Blurring Boundaries Between Journalists and Tiktokers: Journalistic Role Performance on TikTok

In recent years, media has adapted to the logic of each new social network to respond to renewed consumption habits and journalists have developed new roles on these platforms. TikTok is an emerging platform with its own influencer culture and in which the main audiences are the millennial and centennial generations. The main objective of this study is to analyze the presence of journalists on TikTok through the type of content and strategies used in adapting to this platform. The research is based on methodological triangulation. First, a database of journalists on TikTok (<em>n</em>₁ = 212) was developed and the profiles were reviewed. Second, a questionnaire survey (<em>n</em>₂ = 63) was developed. Finally, a content analysis (<em>n</em>₃ = 520) of profiles exceeding 100,000 followers was conducted. This research provides a first description of the activity of journalists on TikTok, where a variety of roles, usages, and strategies are identified, beyond those of their profession. They join the of-the-moment platform with different purposes (to inform, entertain, or introduce themselves) and targets (new audiences, young people, fans). Journalists adapt their presence to the TikTok social media logic, seeking a space of influence on a platform that is the natural habitat of younger generations.

Playing platformized language games: Social media logic and the mutation of participatory cultures in Chinese online fandom

This study discusses the shifting dynamics of fan participatory cultures on social media platforms by introducing the concept of “platformized language games.” We conceive of a fan community as a “speech community” and propose that the language and discourses of fan participatory cultures are technological practices that only make sense in use and interactions as “games” on social media platform. Based on an ethnography of communication on fan communities on Weibo, we analyze the technological-communicative acts of fan speech communities, including the platformized setting, participants, topics, norms, and key purposes. We argue that the social media logic (programmability, connectivity, popularity, and datafication) articulates with fans’ language games, thus shifting the “form of life” of celebrity fans on social media. Empirically, fan participatory cultures continue to mutate in China, as fan communities create idiosyncratic platformized language games based on the selective appropriation of the social media logics of connectivity and data-driven metrics.

Civic Participation in Chinese Cyberpolitics: A Grounded Theory Approach of Para-Xylene Projects

The internet provides a free and convenient platform for the public to obtain political information and participate in political life. Meanwhile, there occurs fierce confrontation of various values and ideologies, shaping a complicated and changeable field of public opinion. The strategies of civic participation and the generation of public opinion show quite different characteristics in such a mediatized society. This article aimed to study civic participation in Chinese cyberpolitics and to find its patterns and the logic behind it. Due to the natural advantage of the environmental issues in its commonality, the internet events in the last decade related to the PX (para-xylene) project were selected as the research object. This study used grounded theory as the method and conducted a cross-case analysis on the original data captured on Weibo—one of the most popular social media sites in China. Finally, four patterns of civic participation in internet events were found and summarized, as well as the intervention and influence of media logic in different modes. However, it is political logic, rather than media logic, that reveals greater vitality in the civic participation of cyber deliberation. Mediatization does exist but is far from dominance. It has certain significance for the supervision and management of public opinion and the rational and harmonious development of civic participation in public issues.

‘My favourite meme page’: Balenciaga’s Instagram account and audience fashion labour online

As fashion ‘goes viral’, adapting to digital popular cultural flows, streams, image aggregations and memes, there is a need for better grasping how these platforms feed into the aesthetics of mediations of fashion. Contemporary digitally mediated fashion is conditioned by what van Dijck and Poell refer to as a new media logic, one that permeates the ‘strategies, mechanisms, and economics underpinning these platforms’ dynamics’. This logic includes audience labour. This article focuses on how the audience is put to work and how such work becomes integral to the mediational aesthetic by using the Instagram account of Paris-based fashion brand Balenciaga as a heuristic device. In connecting perspectives from fashion and media studies, this article discusses how fashion mediation is entangled in processes that harness audience labour on Instagram. Balenciaga takes on communication strategies that expose the aesthetics of user engagement. On Instagram, the brand presents its take on fashion photography in the digital age as part of its visual identity on this platform. Furthermore, in feeding the comments section, users participate in ‘boundary maintenance’, separating Balenciaga insiders from outsiders who lack knowledge of the perpetually changing aesthetic codes of fashion imagery. Online audiences thus find themselves at the crossroads of consumption, production and gatekeeping.

