{"title":"Envisioning a credit society: social credit systems and the institutionalization of moral standards in China","authors":"Jing Wang, Hongmei Li, W. Xu, Wei Xu","doi":"10.1177/01634437221127364","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221127364","url":null,"abstract":"China’s Social Credit System (SCS) has been widely considered a centralized surveillance project, whereas recent research found multiple scoring systems co-existing in various fields at multiple administrative levels and in diverse forms. Despite the broadened view toward the complexity of SCS, these research projects continue to focus on SCS mainly as political and digital control mechanisms. Instead, this paper is interested in the social and cultural meanings of SCS constructed in the media, both at the national and local levels. Based on the analyses of news reports since the year 2003, when the term SCS was officially coined, this paper examines the historical narratives about SCS, including its rationales, stakeholders, and intended goals/tasks. It argues that the SCS construction has been a societal project anchored in a distinct moral orientation of financial credit. While credit systems are often used to classify consumers and financial subjects in Western contexts, the case of Chinese SCS shows that the moral dimension of financial credit scoring has enabled its spread into other non-financial domains. Also, the institutionalization of such moral standards is considered an effective approach to addressing various socio-economic and ethical issues that have long baffled economic development and social justice in China’s reform era.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"30 6 1","pages":"451 - 470"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86506071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Deconstructing social exclusions: The practice of digital activities among disabled people in China","authors":"Liu Yang","doi":"10.1177/01634437221129800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221129800","url":null,"abstract":"This study focuses on the experiences of disabled individuals in online activism in the context of China. Adopting the social model of disability, this study found an iceberg structure consisting of two levels and three layers. The explicit level included observed labels, attitudes and legislation. The implicit level involved both social and internalized stereotypes. These three layers of social structures interacted with each other and together brought about social exclusion into being. Adopting the social model as an organizing principle represents a starting point to alter social patterns and possibly change social isolation.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"1 1","pages":"1588 - 1601"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91032424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Platform ecosystems, market hierarchies and the megacorp: The case of Reliance Jio","authors":"Adrian Athique, Akshaya Kumar","doi":"10.1177/01634437221127798","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221127798","url":null,"abstract":"The ‘great integration’ of disparate economic sectors by ‘Big Tech’ has been fuelled by the massive expansion of mobile infrastructure, especially in developing countries, and the systemic enclosure of users within multi-sided marketplaces operating under the euphemism of ‘platform ecosystems’. Taking the case study of India’s ‘national champion’ Reliance Jio, this article considers the ways in which India’s leading ‘corporate’ has deployed the ‘ecosystem’ blueprint and adopted the strategic role of the oligopolistic megacorp in India’s digital economy. It has done so, seemingly, without adopting the institutional form upon which Eichner’s founding proposition rests. Consequently, we argue that the separation of ownership and management as per the North American corporate form is not fundamental to the status, function or strategy of a conglomerate oligopoly. Rather, we propose that the megacorps of the digital age have an arisen as an inevitable consequence of market hierarchies in the digital economy, and that the key institutional factor in the consolidation of their market power is the licence of the state.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"13 1","pages":"1420 - 1436"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80442403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reconsidering trauma and symbolic wounds in times of online misogyny and platforms","authors":"J. Johanssen","doi":"10.1177/01634437221127362","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221127362","url":null,"abstract":"This article provides an exploratory discussion of the misogynist online incel community and its discourses around mental health. Incels’ discussion of mental health conditions, trauma and victimhood is outlined in relation to Allen Meek’s development of the concept of the symbolic wound. It is argued that incels’ alleged trauma constitutes the construction of a symbolic wound as a marker of group identity as well as a means of shocking and potentially traumatising others. The concept of the symbolic wound is further developed through the psychoanalytic notion of dis/inhibition which shows how incels are torn between modes of desiring and symbolically destroying women. The collective identity of the symbolic wound and its (non)-relation to trauma can thus be more fragile and contradictory than has been discussed in the literature so far.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"46 1","pages":"191 - 201"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79153862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sugar and spice (and everything nice?): Japan’s ambition behind Lolita’s Kawaii aesthetics","authors":"Natalie Ngai","doi":"10.1177/01634437221126082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221126082","url":null,"abstract":"The global media and marketing phenomenon of Lolita fashions has charmed many with their kawaii (cute) aesthetics. This study argues that the kawaii aesthetics not only allows one to perform non-conforming femininity playfully, as previous studies have suggested, but it also embodies racial and national ideologies. This study uses an intersectional, transnational approach to investigate the retail catalogs of Lolita brands and fan publications. Findings reveal that Lolita marketing in Japan artfully appropriates whiteness through the kawaii aesthetics, which renders whiteness/Westernness less threatening and covers up Japan’s ambition to surpass the West with a spectacular and innocent mask. When kawaii aesthetics is repackaged for the Western market, the over-representation of whiteness is replaced by a fantasy of cross-racial sisterhood, subtly celebrating the superiority of the East Asian race. I call for an awareness of the appropriation of whiteness outside the United States and an intersectional reading of ‘postfeminist’ glamor.