global voices, one world

Moral Panics and Nationalism

Examining the Factors that Influence College Students’ Attitude towards Human Flesh Search in Mainland China, LU Chen, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Chinese Cyber-Nationalism: The Case of 2008 Tibet Uprising Discussions on Facebook, Dian PARAMITA, London School of Economics
From nationalism to emerging public sphere: The case of global Olympic torch relay dispute online, FAN Dong, Annenberg School for Communication, USC
Respondent: Hongmei LI, University of Pennsylvania/Georgia State University
Moderator: ANG Peng Hwa, National University of Singapore

Quick history: the Tibet uprising of March 2008 led to a crackdown, then criticism of China, followed by a response by Chinese netizens, such as Anti-CNN. The goal of Paramita’s research is to identify the characteristics of Chinese cyber-nationalism and whether it contains enough “flaming” to impact on political discussion. Yang Guobin’s notion of an online cultural sphere refers to the ability of the Internet to create transnational discussions between Chinese netizens throughout the world, in PRC, HK, Taiwan, Singapore, the diaspora, and non-Chinese parties of interest. Wu describes Chinese cyber-nationalism as non-government sponsored, grassroots, based on modern ideology and reactive (in this case towards Western media). “Flaming” refers to ridiculing those with opposing points of view.

Political expression on platforms such as Facebook has increased and become more important as it facilitates political discussion. Paramita’s sample was the Facebook group Tibet WAS, IS, and ALWAYS WILL BE a part of China – the largest group of its kind. She found that there were posts both supporting, opposed and neutral to the PRC government stance on the group from Chinese and non-Chinese surnamed members. 64.9% were positive arguments contributing to the discussion, but 18.5% were flaming (categories range from “unfriendly” to “insulting” and “confrontational” and “aggressive”). The lesser were categorized as “uncivil”, which was 12.5% of total posts, leaving 6% as “impolite” or more severe categories.

Paramita concludes the term “flaming” needs to be deconstructed, since it doesn’t necessary harm the overall debate, and that the discussion was overall productive and civil.

Moral Panics and Nationalism

Examining the Factors that Influence College Students’ Attitude towards Human Flesh Search in Mainland China, LU Chen, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Chinese Cyber-Nationalism: The Case of 2008 Tibet Uprising Discussions on Facebook, Dian PARAMITA, London School of Economics
From nationalism to emerging public sphere: The case of global Olympic torch relay dispute online, FAN Dong, Annenberg School for Communication, USC
Respondent: Hongmei LI, University of Pennsylvania/Georgia State University
Moderator: ANG Peng Hwa, National University of Singapore

Lu Chen describes human flesh search as not an engine, but as a collective effort of frequent members of an online community to target and expose an individual’s personal data. It can help people find missing relatives, but it can also harass or be a form of vigilantism. She then shows a comic depicting a man being x-rayed and examined with magnifying glass and camera wielding people, and a tree of flatscreen monitors with a lasso representing HFS.

Variables for her study included level of participation online, privacy concerns, online trust, self-disclosure, etc. which were hypothesized to affect both attitude and behavior positively except for privacy concerns. Gender and education were both hypothesized to impact upon attitude and behavior. The median age for the mostly university and above students was around 21 years old. Using statistical methods, the following results were found:

The more students participated, the more they approved of HFS.

Students with a more open privacy attitude approved more of HFS.

Female students participated less.

The more higher education, the less likely they were to participate.

Her conclusions included that education deserves more attention, junior college students had unpredictable attitudes while higher level students had more consistency. Lu argues it is a rational issue, so education helps people avoid it since HFS features irrational behavior – to wit, individuals who disapprove of HFS will participate anyway, enabled by anonymity. The study, however, featured twice as many females as males and maybe skewed, and further study ought to include interviews.

dominant culture vs grassroot culture.

general questions:

1. the driver of the grassroot net culture. market failures? fans group whose desired content is not in the market, citizen journalism that focuses on local news that are not available in the media market. perceived rights to authentic media products?

2. how do they influence political and legal forces?

Bingchun: it has to do with gov’s regulaiton and censorship as well. e.g., cctv 8 censored the original content of deperate housewives. perception of authentity and the rights to the autentic content. the users made fun of the olympics ceremony about the dubbing. the users consider their translation much better than the state broadcaster.

