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How Chinese citizens use social media
Focusing on domestic workers, rural microentrepreneurs, disadvantaged young creatives, and young feminists, Social Media and Ordinary Life 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.
Social Media and Ordinary Life 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.
Amid 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.
"Through longitudinal ethnographic research, Cara Wallis provides innovative analyses of labor, technology, and aspirations for a better future in China. Wallis delves into Chinese cultural traditions and insightfully engages affect theory, Western literature on neoliberalism, and Chinese notions of ethics and morality to develop the concept of a neo/non-liberal China. Social Media and Ordinary Life makes significant and distinctive contributions to studies in communication, labor, and gender from ethical, affective, and psychological perspectives."
"This timely book is highly relevant to students and scholars of media, gender, labour and affect in China and similar non-Western contexts."
"Provides a compelling model for the study of digital media that foregrounds lived experience without losing sight of constraint."
"The book is not only a rich resource for scholars in communication and media studies but also a beautifully written work for readers who are interested in contemporary China. The author’s sensitivity to ordinary people’s stories allows readers to witness their courage, resilience, and perseverance. It is deeply touching, attesting to the power of affect indeed."
"Careful and hopeful... Social Media and Ordinary Life makes a vital contribution to media and communication studies. And it reminds us that even under authoritarianism, ordinary people use social media to shape themselves as ethical subjects, to connect with others, and to pursue aspirations that might otherwise remain out of reach."
"Assembles a textured portrait of contemporary Chinese media culture, perhaps beyond China... Wallis’ thick description casts a question back to researchers in the field: what do you see in these ‘ordinary’ lives at moments of desperation?"