Yingjie Huang; Runze Ding ; Shuang Qiu
Yingjie Huang
University of Edinburgh, Year 3 Phd student in Chinese Studies
Deconstructing Chinese Online Community: Zhai Culture On Bilibili
Deconstructing the communication and interaction of various Chinese online communities is an access to understand Chinese youth’s online identities, engagements and influences, especially subculture followers’ identities, engagements and influences. Since 2009, Bilibili, as a live broadcasting (直播) and mash-up videos sharing platform, has been attracting Chinese youth aged from 20 to 25 years old to inhabit as members of Bilibili’s Zhai (宅) culture community. Zhai culture is a term to describe the new subcultural phenomenon that Chinese youth spend long time on enjoying anime, comic and game products. On Bilibili, Zhai culture followers also favour non-ACG related topics, such as singing and dancing. This paper aims to understand the identities and engagements of Bilibili’s Zhai culture followers in their mutual communication and interaction and also explain their influences to the public. For most communication and interaction between Bilibili’s Zhai culture followers happen in the channels of live broadcast. This paper, therefore, will analyse the identities and boundaries that Bilibili’s users have expressed in the communication and interaction in ten popular channels of live broadcast that selected from Bilibili Leaderboard of Live Broadcast. This paper will help to understand the details of how Zhai culture followers construct their community on Bilibili, what identities that Zhai culture followers have expressed, and the influences of Bilibili’s Zhai culture community on the public. This paper will argue that the youth are constructing an indispensable group that is leading trends on the Internet in China.
Runze Ding
University of Leeds, Year 3 DPhil candidate in Communication and Media Studies
Imagined or Connected?
Urban Chinese Gay Males’ Sense of Community in a Digital Age
Studies have shown the importance of the internet in relation to Chinese gay people’s lives and the creation of the sense of “community” in China (Cao and Lu, 2014, Ho, 2007, Kong, 2010), but little is known about how Chinese gay individuals understand their own “community”. More importantly, with the development of information and communications technologies, people’s usage pattern has changed. Researchers have demonstrated how those social interactions take place on recent digital platforms (e.g. Mowlabocus,2012; Miller, 2015; Chan, 2017), however, the question of how those social interactions on digital media may shape the sense of community has not yet been comprehensively addressed. In addressing this question, the current study employed a mixed-methods strategy involving a nine-month ethnography with gay communities in Guangzhou and Beijing, and a survey which sought to assess the generalisability of the qualitative data. The results suggest that mobile media have created more convenient ways of connection among gay men in China, however, it does not largely enhance the sense of gay community among the participants. I unfold this conclusion from the following perspectives: a) gay male’s negative perception of the “community”; b) the commercially driven nature of digital media; c) unique social and political dynamics in China.
Shuang Qiu
University of York, Year 3 PhD Candidate in Women's Studies
Reshaping intimacy: the use of mobile media in negotiating togetherness and separation in living apart together relationships
Today, in our liquid and mobile lives people are confronted by a complex array of choices, catalysing individuals to construct a mobile nature of the self (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). This opens out a plurality of lifestyles across distances at different times, for example, the living apart together (LAT) relationships, where people choose (or are forced) to live apart from their partner but still keep a close couple relationship. In this sense, the emergence of LAT relationships challenges the assumption that intimacy and commitment are thought to be based on physical 'closeness'. However, some empirical studies (Baldassar et al., 2007; Holmes, 2010) indicated that couples are able to enact certain behaviours in order to maintain their intimate relationship across distance and different time zones. Drawing on 39 in-depth interviews with Chinese heterosexual people in LAT relationship, this paper examines 'mobile intimacy', centring on the role that mobile technology play in changing the balance between communication and spatial distance. Considering that distance prevents practical care, each party, in particular the woman in the couple relationship, has a strong desire for receiving alternative support, for instance, 'emotionally participation' or 'emotional intimacy'. I argue that there have significant gender differences in terms of to what extent people want to disclose themselves emotionally, or express love and intimacy with absent others. That is, women are talking more but receiving less emotional support from their male counterparts.