Revisiting Networked China: Challenges for the Study of Digital Media and Civic Engagement

This volume uses “Networked China” as a lens to explore a complex communication landscape, characterized by digital platforms, algorithms, and global connectivity. Essays and empirical case studies cover issues of digital labor, cybernationalism, gaming, disinformation, fan culture, technology entrepreneurs, and the value of digital repositories in preserving collective memory. The contributions to this book explore the complex communication landscape of China, conceptualized as a global assemblage of technology, norms, and socio-cultural structures. Exploring these digital networks reveals the contradictions between connectivity and control, pushing beyond conceptions of the authoritarian system to better understand in these mediated spaces the sensitive terms of “citizen” and “civic.” Asking “what” and “where” is China and “how” do we know China, contributors situate their insights in local cultural contexts but against the background of China-global entanglements. Understanding a networked China confronts the challenges to researchers of access, political sensitivities, and over-reliance on digital trace data. Emphasizing a mixed methods approach, the studies in this volume provide creative approaches to such challenges at a deeper level of complexity, opening the “black box” to find emerging spaces and connections, within and without China, that are not always self-evident from the outside using more conventional conceptual categories. This book was originally published as a special issue of Information, Communication & Society.