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Asian Digital Media
Timeline
Project status: Active Cluster
Description
coordinating faculty:
About the Cluster:
The rapid expansion of the internet and other digital technologies in recent decades has helped enable the emergence of a vast digital ecosystem with significant implications for the configurations of culture, politics, and society. With digital technologies, cultural production has become infinitely more reproducible, just as transmedial adaptations have also become exponentially easier. The rapid growth and expansion of the internet has greatly facilitated the circulation of both information and misinformation, which in turn has had radical implications both for the constitution of grassroots political movements as well as for how mis/information can be weaponized by political regimes. Finally, the explosive growth of social media platforms has had radical implications not only for culture and politics, but also for the very nature of society and sociality.
In recent years the very concept of digital media has undergone multiple redefinitions, especially as cultural communication has broadened to include infrastructure, environment, and biomedicine. Over the past decade, digital formations ranging from mobile devices to social platforms, from optical cables to 5G towers, from data centers to app-based delivery services, have become new infrastructural systems capable of reshaping physical spaces, ecological circuits, urban dwellings, societal practices, and economic structures. This infrastructural development has radically transformed both the notion and condition of bodies and environments, blurring the boundaries between the technological and the biological, between the symbolic and the material, between human and nonhuman objects, between mediation and habituation. As a result, what is categorized as digital media is far more than binary codes or cultural signs, and therefore demands innovative and multidisciplinary approaches.
The proposed research cluster will examine issues of digital culture as they relate to Asia and global Asia. Given the interests and expertise of the organizers, the research cluster will place particular emphasis on digital media from or relating to China and Greater China. However, digital media is, by its very nature, deterritorializing, and therefore we will examine the circulation of digital culture and digital practices not only in China, Greater China, and other East Asian nations, but also the global Asian mediasphere.
This research cluster will be open to all interested local faculty and graduate students, but we are particularly interested in supporting graduate students who are already working on projects relating to digital culture, but also incoming graduate students who may still be deciding what to work on. We anticipate that the cluster will meet roughly once a month, with most of the meetings consisting of seminar-style discussions of works related to Asian digital media. Research Cluster funds will primarily be allocated to bringing in at least two outside visitors to discuss their work with the group (and possibly also give a public lecture).
Some recent China-related works that the cluster may read and discuss include works on the internet and social media, such as Shaohua Guo, The Evolution of the Chinese Internet: Creative Visibility in the Digital Public (Stanford 2020), Jing Wang, The Other Digital China (MIT Press, 2019), Guobin Yang and Wang Wei, Engaging Social Media in China: Platforms, Publics, and Production (Michigan State, 2021), Shuhan Chen and Peter Lunt, Chinese Social Media: Face, Sociality, and Civility (Emerald Publishing, 2021); works on the political dimensions of the digital culture, such as Francis Lee and Joseph Chan, Media and Protest Logics in the Digital Era: The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong (Oxford, 2018) and Florian Schneider, China’s Digital Nationalism (Oxford, 2018); works on economic dimensions and labor issues, such as Ma Huatong, et al, The Chinese Digital Economy (Palgrave, 2021), Richard Turrin, Cashless: China’s Digital Currency Revolution (Authority Publishing, 2021), and Yu Huang, Networking China: The Digital Transformation of the Chinese Economy (Illinois, 2017).
Team
Members
- Eileen Chow, Duke
- Kimberly Hassel, Duke
- Keren He, faculty, UNC
- Robin Visser, faculty, UNC
- Nathaniel Isaacson, faculty, NCSU
- Xiaodan Wang, CAH MA student
- Qiwen Li, CAH MA student