Micro-blogging Memories

Weibo and Collective Remembering in Contemporary China

Eileen Le Han

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137598813
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

This book offers an in-depth account of social media, journalism and collective memory through a five-year analysis of Weibo, a leading Chinese micro-blogging platform, and prism of transitional China in a globalizing world.
How does society remember public events in the rapidly changing age of social media?
Eileen Le Han examines how various kinds of public events are shared, debated, and their historical significance and worthiness of remembrance highlighted on Weibo. Journalism plays a significant part in mobilizing collective remembering of these events, in a society with rapidly changing topics on the platform, the tightening state control, and nationalism on the rise.
The first five years of Weibo reflect a dramatic change in Chinese society, where journalists, media professionals, and opinion leaders in other fields of expertise, together with ordinary citizens directly affected by these changes in everyday life collaborate to witness the rapid social transition.

© The Author(s) 2016

Eileen Le HanMicro-blogging MemoriesPalgrave Macmillan Memory Studies10.1057/978-1-137-59881-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Eileen Le Han¹

(1)

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, USA

End Abstract

Weibo, Collective Memory, and Social Tensions

July 2012, Beijing. On a summer evening, a few days after the Chinese capital was hit by a thunderstorm that flooded the city and took 77 lives, I met with two staff members of Sina.​com, a leading Chinese web portal. They were then in charge of the daily operations management of Weibo, Sina’s micro-blogging service, which at that point had been running for almost three years. As with previous events, the thunderstorm and the subsequent flash flood had put Weibo in the spotlight. During and after the disaster, Chinese netizens gathered on Weibo. There, they shared live reports and instant updates, mourned for the loss of life, highlighted the resemblance of the event to similar past disasters, and questioned what, or whom, should be held responsible for such a tragedy. There were many groups of participants, including journalists, media organizations, on-site witnesses, victims and families, the police, and local government officials, in narrating the event. These actors interacted with each other and all contributed to shaping memories of this significant moment. Not so coincidentally, it was also during this event that People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party government, launched its official Weibo account—an act that was seen as a milestone in the history of Weibo and Chinese social media in general. It was under these circumstances that my conversations with these two members of Weibo’s operations team took place, in which one of them said,

For me, Weibo gives expression to intensive social contentions accumulated in China during the past three decades (of China’s reform), perhaps even the past one-and-half century. Weibo is so important because these social contentions could not find such an effective way of expression before. ¹

As the above interview demonstrates, Weibo has had an important role to play in China, a country that has seen constant and dramatic changes—much like the landscape of social media itself. Weibo is a China-based micro-blog serving Chinese-speaking users worldwide. Launched in August 2009, it is one of many services provided by the web portal sina.​com. Weibo users actively report and generate debates over news events locally and globally, with its participants ranging from individuals to organizations across the world, most of whose primary language is Chinese. The dynamics of Weibo, especially the flow of news within and outside its domain, reflects the dynamics of contemporary social transition in China.

This book is about Weibo. It aims to capture the highs and lows of this social media platform that, since its launch in August 2009, has substantially altered the ways in which Chinese people respond to ongoing public events. I became a registered Weibo user in March 2010. At that time, Sina marketed Weibo as a news and information platform; it regarded journalists and media professionals as an important part of its user base. What struck me most at that time was the presence of a strong desire to remember what was happening—in other words, an anxiety over forgetting—on this platform. The information updates involved extensive discussions intermingling the “now” and “then” aspects of these events, with a blending of local and global participation in the ensuing information flow. At that time, journalists and media professionals were at the forefront of utilizing Weibo as a news platform. They brought past events to Weibo while reporting and discussing the current news; they made efforts to keep the public remembering what was happening, against attempts to censor their stories; they also became actively involved in the investigation of past events. It was the presence of such an anxiety over forgetting that motivated me to further investigate the construction of collective memory in social media platforms. In addition to media-related individuals, I also followed people who were active in sharing their opinions on public events, including activists, lawyers, scholars, and some business elites. After the first phase of this research concluded in January 2013, I continued daily observations on Weibo to keep track of its topical events as the second phase. By doing so, I ensured that my analysis incorporated the most up-to-date changes that were happening on and to this platform, providing continuity with what is now considered as the “past.”

Through the story of Weibo, this book explores the seemingly paradoxical relationship between transient information flows and the collective desire to remember ongoing events in the digital age. Its discussions are situated in an analytical framework that draws on three sets of interrelated social tensions: control–resistance, past–present, and global–local. Each of the three axes suggests a dimension of social contention: the penetration of state power into every aspect of social life, the accelerating information updates, and the rise of nationalism in the era of globalization. In this book, I conceptualize collective memory as a dynamic process through this three-dimensional framework, within the Internet culture that has taken root in—and is evolving along with—the search for modernity in a society constantly in transition. Collective memory is of particular importance in societies where the legitimacy of the ruling regime is constantly questioned due to unresolved past issues, where the pending threat of censorship and unpredictable policy changes have produced a strong sense of insecurity about remembering, and where official authorities need to be held accountable for misconduct that results in catastrophes or crises.

