Provincializing “web traffic”: data imaginaries and vernacular construction of liuliang in China

IF 1.5 3区文学 Q2 COMMUNICATION

Communication Culture & Critique Pub Date : 2023-07-28 DOI:10.1093/ccc/tcad021

Sheng Zou

引用次数: 0

Abstract

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.

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“网络流量”的省区化:中国留言板的数据想象与乡土建构

摘要本文通过一种关键字信息的方法去同质化了“网络流量”的概念。它关注的是，在中国，“网络流量”这个词是如何以丰富和创造性的方式被使用的。通过实例化自下而上的认知实践，与流亮相关的分类、搭配和智慧揭示了人们在日常生活中想象、理解和处理数字媒体和数据的替代和本地相关的方式。他们为网络流量的理论化提供了一套重新焕发活力的词汇——流动性、可操纵性、可移植性、社会空间差异、意识形态价价和神秘力量，等等。这些新视角丰富了对数字媒体的真正全球理解，使全球北方的人们能够相对反思他们被视为理所当然的数据化经验，并通过解决全球北方与南方之间、专家与非专家之间的不平等，使媒体知识的制作民主化。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Communication Culture & Critique COMMUNICATION-

CiteScore

2.50

自引率

5.90%

发文量

期刊介绍： CCC provides an international forum for critical research in communication, media, and cultural studies. We welcome high-quality research and analyses that place questions of power, inequality, and justice at the center of empirical and theoretical inquiry. CCC seeks to bring a diversity of critical approaches (political economy, feminist analysis, critical race theory, postcolonial critique, cultural studies, queer theory) to bear on the role of communication, media, and culture in power dynamics on a global scale. CCC is especially interested in critical scholarship that engages with emerging lines of inquiry across the humanities and social sciences. We seek to explore the place of mediated communication in current topics of theorization and cross-disciplinary research (including affect, branding, posthumanism, labor, temporality, ordinariness, and networked everyday life, to name just a few examples). In the coming years, we anticipate publishing special issues on these themes.