Monthly Archives: October 2011

This is a response based on the 2005 book ‘Publics and Auidences: When Cultural, Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere’ edited by Sonia Livingstone.

At the end of Livingstone’s essay she proposed a grey area of civic culture and citizen-viewer to bridge the permeable boundary between public and audience, though the rest of the authors in this volume did not follow this framework. The term of civic seems to be a little bit problematic to me as I even could not find a concept in Chinese language to describe it. Dayan in his essay also alerted us the different understandings of these concepts between English and French, and I feel this might be true especially when discussing terms that contain political meanings for authoritarian countries. The concept of private began to have actual and practical meaning only after 1978 Deng’s reform, and the opposition between the private and the public is much referred in terms of property ownership instead of formation of shared identity. Of course the publics are strongly mediated by propaganda machines, but is the public in China really the same as the concept in democratic countries? I don’t mean that there is no such a process of formation of shared values, understandings or identities in publics in China, but I feel the social mechanisms of the formation might be different than democratic societies. For audiences who watch propaganda news programs and accept the ideology, the audiences actively become the public and participate in the whole authoritarian machine directly. However, there is another public we should not ignore in today’s Chinese immature civil society. A public of counter mainstream ideology that actively interacts with the rest of the society is emerging. This public is only labeled as ‘public sphere’ by many Chinese scholars and it seems to fit into Livingstone argument that this public is highly mediated(or even empowered) by ICT use in private sphere, but I want to ask, how does this public come into being? If a consensus of identity and values comes from communities that have much autonomy from the authority, then I feel this public is not the case as the autonomous community is also a problematic concept in China.

My Classmate Rogelio contributed his insights:

To address your post Huan, I think Livingstone’s analysis definitely has limitations in contexts that are not Western or democratic. I think that your point is very important to consider not only because it underscores the limitations in scope to the non-Western world, but also as a means to question many of the assumptions about Western society itself, that Livingstone urges us to problematize, but they nonetheless appear in her work. For example, individuality and personal freedom is seldom contested as a tenant of developed Western societies, as something that is equally experienced by all, and within Livingstone’s work, these values are used to describe the peculiarities of what is considered the “private sphere.” However, and while some elements of class analysis are present, the degree to which these values are expressed and represented in Western Societies are largely dependent on social class, level of education, and religion, etc. Livingstone briefly addresses this by stating how middle class values are projected onto society (near the end with the PBS stuff), yet this small detail has profound implications, not only across class line, but through religion as well (Individualism being a central aspect of Protestantism, for example). However, perhaps the limitations found in Livingstone can be more readily addressed by Ien Ang’s work, as he urges for investigation along cultural, social, political contexts, which could supplement Livingstone’s analysis well.

The question how Internet empowers or disempwers Chinese civil society has haunted me for some time and in 2010 I did a Chinese college students survey to try to establish the linear causal relationship between social networking sites use and their political participation, but when I look back I feel the question being asked might be too simplistic. Studies on the relations between Internet use and Chinese civil society ( the term civil society definitely needs to be re-examined in an authoritarian context) should not be reduced only to discover a positive/negative linkage pattern, but instead other social factors, and cultural contexts should be taken into consideration to complicate the research questions.

China’s over 30 years economic growth does not only lead to fundamental changes in property ownership based social relations, but also open up opportunities for opinion expression. How does the strong economic force shape the relation between ICT use and civil society in China? Yang’s 2009 book ‘The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online’ systematically examined the dynamics of Chinese online sphere and its political implications. He complicated discussion by introducing Chinese economic background instead of asking a simplistic question that addresses only linear relationship of Internet and civil society, as he wrote “This control regime, however, is torn by the internal contradictions between the priorities of economic development and ideological control”. (P.42). (Guobin Yang is an associate professor of Asian culture and sociology at University of Columbia. His research interests ranges from history of Cultural Revolution, 1989 Chinese Student Movement, NGOs and environmental activism as well as the relationship between Internet and civil society. )