Jiang: it is hard to say that grassroot culture can bring social changes. shanzhai spring festival gala sucessfully negotiated with guizhou tv channle to broadcast it. gov implicitly gave the order that no report on shanzhai. but this policy has been changed during the party conferences. the gov official indicated that if shanzhai is creative and has the “chinese charaters of socialism”, it should be protected. shanzhai culture has grown up to influence the gov. so he tends to believe that shanzhai can bring changes to the quanshi situation.

Xin: pessimistic view of CJ on its impact on China. when looking at political control and the commercial power, they jointly shut down diverse opinions.

a coherent flow – yesterday macro-level big picture; today micro-level analyses more at the civil or civic level.

pilot study of a bigger scale research. clarifications: 1. emule is really an representative term to refer to a large number of p2p file sharing sites; 2. focuses on subtitles groups in the file sharing community.

why study it? how ict contributes to the decentralized form of media production and consumption. one particular form is p2p file sharing. such file sharing is illegal coz it violates copyright law. she wants to question coping with the new comm spaces using established institutions (laws and regulations).

trading digital products as commodified objects? the main question is what is the context contributes to the formation of these groups? why do ppl want to contribute? what are the mechanisms to coordinate the cooperation and keep the quality? what is the insight these groups can provide to ICTs in china.

method: filedwork in April 2009.

refers to jack’s comments about not taking china too seriously.

analytical framework: western theories and their applicability in china. henry jenkins on convergence culture. http://www.amazon.com/Convergence-Culture-Where-Media-Collide/dp/0814742815
benkler’s the wealth of network. http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Networks-Production-Transforms-Markets/dp/0300125771/ref=pd_sim_b_3

findings: 1. why this becomes popular? the state-controlled media do not satisfy the needs. audience’s demand is important motives. personal interest such as fans of american dramas or foreign movies is another reason. 2. the extent of coordination among the groups. there are three or four major subtitle groups. there is fierce competition among them for recognition or reputation, not for material gains. e.g., within each group, there are three to four subgroups. one is responsible for moving the content from the servers, one for translation, etc. within the translation group, there are even divisions of languages such as english and korean. still another group is in charge of sychnronizing subtiltes and videos. a final group on disseminating the subtitles to forums and online spaces. 3. the incentives of the volunteer participation. non-material incentives beomce prominent in cyberspace. it challenges the bases of copyright law and the right it protects, which are often material-related.

conclusion – implications of this study. 1. quesionts the traditional notion of copyright 2. alternative mechanism of media production and distribution (non-state, non-commercial) 3. community with weak ties and interest-oriented communities. the volunteers do not know each other in most cases. but the weak ties indeed are able to mobilize collective efforts and to coordinate with each other.

Quan = Power, Shi = ? maybe a bit like the influence of power, Shanzhai = copycat knock-off

we are limited by the visions and the datasets when it comes to internet research.

he shows the pictures of the shanzhai phenomenon such as double ms that look very simliar to mcdonald’s m. pizzahut to pizzahuff. all kinds of replications of bird nets. netizens make shanzhai lecture to pk cctv. shanzhai version of cdream of red mansions.

the climax to shanzhai culture: shanzhai spring festival evening gala. www.ccstv.net

responses to it: Ni Ping, the former anchor of Spring Festival Gala, absolutely boycotts the shanzhai culture. Director Zhang Yimou wants to leave it alone. Han Han, the famous blogger, thinks no shangzhai, no new china coz everything was copied from other countries. Yin Hong, a scholar, said only elite and modern culture should be the mainstream.

Jiang’s point of view – the event itself is an etertainment event among netizens. it is a chinese robinhood. it is an adult ceremony for chinese netizens. there should be a conexistance of both shanzhai and mainstream culture.

the relationship beween quan and shi in china should be examined against the chinese culture. The seal as the sign of power in history. shi means treatments one accpeted once the person got the quan. the shift of quan and shi in china. gov has quan whereas netizens have shi. if the gov can win the support from the netizens, it will have both quan and shi.

conclusion – shanzhai culture is inevitable. the idea of quan and shi is necessary to under cyber culture in china.

during the olympics, the control over internet was loosened. the function of web 2.0 in empowering political activists should not be over-stated. this paper shows CJ functions as an alternative to MJ. Both CJ and MJ may fail in challenging chinese info control. Case study is used in this paper.

Case 1: Zuola Zhou and his blog. CJ is an important source to the MJ. CJ plays a watchdog role however it is far from challenging or changing the state.

