Abstract
This issue consists of three sections—a symposium of research articles on digital culture, a forum of commentaries on “The Other Internets,” and a new feature named “Comparatively Speaking.” From different angles, they all interrogate the ways in which new expressive practices spurred by new media technologies are shaping the public life in various settings.
Three of the four articles in the symposium on digital culture were presented on 4 December 2015 at the Scholars Symposium on Digital Culture hosted by Barbie Zelizer at the University of Pennsylvania. The fourth, by Yizhou Xu, was presented at the conference on “Body, Lived Space, and Mobile Media” held in Beijing (18-19 June 2016), an event co-sponsored by this journal. These articles approach digital culture in innovative ways, interrogating popular concepts (Veronica Barassi), developing new frameworks and conceptualizations (Vincent Manzerolle and Mette Mortensen), and illuminating new empirical phenomena (e.g. Yizhou Xu).
The five essays in the forum on “The Other Internets” extend the focus on digitization of cultural practices. They call attention to a more diverse and multi-faceted understanding of digital technologies by highlighting practices and communities that are non-Western, non-urban, and non-heteronormative.
Under the heading “Comparatively Speaking,” we will periodically publish papers translated from non-English publications. With this new feature, we hope to make insightful works from outside of the Western world available in English.
For this purpose, we also set out to be pragmatic and creative in carrying out the manuscript review procedures. We first rely on known means of peer evaluations in the source outlets to identify a suitable paper. We then ask the authors to produce an English version of their own paper and secure copyright permissions to publish it in this journal. After that, we solicit critical readings from other scholars, including members of our Editorial Board.
In this initial installment, we have selected two papers originally published in Chinese. The two journals that published them are top outlets in the fields of journalism and communication in China. While they do not have the comparable blind-review system that we operate, they are highly selective based on recognized scholarly rigor. The two papers were originally presented at a workshop on the changing journalism in the digital age that took place in December 2015 at Fudan University. In total, 14 scholars spent a full day on 10 submitted papers; they critiqued each other’s paper and offered constructive suggestions on how to improve it. A number of these papers, after several rounds of post-workshop revision, were published.
We worked closely with the authors to reshape these two papers into English. They share a focus on changing journalism in China and both explore this issue from the vantage point of how Chinese journalists envision their craft and professional identities and how they articulate their vision. In addition, both papers are situated against the backdrop of the turmoil and uncertainties in China’s news media sector that have been brought about by the regime’s tightening control and the advent of social media and mobile technologies.
The two papers also illustrate our thinking by naming this new feature Comparatively Speaking. While examining some phenomena in a non-English speaking part of the world and written for a non-English speaking scholarly community, both papers are inspired by and make extensive references to the literature in English. To this extent, they are products of cross-cultural comparisons. Reshaping them into English is yet another round of cross-cultural comparison. In this case, it is to figure out how to speak about the Chinese experiences in a voice that is not only familiar to the English-speaking peers of the scholarly community but also authentic to the highly situated empirical world in China and Chinese.
We are especially eager to hear from our readers on this new feature, and in particular, on how to make it a useful forum for intellectual engagements across cultural and linguistic boundaries.