Many terms such as civic engagement, civil society, and public participation for authoritarian countries might not have the same meaning as the western counterparts. Instead of pursuing a global consensus on the semantics some scholars touched on the use of public sphere as well as deliberation in Chinese context. Min Jiang particularly examined the notion of authoritarian deliberation on Chinese online sphere and she argues that ‘democracy needs not be a precursor to public deliberation. Instead, public deliberation may flourish as a viable alternative to the radical electoral democracy in authoritarian countries like China. ’(Min Jiang is an assistant professor of communication at UNC Charlotte and have publicized several scholarly articles on Chinese e-governance performance, authoritarian deliberation, and civic political participation on Chinese Internet and also she used to be a news journalist for BTV and CCTV.) Hu Yong challenged the widely held dichotomy between the civil society and the state, and he proposed in his 2009 book ‘The Rising Cacophony: Personal expression and Public Discussion in the Internet Age’ a notion of common media where both controllers and protesters have a say in this arena. (Hu Yong, a professor of communication at Beijing University, is currently doing a fellowship with Asia Society. He translated the influential book ‘Being Digital’ into Chinese in 2000). In comparison with discussion on normative meaning of civic sphere, it is easier to reach consensus on questions of digital divide in developing countries. Jack Linchuan Qiu does not simply present the unequal distribution of ICT resources in China, but instead he presented the question in his 2009 book ‘Working-Class Network Society’ from an interesting perspective. Qiu adopted the concept of network society into Chinese context and proposed working-class network society, indicating a class division of using ICTs. (Jack Linchuan Qiu is associate professor at school of journalism and communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. )

The term of media ecology has been used in various contexts, so when we ask about the themes under the media ecology tradition, different intellectual groups might give distinct answers. One theory group has been thoroughly illustrated by Casey Man Kong Lum and many other contributors in the book “Perspectives on Culture, Technology, and Communication: The Media Ecology Tradition”. Lum described that the term media ecology has been used as a metaphor including McLuhan, while it was Neil Postman that gave the term a formal definition as the study of media environments encompassing new field of media studies dated in 1968. (p.10-p.11). Postman addressed the fundamental principle of media ecology as “a medium is a technology within which a culture grows; that is to say, it gives form to a culture’s politics, social organization and habitual way of thinking” and the word ecology suggests “interaction between media and human beings give a culture its character; and one might say, help a culture to maintain symbolic balance.” (p.62)

A coherent body of theoretical literature was identified as the intellectual foundation of media ecology tradition. McLuhan is the most visible early key thinker in the field who received attention from both academic and popular venues, and other major players include Jacques Ellul, Harold A. Innis, Lewis Mumford, Walter J. Ong, Postman and others. Just to think about these thinkers’ theoretical contribution, we could have a taste of how broad and deep the definition of media ecology from this group could be. It is a body of theoretical perspectives on understanding culture, technology and communication. Ong’s account on the distinction of orality and literacy draws readers’ attention to a history that spans thousands of years (Ong, 1982). Innis examined the bias of communication supported by histories across many ancient cultures (Innis, 1951). Other research interests summarized by Lum in this field include media and culture (McLuhan, 1951, 1962, 1964), history and technology (Mumford, 1934, 1967, 1970) and urban studies (Mumford, 1938, 1961), behavioral sciences (Watzlawick, Bavelas, & Jason, 1967; see also Watzlawick, 1967), structural anthropology (LeviStrauss, 1966), sociology of technological culture (Ellul, 1964) and propaganda (Ellul, 1965), perceptual psychology (Cantril, 1960), information and systems theories (Shannon & Weaver, 1949; see also Wiener, 1948, 1950), general semantics (Hayakawa, 1964; Korzybski, 1933), cultural anthropology (e.g., Hall, 1959), nonverbal communication (e.g., Birdwhistell, 1952, 1970), classics (e.g., Havelock, 1963, 1976), history of typography (e.g., Eisenstein, 1979) and physics and philosophy (Heisenberg, 1962). As can be seen, the study of media ecology draws from multi-disciplinary intellectual frameworks. Postman generalized the interest of media ecology as communication environments derived from the biological term. (p.62) Relevant research questions might include what the relationship between human beings and the communication environment is, what influence of the shift from oral, typographic, to electronic culture have on our sensory and thinking ways, and how different forms of communication as organisms that interact within environments.

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