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Provincializing “web traffic”: data imaginaries and vernacular construction of liuliang in China
Abstract
This article dehomogenizes the concept of “web traffic” through a keywords-informed approach. It attends to how, in China, the term for “web traffic,” liuliang (流量), is utilized in rich and creative ways. Instantiating bottom-up epistemic practices, the taxonomies, collocations, and wisdom related to liuliang reveal alternative and locally relevant ways in which people imagine, apprehend, and deal with digital media and data in everyday life. They unleash a set of reinvigorating vocabulary for the theorization of web traffic—liquidity, manipulability, portability, socio-spatial differentiation, ideological valence, and mystified power, among others. These new lenses enrich a genuinely global understanding of digital media, enable those in the Global North to comparatively rethink their taken-for-granted experiences of datafication, and democratize the making of media knowledges by addressing the inequality between the Global North and South(s), between experts and non-experts.
... It has been a long-standing practice in city branding to "forge emotional linkages between a commodified city and its increasingly footloose middle-and upper-class consumers" (Greenberg, 2000); that said, social media enhances the circulation and reach of these emotional and affective connections among participatory users, bring forth new ways to boost affinity and engagement. The coordination of online and offline marketing and the increasing importance of the web traffic (流量) in Chinese users' everyday life has prompted a wholesale rethinking of customer engagement and the valorization of new media logics such as interactivity, stickiness, and virality (Zou, 2023). Emotional and affective intensity becomes ever more central to monetization. ...
Digital media have been playing an increasingly pivotal role in reshaping urban spaces, landscapes, and lifestyles across the world. In China, the rapid development of digital infrastructure, platforms, and e-commerce has fueled the rise of a number of so-called wanghong cities. A term originally employed to denote internet celebrities, wanghong as a social phenomenon, practice, and modus operandi now penetrates different spheres of life in China. This article presents a case study of a new wanghong city, Zibo, a third-tier industrial city that rose to sudden fame in 2023 with the aid of livestreaming and short video. Extending Manovich’s idea of “transcoding” between the cultural and the digital, this article investigates how the logics, aesthetics, and sensibilities of digital (social) media increasingly carry over to the “imagineering” of built environment—particularly urban place-making—within interlocking processes of mediatization and culturalization. Mediatized culturalization of urban places in China prompts us to critically reflect on deeper questions around the right to and the future of our cities in the social media era.
Social media content creators and influencers increasingly use multiple platforms to mitigate the risk of (in)visibility in the volatile algorithmic environment. This article focuses on transnational creators’ algorithmic knowledge and practices across Chinese and US-based platforms. Drawing on in-depth interviews, participant-led walkthroughs and online observation with transnational creators, this research finds that creators learn each platform’s algorithmic preferences through ‘cross-platform sensitivity’, which also informs their practices of ‘algorithmic adaptability’ in the ever-changing platform environment. Creators’ cross-platform sensitivity and algorithmic adaptability show forms of everyday resistance to survive and cope with algorithmic power in the precarious multiplatform environment.
With the promulgation of the “rural revitalization” initiative, China has been promoting the marriage between technology and rurality to chart a digital future for what is christened “a new countryside.” Rural revitalization is not simply a socio-economic project but a profoundly ideological one, which choreographs a socio-spatial order, fashions an aspirational rural subjectivity, and realigns imaginaries of rurality. This article examines the role of short video in fostering an emergent rural performativity in line with official ideology through idyll-icized displays of rural lifestyles and landscapes, which are loaded with affective and ideological connotations. A scopic contact zone is thus carved out between rural vloggers and urban viewers, one characterized by mutual appropriation and strategic differentiation. This article foregrounds the limitations of this urban-rural contact zone and its immanent “cruel optimism,” while advocating a kind of radical utopia to enable imaginations of the alternative futures of digital rurality.
The growing ubiquity of algorithms in everyday life has prompted cross-disciplinary interest in what people know about algorithms. The purpose of this article is to build on this growing literature by highlighting a particular way of knowing algorithms evident in past work, but, as yet, not clearly explicated. Specifically, I conceptualize practical knowledge of algorithms to capture knowledge located at the intersection of practice and discourse. Rather than knowing that an algorithm is/does X, Y, or Z, practical knowledge entails knowing how to accomplish X, Y, or Z within algorithmically mediated spaces as guided by the discursive features of one’s social world. I conceptualize practical knowledge in conversation with past work on algorithmic knowledge and theories of knowing, and as empirically grounded in a case study of a leftist online community known as “BreadTube.”
