Abstract
Keywords
In this issue, we are introducing a new feature of Communication and the Public, called “Trending,” which will focus on short cases from around the world in which communication is being deployed or challenged in the development of civil society or the public sphere. Our goal is to establish a case forum in which the work of younger scholars (including graduate students) can be presented relatively quickly (at least in “journal time”) so that readers can see and react to events as they unfold. Undoubtedly, many of the cases we present will turn into fully developed articles, even dissertations and books eventually. But we think there is a useful space of publication, more formal than the web, editorially reviewed, but less formal than the full article, that can serve to generate public discussion and analysis closer to the time of the events themselves and diffuse them into scholarly and public discussion.
Each section will contain a modest number of cases, ranging from 1000 to 3000 words. Cases can briefly describe a set of theoretical or analytical issues or problems, but we ask that theory and analysis be relatively restricted to framing the case itself, locating it in the “family” of problems that it exemplifies, but not engaging in extensive theoretical analysis or literature review. The bulk of the case should be descriptive and analytical, written to introduce it to non-specialist readers. We are also asking contributors to keep citations to a minimum: no lists of standard sources in the field. Please cite only that material which is necessary to document your case and its claims. Each section will also have a short introductory essay, framing the cases, posing questions, and establishing common threads where warranted.
In this first section, we were lucky to have a fine cohort of graduate students from the University of Wisconsin (UW)–Madison and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania whose work in the past year we felt was worth presenting. Of course, we hope to expand this scope in subsequent Trending sections. This issue’s cases both cluster and overlap in several ways. We have two cases of the introduction of new technologies nation-wide, in China and India, and how these technologies were received. Two of our cases, focusing on China and South Africa, highlight the continuing and evolving use of both old communication technology and new in forming civil society, and the South African case extends our knowledge of the use of social media in protest. Finally, two cases highlight the potential global cultural impact of new technologies, one focusing on the construction of audiences for a global event, the Olympic games, and the other on the very local case of a New York photographer whose portraits of people in the city went global. In the interest of space, in this introduction I will offer some general comments on the significance of each case and links to other cases and issues, without rehashing detail.
Fangjing Tu of UW-Madison presents the remarkable case of WeChat, a social media platform primarily introduced in China in 2011. It now claims more than 700 million users, which would make it one of the world’s largest platforms, but remains relatively little known outside of China. While there has been some computer-related publication on WeChat, this is the first publication to our knowledge analyzing its broader deployment in everyday life and effect on Chinese civil society. Tu offers a narrative of WeChat’s growth and deployment. She links WeChat to concrete developments in at least three areas. First, it has rapidly penetrated everyday life. Users can communicate with family and friends in small closed circles, combining instant messaging with social networks to create a real-time personal social network news and communication medium. It is precisely this relatively closed system that has allowed WeChat to emerge as a medium of the public sphere, quite different from Weibo, the Twitter-like medium that has been a dominant Chinese platform. Because it is closed, WeChat can, according to Tu, form a series of interlinked alternative public spaces, giving Chinese citizens greater trust in the medium and lowering fear of being monitored. WeChat, by being less public, is actually able to adapt to a society in which government monitoring of opinion is widespread. By building trust among smaller social circles, WeChat has also become a kind of infrastructure for an emergent civil society, extending beyond family and friends to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and interest groups. Naturally, the Chinese state continues to monitor WeChat, but the form of the app itself has adapted. Whether and how this evolves will be one of the most interesting stories of communication and civil society emerging from China in the coming years.
Yiping Xia of UW-Madison presents a fascinating, contrasting case to the high-tech penetration of WeChat. The Liren Rural Library movement grew from 2007 to 2014 as a relatively autonomous educational movement, whose goal was to establish a national public library network in rural areas of China, working with other social and civil institutions. Liren explicitly aimed at improving the “spiritual and cultural life” of citizens to help them become “qualified.” But the meaning of qualified is closer to the notion of well-educated, well rounded, and culturally literate. Liren also promoted “great books” by Western liberal and contemporary Chinese authors. Xia does a fine job of presenting the details. The case reminds those of us outside of China how little we actually know about civil society formation in everyday life and also that civil life takes many forms. Liren was rooted in book and literary culture, and ideas that were alternatives to the official Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ideology. But it is also remarkable as an autonomous associational form, which may have been its undoing. Liren reminds us that all civil society activity need not be political, but under conditions of a dominant state, all civil society activity is likely to be seen that way and treated accordingly. It also reaffirms for communication scholars that ideas can have power when communicated in books and lectures, and these forms have far from disappeared in a social media age.
