About the book
There are billions of internet users in China, and this number is continually growing. This book looks at the various purposes of this internet use, and provides a study about how the entertainment-consuming users form into publics through the mediation of technologies in the era of network society. The book goes on to focus on how fans, including movie fans, fans of foreign reality TV shows and TV dramas, fans who took a step further to translate and disseminate such foreign language content, and fans whose fan objects are celebrities instead of cultural products, become publics in a society that follows the logic of network. The resources I have relied on in this book are mainly first-hand and longitudinal (15 years) data from the fans themselves, including both their discourses and their online/offline activities.
Order the book at Amazon
Order the Kindle copy here
Order the book at Amazon
Order the Kindle copy here
Book Reviews |
My book has been recently reviewed in the following journals! Click the link to see how to access the full texts.
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Book Talks |
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Commentary
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Interview
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Many thanks to my Alma Mater Annenberg School for Communication at UPenn for the interview on the crowdsourced translation of my book! See the interview HERE!
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Chapter 1 |
After reviewing the European, American, and Chinese definitions of public, the contradictions between the traditional conceptualization and the modern social category, fans, are elaborated on. These contradictions invite us to reconsider the boundary between public and private and the social conditions in which the boundary is drawn. Instead of inserting too much normative expectation to the concept, public, I propose to use a relational concept of publics in order to trace the developing procedure of forming social entities that function as political collectivities in an ever-changing China.
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Chapter 2 |
This chapter opens with an empirical review of the development of popular culture in China, including its most recent phase of digitalization. Despite its empirical prominence, academic endeavors to understand the phenomenon of popular culture on the Chinese Internet have been scarce. The second part of the chapter attempts to explain why these entertainment-seeking netizens have not become a focus of research on China and Internet. The ideological and structural biases implied in the relative lack of discussion of online fandom are explored, and the book’s intellectual orientation is further explained with an emphasis on the technologies.
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Chapter 3
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This chapter focuses on one of the most influential online communities of movie fans, Rear Window to Movies. Using data from 14 in-depth interviews, an online survey with 185 respondents, and participant observation over two years, the discourse that emerges from fans’ engaged discussions is identified and contrasted to the state and commercial discourses. The activities fans engage in to disseminate their discourse to the larger society are documented in detail. The subaltern nature of this public has to be acknowledged, however, due to the relatively limited reach and influence of their discourse.
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Chapter 4
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Rear Window to Movies fans were revisited 10 years after the original study. Another set of 15 in-depth interviews, as well as a decade-long continuous participant observation, yielded evidence of how the social network, initiated and stabilized in cyberspace, transforms the subaltern public into the regular public. Some of the movie fans who share their thoughts and feelings about movies became “freelance movie reviewers” through their connections with mass media executives. Later on, popular online reviewers were able to enter the moviemaking process through their connections with both independent filmmakers and directors in the commercial movie industry.
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Chapter 5
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This chapter expands the boundary of fan objects from movies to any foreign-language content, including both entertainment and information. Fans’ creativity is demonstrated by the phenomenon of online translation. Volunteer translation arose in the context of pirated VCD/DVDs, when the translation of foreign movies was often of poor quality due to the limitations of those doing the pirating. This chapter traces the history of the online translation community, analyzes the ICT-based mechanism that makes the collaboration possible, and investigates volunteers’ motives for contribution. The potential of such fan creativity to foster a civic culture is discussed in this chapter.
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Chapter 6
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This chapter turns to focus on the content of fan objects, which has been deliberately ignored in previous chapters. Whereas publics can form around any issue, those that form around foreign content such as American political sit-coms seem to prompt fans to embrace democratic values. Through a textual analysis of posts on a Baidu discussion board for House of Cards fans, this chapter shows how Chinese fans interpret American reality shows according to two themes of contradiction: authentic/unauthentic and foreign/indigenous. This chapter also demonstrates how the online interactions among fans reshape the meaning-making process of viewing and enjoying foreign content.
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Chapter 7
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This chapter presents a more profound effort to discover the network logic. Social networking sites (SNSs) in China are even more diverse than in American and European contexts. This chapter examines Douban, a SNS that connects users not only through social ties but also via fan objects such as books, movies, and music albums, in contrast to a Facebook-type SNS, Renren. Network analysis and an online survey of users clarify the different structures and effects of relationship-oriented SNSs and interest-oriented SNSs. This network logic, which resonates with Castells’ argument, can be viewed as the social-formation principle of the network society.
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Chapter 8
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The network logic discussed in the previous chapter is used to analyze Weibo, and in particular, the celebrities on Weibo. The fan objects here are the celebrities themselves, and they serve as network nodes that connect not only their fans but also topics that emerge from different domains. These celebrities’ capacity for meta-connection allows their followers the access to discussions of various topics and to be in touch with each other. However, the concentration of celebrities as critical nodes in the network also brings vulnerability to the networked publics.
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Chapter 9
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This chapter locates the book’s findings in a broader theoretical context, building conversations with a diverse range of conceptual traditions. After a review of concepts such as “mediated publics” and “networked publics”, I attempt to clarify the network logic through contrasting three network theories, namely, Social Network Theory, The Network Society, and Actor-Network Theory. Then the style and aesthetics of the co-performance of fandom publics are explicated through a comparison to the concepts of “issue publics” and “affective publics”. Finally, I provide critiques of the concept, fandom publics, via four critical frames, namely, democratization, post-Marxism, post-colonialism, and post-modernism.
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