{"product_id":"social-media-and-ordinary-life-9781479825035","title":"Social Media and Ordinary Life","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eHow Chinese citizens use social media\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFocusing on domestic workers, rural microentrepreneurs, disadvantaged young creatives, and young feminists, \u003ci\u003eSocial Media and Ordinary Life\u003c\/i\u003e is a deeply moving ethnography of how digital media infrastructures and platforms are woven into the rhythms of ordinary, everyday life. In choosing to foreground marginalized groups and communities, Cara Wallis gently shifts our attention away from the world of “social media influencers” and tech-centric discourses of entrepreneurial lives towards a decidedly ambivalent terrain of routine life practices.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eSocial Media and Ordinary Life\u003c\/i\u003e argues that understanding these individual experiences of the everyday enables greater insight into larger transformations taking place in contemporary China. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork across China, Wallis foregrounds the entanglement of affect, emotion, ordinary ethical decisions, and desires connected to social media as it is used for self-expression, self-representation, fights for equality, maintenance of community, and economic livelihood.  Four case studies show how social media is integrated into the articulation of affects by a wide variety of “ordinary” Chinese subjects: disadvantaged young creatives who migrate to Beijing from rural areas and use social media to cultivate their personal aesthetics; micro-entrepreneurs in rural Shandong province, especially women whose affective ties to the patriarchal family constrain their use of technology for economic enhancement; domestic workers, all women, in urban homes who use social media to build community and construct themselves as ethical subjects; and young feminists spread across China who engage in various types of cultural production and deploy social media in their fight for gender equality, often facing social and\/or political marginalization in the process.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAmid daunting forces—big data, artificial intelligence, massive surveillance—this book centers the “small,” showing how structural inequality, the urban\/rural divide, patriarchal gender norms, and generational differences lead to contradictory or ambivalent outcomes of technology use. Even so, for these individuals and many others, social media is deeply intertwined with aspirations for a better future.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Cara Wallis","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48274159272187,"sku":"9781479825035","price":89.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0779\/3917\/9771\/files\/CoreSourceHub_fe67c9f2-003c-4cf8-825f-377a2d58f82f.jpg?v=1779997744","url":"https:\/\/indiepubs.com\/products\/social-media-and-ordinary-life-9781479825035","provider":"IndiePubs","version":"1.0","type":"link"}