Waves of subaltern, colonial, postcolonial, and critical race studies have posed an undeniable challenge to the normative geopolitical bent of area studies, and yet the same challenges are rarely taken up within media studies. Media studies reach a similar impasse when it comes to dealing with geopolitical forms and functions, stressing the dynamism of media and the passivity, historical immutability, and cultural inertness of regions. This article reconsiders the impasses of both area studies and media studies to propose an alternative approach to the region-platform relation: platformativity. The notion of platformativity is intended to address the infra-individual intra-actions between platform and human, and individual and collective – a kind of performativity via platforms. It considers how media infrastructures operate alongside and through national and regional forms to generate signaletic modes of existence that function as relays between disciplinary, sovereign, and biopolitical formations.
The digitalization of fandom and fan culture has become significant topic in recent studies, yet there is a lack of examination of the nuance between specific fan performance and the affordance, infrastructure and architecture that constitute it as it is today. In this article, I examine how digital fandom involves the platform algorithm and the logic of data contribution, affectively engaging fans to participate in increased data labour. Depicting online fandom on Weibo, a massive Chinese social media platform, I portray the data-ization of online fandom in China, arguing that the traffic data has been dematerialized as new affective object in fan–object relations, while digital fan culture has been constructed into a type of algorithmic culture.
This article traces the formation of popular music idol industries in China and the emergence of data fandom. It charts the growth of digital platforms and historicizes the commercial and geopolitical itinerations linking cultural production in Japan, South Korea, and China. It locates data fandom as an integral part of the popular music industries reconfigured by digital social media platforms; a structural change from the production-to-consumption ‘supply chain’ model of the recording era towards emergent circuits of content that integrate industries and audiences. Data fans understand how their online activities are tracked, and adopt individual and collective strategies to influence metric and semantic information reported on digital platforms and social media. This article analyses how the practices of data fans impact upon charts, media and content traffic, illustrating how this activity benefits the idols they are following, and enhances a fan’s sense of achievement and agency.
This article studies the platformization of cultural production in China through the specific lens of Kuaishou, an algorithm-based video-sharing platform targeting second- and third-tier cities as well as the countryside. It enables the forming of an “unlikely” creative class in contemporary China. Kuaishou’s platform business fits into the Party State’s socio-economic agenda of “Internet+” and “Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation,” and is also folded into the state’s demand for cultural censorship and social stability. As we will show, this state-commerce relationship largely shapes Kuaishou’s interface and its affordances as encoded in its algorithm. Nevertheless, Kuaishou enables the diverse, often marginalized, Chinese living outside the urban centers of the country to become “unlikely” creative workers, who have become self-employed creative, digital entrepreneurs. For these “grassroots individuals,” creativity, life, and individuality are constantly mobilized and calculated according to the workings of the platform. This grassroots entrepreneurship, in tandem with the institutional regulation and censorship of the Internet, contributes to the transformation of Chinese economy and the production of social stability and a digital culture permeated with contingency and negotiation.
This article introduces the tenets of a theory of datafication of and in the Souths. It calls for a de-Westernization of critical data studies, in view of promoting a reparation to the cognitive injustice that fails to recognize non-mainstream ways of knowing the world through data. It situates the “Big Data from the South” research agenda as an epistemological, ontological, and ethical program and outlines five conceptual operations to shape this agenda. First, it suggests moving past the “universalism” associated with our interpretations of datafication. Second, it advocates understanding the South as a composite and plural entity, beyond the geographical connotation (i.e., “global South”). Third, it postulates a critical engagement with the decolonial approach. Fourth, it argues for the need to bring agency to the core of our analyses. Finally, it suggests embracing the imaginaries of datafication emerging from the Souths, foregrounding empowering ways of thinking data from the margins.
Scholarship to date agrees that the internet has weakened the Chinese Party-state’s ideological and discursive hegemony over society. This article documents a recent intervention into public discourse exercised by the Chinese state through appropriating and promoting a popular online catchphrase-“positive energy” (zheng nengliang). Analysing the “positive energy” phenomena using Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony and discourse, the authors argue that the relative effectiveness of this hegemonic intervention rests on the semantic versatility of “positive energy”, which enables “chains of equivalence” to be established between the label’s popular meanings, on the one hand, and its propagandist meanings, on the other.
In this introductory chapter, the authors explore why the internationalization of media studies has been stymied and argue that the conditions are now ripe for invigorating this effort, especially in and through Asia. The fervent adoption of information and communication technologies in Asia, the region’s rapid economic growth, and its youthful and increasingly well-educated populace have lent impetus to the adoption, consumption, appropriation and production of media content and technologies. Juxtaposed against these contemporaneous developments are the enduring traditions and cultural values of the region that are simultaneously shaped by and shaping the socio-technological landscape. Although media systems and experiences are increasingly being shaped by global flows and exchanges, the chapter makes a case for the importance of looking back at these enduring Asian concepts to inform our nuanced understanding of everyday experiences of communication and technology engagement in the region. This chapter also describes the organization of the volume and provides an introduction to the chapters.
