-profile #MeToo movement in the Chinese context. This framework is used to analyse a corpus of uncensored #MeToo material, which appeared on Chinese social media. This article combines a discourse analysis of these posts and interviews with feminists from activist collectives to critically examine feminist empowerment by reflecting on survivor/victim narration and storytelling practices, digital media’s capacity to facilitate critical dialogue between witnesses and survivors/victims and activist collectives’ organising role in opening up a dialogic space for collective reading, listening and healing. These reflections lead to broader considerations on how notions of empowerment can spur collective action and structural change. In short, this article demonstrates the potential possibility of discursive change and reflects on this mode of feminist politics as a way to speak to empowerment in the Chinese context.

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