Case 2: CJ as an alternative medium to distribution info by MJ journalists. 2008 Shangxi event. 1. the boundary between CJ and MJ is not clear-cut 2. the fudemental approach to reporting the events in china does not change – draw attention from central gov to publish the bad guys at the lower level, rather than criticizing the whole system

Case 3: the milk scandal. both CJ and MJ fail to inform citizens about the event.

Q: What do you think about the difference between the theories of collective action in the context of virtual communities? 

WZ: No words in one definition of conceptualization refer to agency or consciousness – so that what we normally understand about collective action is that it is about achieving some sort of collective end. So Weiyu points to an idea of “collective intelligent design,” and how SNS can have mechanisms that suggest relevant content users. 

Q: For Weiyu: One could argue that all social networks are about relationships. Lam: where did you do your fieldwork and what were your implements? Read more…

Michael Delli Carpini responds with some commentary about the papers and their implications.  He applauds the papers in format and substance, reminding us that we’re only getting an excerpt of the papers based on the presentations.

For Jiang’s paper, Michael acknoweldges her “important move” in making a distinction between different types of Internet sites, such as the collocated v. distributed diaspora sites she discusses in the paper.  As with many empirical studies, the difficulties of self-selection are a limit to what kinds of implications we can make with these data sets.  Nonetheless, the conclusion that the real value of building social capital is to connect to a real (physical and virtual) community is important.  To really make that case, though, Michael suggests that we should look to collocated web sites and compare that with those who are in the physical community but do not go online.

Michael considers Sunny’s paper in some ways a “poignant” paper about the role of ICTs in trying to maintain the familial solidarity so integral to Chinese culture.  It’s an almost ethnographic approach that consequently brings a rich flavor to it.  Sunny asks, Michael reminds us, does mobile phones and the Internet bring some kind of solidarity in the face of Chinese society?  The suggestion that new ties may be more virtual is convincing to Michael, but he also wonders what’s driving it and what the normative implications are–can you meaningfully look at ties that might in fact be almost exclusively virtual?  In the first paper, the most valued use of online community is when they are connected to the physical community; here, the question is what is the value of an almost totally virtual community. Michael thinks it’s an open question.

Michael also considers Weiyu Zhang’s paper a valuable contribution because it demonstrates the characteristics of social networking sites in a helpfully multimethod manner, and learning how ties (especially weak ties) emerge in forming social capital.  Issues remain about sampling and direction of causality, but he thinks it’s nonetheless an important contribution about implications of social action. Read more…

Weiyu Zhang offers some insights about collective action based on social network sites in China. She reminds us that collective action is a difficult term to define.  She selects the definition based on Bimber, Flanagin & Sohl (2006) as “a set of communication processes involving the crossing of boundaries between private and public life.”  What do they mean as crossing, she asks us?  Expressing or acting on an individual interest in ways observable to relevant others.  Boundary crossing can incurs transaction costs–so this definition suggests that the softer the boundary, the easier it is to cross. 

Weiyu reviews some of the common problems of strong ties in social networks: homogeneity that could discourage tolerance and encourage enclaving of small groups; or impeding members’ ability to adapt to significant changes.  

She mentions Usenet as a “Web 1.0″ example of showing us of the effort to establish some weak ties with strangers and doing something together.  Putnam’s Bowling Alone documents decreasing social capital in US society, with the exception of “mass mailing list groups.” But these groups have little to no personal interaction.  She looks to Web 2.0 examples that can have both massive number of weak ties and direct or personal interaction.

This brings us to Weiyu’s main research question: How an interest-oriented social networking sites (SNS) work differently in enabling collective action as opposed to relationship-oriented SNS? Read more…

Sunny Lam thinks that ICTs can be used as a way of strengthening familial solidarity. He brings us this paper based several post-1978 economic reforms, including the “four modernizations” which led to enterprise reform and loose hukou zhidu, education system reform (1977), and China’s one-child policy (since 1979).

He wonders whether ICTs as new channels for communication can help establish what he calls a “translocal familial solidarity” between generations, especially as young family members become more socially and spatially mobile.  He also wants to know whether ICT models can tackle social tensions within this area.  He pulls from theoretical frameworks and literature on media and migration, “network of solidarity” (Castells), and translocality. We can think of “modernity as motivation,” he tells us, and “translocality mobilizes people to take social action.”

The findings, Sunny tells us, show Read more…