MEDIATIZATION AS A RESEARCH CONCEPT: MAIN PREREQUISITES OF THE FORMATION AND POSSIBILITIES FOR FURTHER DEVELOPMENT

Концепт «медиатизация» фиксирует принципиальные изменения в обществе, произошедшие благодаря развитию современных медиа. Этот концепт активно и широко используется в современных исследованиях; однако концептуализация процессов медиатизации происходит в разных направлениях и различна в разных странах. Между тем уточнение содержания данного концепта и исследовательских допущений, связанных с его употреблением, является важной и самостоятельной задачей. В статье анализируются появление и исходные идеи данного концепта: идея особой медиалогики, как она понималась Д. Элтейдом, идея форматирования, опирающаяся на концепцию медиума как ключа к сообщению последователей М. Маклюэна. Выявлены и представлены проблемные моменты этой концептуализации, связанные, с одной стороны, с тем, что сложные формы анализируются как простые, что приводит к неверным аналогиям; с другой – с пониманием медиума вне необходимых для его функционирования материальных и организационных условий. В то же время показывается, что ряд критических аргументов в адрес данных концепций, связанных, например, с игнорированием этического измерения и осознанности сообщения в модели Маклюэна, неправомерны. Представлены основные взгляды на датировку процессов медиатизации. Выделяются ключевые посылки введения концепта «медиатизация», связанные с разделением собственно действительности и конструктов этой действительности, а также отсутствием единой логики формирования различных медиатизированных социальных миров. Показывается направление дальнейшей эволюции исследований, использующих данный концепт, – оно связано с идеями различных медиалогик, а не единой медиалогики и представлено тремя основными подходами: стратегией понимания медиа как института, под действием которого трансформируется логика других игроков; стратегией анализа «медиатизированных социальных миров», базирующейся на идеях семиотики, постструктуралистских подходах к анализу дискурса, а также различных интерпретациях социальных миров; «технологической» стратегией, демонстрирующей связь «грамматики медиа» и трансформации мыслительных привычек. The concept “mediatization” captures fundamental changes in society due to the development of modern media. It is actively and widely used in modern research, but the conceptualization of mediatization processes takes different directions and differs in different countries. Meanwhile, clarifying the content of this concept and the research assumptions associated with its use is an important and independent task. The article analyzes the appearance and initial ideas of this concept: the idea of a special media logic, as it was understood by David Altheide, the idea of formatting based on the concept of the medium as the key to the message developed by the followers of Marshall McLuhan. The problematic aspects of this conceptualization are identified and presented. On the one hand, complex forms are analyzed as simple, which leads to incorrect analogies; on the other, they are related to the understanding of the medium outside of the material and organizational conditions necessary for its functioning. At the same time, it is shown that a number of critical arguments against these concepts related, for example, to ignoring the ethical dimension and the awareness of the message in the McLuhan model are invalid. The main views on the dating of mediatization processes are presented. The key premises of the introduction of the “mediatization” concept are identified; they are connected with the separation of reality itself and constructs of this reality, as well as the lack of a single logic for the formation of various mediatized social worlds. The direction of further evolution of studies using this concept is shown. It is associated with ideas of different media logics, not a single media logic, and is represented by three main approaches: (1) a strategy of understanding media as an institution whose influence transforms other actors’ logic; (2) a strategy of analyzing “mediatized social worlds” that is based on the ideas of semiotics, poststructuralist approaches to discourse analysis, and different interpretations of social worlds; (3) a “technological” strategy that demonstrates the connection between “media grammar” and the transformation of thinking habits.