The Internet and New Social Formation in China

Fandom Publics in the Making

Weiyu Zhang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317629283
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

There are billions of internet users in China, and this number is continually growing. This book looks at the various purposes of this internet use, and provides a study about how the entertainment-consuming users form into publics through the mediation of technologies in the era of network society. It questions how individuals, mediated by new information and communication technologies, come together to form new social categories. The book goes on to investigate how public(s) is formed in the era of network society, with particular focus on how fans become publics in a society that follows the logic of network. Using online surveys and in-depth interviews, this book provides a rich description of the process of constructing a new social formation in contemporary China.

1 Publics, fans, and social media

Fundamental to the debate around social media should be the idea of social formation or the new forms of social collectivities. How do socially mediated individuals come together to form new social categories? The inquiry has been carried out in the vibrant discussions on virtual communities (Baym, 2000; Jones, 1995; Rheingold, 1993). Communities, taken away from their nostalgia of intimate interaction and dense connection (Bell and Newby, 1976; Bernard, 1973), are transformed by the modern conditions of society, salient among which is the rapid evolution of technologies. Whereas the exploration of virtual communities focuses on the style in which they are formed, maintained, and imagined, an important purpose of community seems to be neglected. A community is a social unit that connects individuals and society (Friedland, 2001). Watson (1997, p. 102) stated the purpose of community in one question: “How does a group struggle for greater representation in the larger society?” While the network approach of community measures the individual relational network and limits the function of community to social support (Wellman, 1999), the political connotation of community, implied in Watson’s question, remains unexamined. The notion of public, as a noun, refers to a specific social category that appears as a political actor (Splichal, 1999, p. 2). Community members become a public only if they engage in open contestations on issues that have consequences on their lives but are not under the members’ full and direct control. A further question needs to be asked: How do socially mediated individuals come together to act as political collectivities?

A tradition of examining new media as public sphere took roots in a Habermasian model of a universal discursive space for rational–critical debate (Habermas, 1989). As a revision of the Habermasian bias towards a bourgeois public sphere, subaltern or counter-public spheres (Fraser, 1993) were proposed as an empirically more accurate and normatively more inclusive lens to look at the political potential of new media. The shared academic interest here is to understand how new media provide infrastructural support to such spheres and whether the support is sufficient to reach the democratic ideal, be it the universal and rational ideal of Habermas, or the inclusive and engaging ideal of Fraser. Public in public sphere(s) is an adjective that describes a nature or an attribute of the sphere(s) (Splichal, 1999, p.17). This tradition does not pay much attention to public as a noun. Habermas merely used “a body of private persons assembled” (cited in Fraser, 1993, p. 10) to indicate a public. To Fraser (1993, p. 14), counter-publics mainly refer to “members of subordinated social groups.” The former casts too wide a net to capture an ephemeral social category that has been infamously claimed as phantom (Lippmann, 1925). The latter assumes the procedure of formation a done deal, jumping too fast from social groups to political publics. In other words, the public sphere(s) approach to examining the political aspects of new media suffers from the lack of focus on public(s), the actors who act in the discursive arena of open contestations. The public sphere(s) without public(s) has distracted our inquiry from describing the process through which virtual community members become online publics, and more pertinent to this book’s focus, how social media redefine this process.

The thought on public(s) as a social category can be traced back to the Chicago school of sociology that has been intrigued by the impact of Industrial Revolution in the twentieth century (e.g., Blumer, 1946; Park, 1904/1972). Other American and European intellectuals, including Dewey (1927), LeBon (1895/1960), Mills (1956), and Tarde (1890/1903), also contributed significantly to the theorization of public(s). In these efforts, public(s), as a developing social entity, is often contrasted with two collective concepts which are believed to be modern entities, namely mass and crowd. Community is left out of the comparisons as the concept was constructed as a pre-modern sociological category that inspires the reflection on the changes brought by Industrial Revolution (Calhoun, 1980). Consistent across the comparisons is an interest in finding out the role that the modern communication media play in shaping these social entities. The relations to modern media, at least partially, differentiate public, crowd, and mass. A communicative model of public (Price, 1992) argues that a public has to form itself via discussion and debate, which highlights the role of media in enabling such discursive exchanges. In other words, a public has to be mediated in a massified modern society.