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"11 1","pages":"545 - 560"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89800506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social media’s canaries: content moderators between digital labor and mediated trauma","authors":"Amit Pinchevski","doi":"10.1177/01634437221122226","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221122226","url":null,"abstract":"This paper takes recent PTSD claims by content moderators working for Microsoft and Google as a starting point to discuss the changing nature of trauma in the context of social media and algorithmic culture. Placing these claims in the longer history of how media came to be regarded by clinicians as potentially traumatic, it considers content moderation as a form of immaterial labor, which brings the possibility to be traumatized into the cycle of digital labor. Therefore, to the extent that content moderators’ trauma exists as a clinical condition, it cannot be taken as an incidental side-effect but as a built-in potentiality. It is about the commodification of traumatic vulnerability itself. The discussion then proceeds to speculate about the possibility of using algorithms to identify potentially traumatic content and what would that mean for the understanding of trauma, especially as a mediated experience.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"7 1","pages":"212 - 221"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82496902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Drone trauma: violent mediation and remote warfare","authors":"M. Richardson","doi":"10.1177/01634437221122257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221122257","url":null,"abstract":"For people subject to drone war in Gaza, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, the violence and trauma inflicted by remotely piloted aerial systems such as the MQ-9 Reaper takes place at a remove from the sensors, networks, algorithms and interfaces that launch Hellfire and other missiles from the air. Brutal death and wounding bely the precision rhetoric, technocratic discourses and technoscientific imaginaries that shroud drone warfare in popular and political debate over its merits. Much has been said about the traumas of drone operators, but less about the traumas produced by drone warfare in those individuals and communities subject to it. In this short article, I pursue the question of how those traumas on the ground are bound up with the media-technological entities, processes and affects that compose the military drone apparatus: sensors, networks, algorithms, interfaces, atmospheres and missiles. My core contention is that the trauma of drone warfare is characterised by the violent mediation of drone systems, which produce an intensive relation between the not-yet of traumatic violence having commenced before it is felt and the already-too-late of that experience.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"48 1","pages":"202 - 211"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74653950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Trauma and digital media: Introduction to crosscurrents special section","authors":"Amit Pinchevski, Michael Richardson","doi":"10.1177/01634437221122244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221122244","url":null,"abstract":"Associations between trauma and media theory are longstanding, going back at least to Walter Benjamin’s observations on technology and modernity, which were themselves informed by Freud’s 1920 speculations on war trauma following WWI. A century later, and in the wake of numerous conflicts, catastrophes, and far-reaching technological transformations—and of course the COVID pandemic—it is time to reconsider the relation between trauma and media, digital platforms in particular. While some significant scholarship has noted the intersections of modern media technologies such as photography, film, radio, television, and recently digital and algorithmic media, with the conception and experience of trauma, a more systematic theoretical consideration of the relation between media and trauma remains to be developed. And with the intensifying reliance on new and old media in these pandemic times the question of these relations is increasingly urgent. Moving beyond conceptions of media as representing or inducing trauma, this special section of Crosscurrents explores how (digital) media and trauma shape one another.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"5 1","pages":"178 - 180"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80220028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Familial digital mediation as a gendered issue between parents","authors":"Claire Balleys","doi":"10.1177/01634437221119020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221119020","url":null,"abstract":"The different strategies explored by parents managing their children’s digital practices, the associated challenges, and the conditions for a successful outcome are central in the literature on digital mediation within families. However, few studies consider the family context in its entirety, which is essential if we wish to capture the meanings, perceptions, and negotiations that are played out in the daily family routine. Based on an ethnographic survey on the place of screens in Swiss families’ socialization processes, the paper shows, first, how paternal use undermines digital mediation within the family and, second, that this mediation is ultimately a maternal concern and responsibility. By interviewing all family members (including children) on their assessment of screen use by all family members (including parents), our research design provides access to the backstage of parental digital mediation. Our data shows that women confront fears and guilt in the face of social norms that a ‘good’ mother should regulate screens ‘well’ within her household. We conclude that parental digital mediation is embedded in a gendered social and relational context, where fathers and mothers do not adopt the same roles, the same duties, nor the same mental burden.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"44 1","pages":"1559 - 1575"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86434957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Remapping spatiality in contemporary East Asian media engagement: reevaluating China’s Got Talent","authors":"Eason Lu","doi":"10.1177/01634437221119024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437221119024","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past decade, production in China’s television sector have reshaped media cultures across the country as well as the geocultural region of East Asia. Through analysis of licensed reality television programs such as China’s Got Talent, this paper examines transnational television formats and their circulation and replication in contemporary China, challenging the traditional concept that television format trade falls within a West-Rest narrative. While highlighting the cultural and media phenomena of interactive ‘glocalization’ of cultural products, this paper calls for de-westernization in approaching Chinese and East Asian media studies. It does so by pointing out unique imitating and adaptive practices of Chinese unscripted television programs, which serve as case studies to the existing literature of television business and cultures. The practice of licensing formats provides a unique perspective into analyzing China’s media strategies in a globalized industry and reviewing the current scholarship on media globalization. With a comparative analysis, the paper attempts to reconceptualize the spatiality of East Asian media production and consumption. I also include my observations while working on the production teams for these programs.","PeriodicalId":18417,"journal":{"name":"Media, Culture & Society","volume":"34 1","pages":"1394 - 1402"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75213322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}