Subhayan Mukerjee of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania presents the case of a rapidly emerging net neutrality movement in India. The case reminds me that Western scholars tend to think of net neutrality and regulatory policy as issues for highly developed nations, but Mukerjee demonstrates that the diffusion of the net matters to both a core of urban users and activists, and also the many hundreds of millions of potential rural users. The case also illustrates what happens when both new technologies and the legal concepts evolved to regulate them are introduced from outside a nation and how they are absorbed and transformed. Mark Zuckerberg introduced “Internet.org” to a worldwide conference in 2015 with the stated goal of bridging the digital divide. But Internet activists in India reacted differently, claiming that because Internet.org was run by Facebook it would decide what services were available to Indian consumers. Around the same time, a “Save the Internet Coalition” arose to oppose a new service, Airtel Zero introduced by Indian telecom giant Airtel. The coalition mobilized 1 million email submissions to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India in favor of net neutrality. This movement became intertwined with Facebook’s rebranding of Internet.org as Free Basics. Mukerjee analyzes the twists and turns of the case, but one larger takeaway is that even powerful multinational and national corporations cannot simply impose their will on nations that have the democratic right to organize. Furthermore, new online civil society movements can and do emerge around questions of Internet access and development, even in a society in which a large population is still struggling to meet basic needs.
Robyn Baragwanath of UW-Madison analyzes the #MustFall movements that arose in South Africa in 2015. Although formal democracy has made strides in South Africa, it is widely viewed as corrupt and, by some, fundamentally corrupted. The movement evolved from initial protests against statues of colonialist Cecil Rhodes to more widespread protests against educational costs and barriers, and called for the “decolonization of education.” Baragwanath describes a type of developing legitimation crisis in which the populace is losing faith in formal channels and institutions. As we have seen elsewhere in the United States, Western Europe, and the Middle East, new technologies play a critical role in mobilizing and coordinating informal protest. Civil society in the South African streets has adapted social media, and Twitter in particular, to evolve into a widespread movement challenging governing authorities. But Baragwanath also describes the limits of new media protest in a country with low social media and Internet penetration.
We then move to two cases that demonstrate the emerging cultural effects of new media at very different scales.
Katerina Girginova of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania introduces the case of the Olympics’ construction of audiences over time, arguing that global media events derive their power, in part, from constructing a broad range of audiences around a multiplicity of issues that go beyond sport. Her analysis breaks new ground in focusing on how Olympic organizers actively construct audiences. She uses a unique data set sampling Olympic documents over a 50-year time frame, with a focus here on the 1960s and early 2000s, tracing the awareness of organizers of a “public” as an actor in the construction of the games, evolving into an awareness of, first, the audience, and then a multiplicity of audiences. There is also a slippage between the two terms, as public is initially a reading public, but then one constructed as an audience of potential viewers. She shows how the introduction of digital technologies transforms the public/audience yet again, particularly through analysis of the 2016 Rio Olympics app. With this last shift, a kind of uncertainty is introduced into public formation. No longer can publics be constructed from audiences; rather, they begin to construct themselves while constructing the event of which they are an effect.
Finally, Jasmine Erdener of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania offers the case of “Humans of New York” (HONY), a blog founded by trader-turned-photographer Brandon Stanton in 2010. Stanton had a goal of taking and posting 10,000 photos, creating a photographic portrait of New York. Erdener shows how this ambitious but (relatively) simple project grew from a blog to a Facebook page followed by 17 million people around the world. She describes her own growing interest in the lives of the people portrayed, saying “each post was a powerful narrative moment, a portrait of a person, and a small glimpse into their lives.” Stanton began to travel abroad, posting among other things stories about the lives of Syrian refugees and directing donations to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations refugee agency. Erdener notes the debate in the United States over admitting refugees and asks how this kind of individual storytelling project might affect the wider debate. She raises questions about what it means to humanize “the other” and the assumptions of universality embedded in such a project. (I would note, these go all the way back to the original publication of the Family of Man in the 1960s.) She also raises questions about Stanton’s professed neutral stance and failure to consider the large political and socio-economic forces involved but notes the blog could be read as an implicit critique of these larger structural factors. Erdener doesn’t settle for a simple answer, but challenges us to think about the role of this kind of self-generated, but global storytelling in framing the lives of those unknown others.
Taken as a whole, then, our cases move from the macro-sphere of the nations of China and India, of global technology platforms and trans-national regulation, to the national and civil emergence of associational movements in China and South Africa, as well as the relation between legitimation, protest, and new technologies. They end with reflections on our culturally constructed world, again, moving from the macro and historical perspective of the Olympics, to the work of one man and his 17 million followers, and the possibility of a new, fragile, global solidarity. Not a bad day’s work. We hope you will find these trending cases as useful and challenging as we did.