Operating on the three axes of social tensions, the making of collective memory on Weibo is a part of the culture of the contentious Internet, and journalism is an indispensable part of such a process. Over the past decade, studies on the Internet in China have generally focused on the relationship between the state and civil society, or state authority and grassroots resistance. ² Scholarship on the Chinese Internet has also been criticized for its predominant reliance on the Western-centric framework of democratization in authoritarian societies while ignoring the complexity of multiple actors and the historical contexts of new technologies. ³

This book is cognizant of the debate between the proponents and skeptics of the efficacy of social media and the Internet in general. The overly optimistic view of social media’s liberation potential, the emerging “freer, more creative subjectivities” in social media and protest culture, needs to be balanced with the consideration of “institutional, professional and procedural forms of politics.” ⁴ Studies have also revealed the limitation of social media in sustaining uprisings and revolution. ⁵ Social media may well be used by government too, as governmental authorities are also learning to adapt to the new technologies very quickly, ⁶ which leads to more effective control of online information flows.

Similarly, in this age of social media, the future of the Chinese Internet is far from clear or well-defined. Indeed, the Chinese cyberspace is becoming increasingly contentious. The Internet-based contentious activities are derived from “a broad spectrum of converging and contending forces, technological, cultural, social, and economic, as well as political.” These activities engage in contemporary social debates via a vibrant and creative Internet culture. ⁷ With the emergence of new technologies and China’s deepening encounter with the world, the past has provided various sources of conflict that shape today’s social contention. ⁸ Nevertheless, we should not be overly optimistic about the empowerment potential of social media, which mostly occurs at the symbolic level and is not easy to materialize. ⁹ Acts of subversion (or even open defiance) pose no real threat to the system, and the influences they have on society at large are at best incremental.

Weibo occupies a unique position in the Chinese and global social media landscape as the sole victor of the 2010–2012 Chinese micro-blogging service boom. Certain features of Weibo belong to the prototype of a micro-blogging service, although it would be misleading to consider Weibo as only a variation of such a prototype. While it is usually characterized as “the Chinese equivalent of Twitter” (or sometimes “Chinese Twitter”), ¹⁰ as this book will demonstrate, such a term is far too simplified to capture the complexity of a platform situated in this specific moment of Chinese social transition. We must also understand Weibo’s content and form as a continuation of its predecessors in the Internet culture, a response to continuously evolving state control over the Internet, and intensifying social dispute in China. The slogan at Weibo’s login page, “share what’s new around you anytime, anywhere,” encourages its users to post events around them, as well as thoughts and insights with a personal perspective. Such instantaneous, real-time, and ever-present informational updates create a web of awareness ¹¹ of the potential development of news events for journalists, Weibo staff, and individual users. So far as Weibo has been recognized as a mainstream social media platform in the Chinese-speaking media landscape, it has never ceased to produce or accommodate argument.

To follow a “moving target” in such a rapidly changing social media era is quite a challenge. This book therefore does not purport to offer a comprehensive analysis of Weibo, nor does it aims for a universally applicable model of studying social media, journalism, and collective memory. Instead, it offers insights into a moment of social transition by capturing a short period when Weibo’s power and reach were at its zenith, exploring the twists and turns that accompanied its phenomenal rise. It is also a response to the notion that Weibo has suffered a “decline” in the midst of the tightening state control and competition from other platforms such as Weixin (WeChat). Though it has lost its hegemonic market position, Weibo still sheds light on a China in transition—and contention.

Weibo as a Research Site

Fuch and Sandoval ¹² define social media on the basis of different forms of sociality ¹³ they support: information, communication, and community-building and collaborative work (most SNS and wikis). The broadness of this definition illustrates the flexible and sometimes unclear boundaries of social media. In this brave new world of social media that is digitized, mobile, and connectivity-oriented, journalism has begun to take on a new shape.

Weibo concentrated on news-led public affairs that pushed journalism to the forefront of social contention. Journalism benefits from the digital age and global network society, in which different groups of individuals collaborate to tell a story. ¹⁴ The culture of journalism becomes more collaborative, responsive, and interactive, ¹⁵ privileging the role of individuals. The participants of journalism in social media are not limited to professional journalists working for traditional media institutions. They include media-related professionals (media critics, columnists, scholars, web editors), media institutions, and those who are conventionally understood as “citizen journalists”— on-site reporters of a news event who are by no means trained as journalists. They spontaneously become “citizen journalists” because they happen to be at the scene during moments of crisis and feel an obligation to participate the news-making process. This “citizen witness” phenomenon has substantially contributed to news coverage by producing important firsthand accounts. ¹⁶ However, in the Chinese context, the term “citizen journalist” is largely prohibited in public discourse, and activities bearing any resemblance to citizen journalism are closely monitored by the government. ¹⁷ As early as Weibo’s inception, Sina began to invite journalists and media professionals to open Weibo accounts, among the first to users of the service, and these users played an important part in shaping Weibo into a news platform. Weibo participants who do not fit into these existing categories also contribute to the reporting on public events. For example, there are also scholars in the areas of journalism and media, as well as scholars and professionals with expertise relevant to topics the news events cover, such as history, law, economics, political science, and so on. Together they share their interpretations of the ongoing events on Weibo, offer on-the-spot analyses, and enlarge the journalistic interpretive community. ¹⁸

The moniker of “Chinese Twitter” does not do Weibo justice, as it has proven to be an intrinsic part of both Chinese Internet culture and social transitions in recent years. Weibo supports a broad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Weibo and Memory: Analyzing an Event-Oriented Platform with a Three-Dimensional Framework
• 3. Control and Resistance: Remembering and Forgetting in the Changing Dynamics of State, Market, and Individuals
• 4. Past and Present: Weibo, Historical Events, and News
• 5. Global and Local: Collective Memory, Global Chinese Identities, and Nationalism
• 6. “Universal Values” and “Chinese Characteristics”: Memory and Chinese Modernity
• 7. Remembering Weibo in China’s Social Transition
• 8. Conclusion
• Backmatter