Intelligence on mass media audiences was founded on representative statistical samples, analysed by statisticians at the market departments of media corporations. The techniques for aggregating user data in the age of pervasive and ubiquitous personal media (e.g. laptops, smartphones, credit cards/swipe cards and radio-frequency identification) build on large aggregates of information (Big Data) analysed by algorithms that transform data into commodities. While the former technologies were built on socio-economic variables such as age, gender, ethnicity, education, media preferences (i.e. categories recognisable to media users and industry representatives alike), Big Data technologies register consumer choice, geographical position, web movement, and behavioural information in technologically complex ways that for most lay people are too abstract to appreciate the full consequences of. The data mined for pattern recognition privileges relational rather than demographic qualities. We argue that the agency of interpretation at the bottom of market decisions within media companies nevertheless introduces a ‘heuristics of the algorithm’, where the data inevitably becomes translated into social categories. In the paper we argue that although the promise of algorithmically generated data is often implemented in automated systems where human agency gets increasingly distanced from the data collected (it is our technological gadgets that are being surveyed, rather than us as social beings), one can observe a felt need among media users and among industry actors to ‘translate back’ the algorithmically produced relational statistics into ‘traditional’ social parameters. The tenacious social structures within the advertising industries work against the techno-economically driven tendencies within the Big Data economy.
Over the last 30 years or so, human beings have been delegating the work of culture – the sorting, classifying and hierarchizing of people, places, objects and ideas – increasingly to computational processes. Such a shift significantly alters how the category culture has long been practiced, experienced and understood, giving rise to what, following Alexander Galloway, I am calling ‘algorithmic culture’. The purpose of this essay is to trace some of the conceptual conditions out of which algorithmic culture has emerged and, in doing so, to offer a preliminary treatment on what it is. In the vein of Raymond Williams’ Keywords, I single out three terms whose bearing on the meaning of the word culture seems to have been unusually strong during the period in question: information, crowd and algorithm. My claim is that the offloading of cultural work onto computers, databases and other types of digital technologies has prompted a reshuffling of some of the words most closely associated with culture, giving rise to new senses of the term that may be experientially available but have yet to be well named, documented or recorded. This essay, though largely historical, concludes by connecting the dots critically to the present day. What is at stake in algorithmic culture is the gradual abandonment of culture’s publicness and the emergence of a strange new breed of elite culture purporting to be its opposite.
This study, based on a survey of 206 online editors, tests a theoretical framework guided by field theory that seeks to explain the patterns of how journalists use Web analytics in their news work. Using structural equation modeling, this study finds that journalists' perception of competition in the field and their conceptions of the audience as a particular form of capital lead them to using Web analytics in particular ways.
This article utilizes a postcolonial theoretical framework to challenge and unsettle the ways in which media has been historicized in media studies where the time of the North Atlantic West is taken to be an unspoken normative assumption through which we chart media’s development. Further, this article attempts to move us to the Global South by calling attention to media objects and the mediated lives that function through those objects, that have not received any place in media history. Nor are they recognized as a media object. The basic questions that this article raises are: (a) what happens to our understanding of media’s development when we complicate the temporality (North Atlantic Western) through which we narrate the history of media, and (b) What happens to our understanding of what media is when 24/7 electrification is not taken as a norm in our recognition of a media or technology object. What other media objects and mediated lives might then become visible?
An exploration of the diverse experiments in digital futures as they advance far from the celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship.
In Networking Peripheries, Anita Chan shows how digital cultures flourish beyond Silicon Valley and other celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. The evolving digital cultures in the Global South vividly demonstrate that there are more ways than one to imagine what digital practice and global connection could look like. To explore these alternative developments, Chan investigates the diverse initiatives being undertaken to “network” the nation in contemporary Peru, from attempts to promote the intellectual property of indigenous artisans to the national distribution of digital education technologies to open technology activism in rural and urban zones.
Drawing on ethnographic accounts from government planners, regional free-software advocates, traditional artisans, rural educators, and others, Chan demonstrates how such developments unsettle dominant conceptions of information classes and innovations zones. Government efforts to turn rural artisans into a new creative class progress alongside technology activists' efforts to promote indigenous rights through information tactics; plans pressing for the state wide adoption of open source–based technologies advance while the One Laptop Per Child initiative aims to network rural classrooms by distributing laptops. As these cases show, the digital cultures and network politics emerging on the periphery do more than replicate the technological future imagined as universal from the center.
