“Social media platforms and the logics of marginalized knowledge production in East Asia”

Abstract

This article explores dynamics of knowledge formation and preservation through social media uses in an emergent East Asian context of musical production. Taking the case of the Hong Kong independent music scene and drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s typology of knowledge, this article analyses how culturally specific logics of knowledge production are used to remedy infrastructural scarcity and limited media and institutional support. Through the analyses of four independent music actors’s social media uses, this essay proposes that three overlapping logics – industrial, subcultural, and archival – with roots in the history and practices of the HK music landscape are at play in supporting attempts at fostering knowledge in and about the HK independent music scene. In turn, this article argues that paying attention to the industrial, cultural and stylistic specificity of platform-based logics of knowledge production by users is useful not only to better understand the role of social media platforms in cultural production ecosystems outside of the American and Anglo-European social media contexts, but also to conceptualize social media potentially as complex – at times negentropic - knowledge spaces.