This book examines the powerful and intensifying role that metrics play in ordering and shaping our everyday lives. Focusing upon the interconnections between measurement, circulation and possibility, the author explores the interwoven relations between power and metrics. He draws upon a wide-range of interdisciplinary resources to place these metrics within their broader historical, political and social contexts. More specifically, he illuminates the various ways that metrics implicate our lives - from our work, to our consumption and our leisure, through to our bodily routines and the financial and organisational structures that surround us. Unravelling the power dynamics that underpin and reside within the so-called big data revolution, he develops the central concept of Metric Power along with a set of conceptual resources for thinking critically about the powerful role played by metrics in the social world today.
In the late 1990s and 2000s, a number of calls were made by scholars to “internationalize” or “dewesternize” the field of media and communication studies. I argue that these approaches have indirectly silenced a much longer disciplinary history outside “the West” that has not only produced empirical knowledge but has also actively challenged Western epistemologies. This article seeks to reinscribe the epistemological and historical foundations of media and communication studies in Africa. By framing the research of African media and communication scholars within the changing nature of knowledge production, shifting power relations between African nations, and the evolving role of African universities, I demonstrate how academic knowledge production is frequently driven and constrained by particular dominant social, political, and economic interests.
'This is an ambitious, original, and complex treatment of key aspects of contemporary capitalism. It makes a major contribution because it profoundly destabilizes the scholarship on globalization, the so-called new economy, information technology, distinct contemporary business cultures and practices' - Saskia Sassen, author of Globalization and its Discontents 'Nigel Thrift offers us the sort of cultural analysis of global capitalism that has long been needed - one that emphasizes the innovative energy of global capitalism. The book avoids stale denouncements and offers instead a view of capitalism as a form of practice' - Karin Knorr Cetina, Professor of Sociology, University of Konstanz, GermanyCapitalism is well known for producing a form of existence where 'everything solid melts into air'. But what happens when capitalism develops theories about itself? Are we moving into a condition in which capitalism can be said to possess a brain?These questions are pursued in this sparkling and thought-provoking book. Thrift looks at what he calls "the cultural circuit of capitalism," the mechanism for generating new theories of capitalism. The book traces the rise of this circuit back to the 1960s when a series of institutions locked together to interrogate capitalism, to the present day, when these institutions are moving out to the Pacific basin and beyond. What have these theories produced? How have they been implicated in the speculative bubbles that characterized the late twentieth century? What part have they played in developing our understanding of human relations?Building on an inter-disciplinary approach which embraces the core social sciences, Thrift outlines an exciting new theory for understanding capitalism. His book is of interest to readers in Geography, Social Theory, Antrhopology and Cultural Economics.
How are transformations in newswork intersecting with changes in the monitoring of reader behavior and new technologies of audience measurement? How, in short, are journalistic ‘visions of the audience’ shifting in the online era, and how are they enabling particular editorial practices? This article explores a provocative tension between the now common rhetorical invocation of the news audience as a ‘productive and generative’ entity, and the simultaneous, increasingly common institutional reduction of the audience to a quantifiable, rationalizable, largely consumptive aggregate. The first half of article reviews the literature on the relationship between audience understanding and newsroom practices. The second half of the article is comprised of an ethnographic analysis of the manner by which increasingly prominent and widespread techniques of audience measurement and quantification interact with the newsroom rhetoric of the active, generative audience. The article concludes with some thoughts regarding the role played by audience quantification and rationalization in shifting newswork practices. It argues that the underlying rhetoric of the active audience can be seen as laying the groundwork for a vision of the professional reporter that is less autonomous in his or her news decisions and increasingly reliant on audience metrics as a supplement to news judgment.
Before news organizations began putting their content online, people got the news in print or on TV and almost always outside of the workplace. But nowadays, most of us keep an eye on the headlines from our desks at work, and we have become accustomed to instant access to a growing supply of constantly updated stories on the Web. This change in the amount of news available as well as how we consume it has been coupled with an unexpected development in editorial labor: rival news organizations can now keep tabs on the competition and imitate them, resulting in a decrease in the diversity of the news. Peeking inside the newsrooms where journalists create stories and the work settings where the public reads them, Pablo J. Boczkowski reveals why journalists contribute to the growing similarity of newsâeven though they dislike itâand why consumers acquiesce to a media system they find increasingly dissatisfying. Comparing and contrasting two newspapers in Buenos Aires with similar developments in the United States, News at Work offers an enlightening perspective on living in a world with more information but less news.
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