The necessity of mediation in social formulation directs our attention to another common social category seen in modern societies, namely audiences. Fans, as the most actively engaged audiences, have a close association with media products but the concept was rarely seriously considered as comparable to public(s), largely due to its everyday connotation of obsession and irrationality (Hills, 2002, p. ix). Recent studies point out that the opposition between fan culture and formal politics is a normative construction rather than an empirical separation (Van Zoonen, 2005, pp. 1–4). Contrary to the popular representation of fans as atomized and dangerous individuals (Jensen, 1992), fans have been found to be socially connected and creatively engaged (Fiske, 1992). Van Zoonen (2004) argued for three connections between fan culture and politics: fan communities are structurally equivalent to political constituencies; the two entities make use of and value similar repertoires of activity; and the emotional investments fans often make are crucial to civic engagement. If political purpose is not alien to fans and their activities, it is without much difficulty to admit that fans can act as publics in certain circumstances.

The transformation from fans to publics is now largely built upon the mediation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as the Internet and mobile phones, which are considered the foundation of a network society (Castells, 1996; Rainie and Wellman, 2012). Cyberspace does not merely provide an online replication of the offline fandom and, rather, intersects with fans’ relationships in such a way as to alter fan practices and identities. As Hills (2002, p. 172) said, “(t)he mediation of ‘new media’ must be addressed rather than treated as an invisible term within the romanticized ‘new’.” Parallel to this argument is to argue that the mediation of social media significantly influences the manner in which fans become publics. Baym (2007) found that social media, as a recent phase of new media development, not only overcome the constraints of geographic locale but also transcend the boundary of disparate online platforms. The fashion of “networked collectivism” provides fans a complex ecosystem of sites to connect. Jenkins (2006) argued that ICTs support the networked practices of fans and their collective intelligence, which have the potential to foster political activism.

This chapter introduces a theoretical discussion of how the network logic of new ICTs leads to new ways of forming publics. It opens with a review of different conceptualizations of public, with an emphasis on the contrast between European, American, and Chinese definitions. Whereas “public” is defined in the West by its distinction from “mass” and “crowd” against the background of the Industrial Revolution, Chinese history has witnessed a conceptual evolution that stresses the oppositional relationship between “public” and “private” along the moral dimension. Both Western and Chinese definitions, however, seem to encounter the term’s contemporary discontinuation when fandom becomes the raw material from which publics are forged. Fandom seems to contradict the Western notion of public due to the popular understanding of fans as isolated, obsessive, and irrational. It also contradicts the Chinese notion of public, as fans are categorized as private individuals and their fandom as pursuing self-interests. These contradictions invite us to reconsider the boundary between public and private and the social conditions in which the boundary is drawn. It is argued that network society, in contrast to mass society, is becoming the dominating logic of social formation in China. The social conditions associated with the network society urge us to redefine public as a relational concept, which illustrates the network logic (in contrast to the hierarchy logic) of connecting individuals and building visibility. The chapter concludes with an outline of the book.

Crowds/masses/ publics vs. audiences/fans

Starting from the days of the Chicago school, the conceptualization of public has always been driven by inquiring about the formation of social collectivities under different societal conditions. During the period when society became massified, the concern was that destructive and violent crowds seemed to mark the era. Many scholars (Tarde, 1890/1903; Park, 1904/1972) tried to define public through its contrast to crowd. Crowds, as LeBon (1895/1960, p. 10) believed, are mentally inferior and essentially “barbarian.” Individuals in crowds are anonymous, emotional, and unconscious of their critical agency, which results in the rapid spread of spontaneous imitation of even the most violent behaviors. This fearful description of crowds was no longer prominent in recent scholarship when terms like “the wisdom of crowds” (Surowiecki, 2004) present a fresh look at loosely structured and collectively unreflective associations. Surowiecki (2004) argued that if the individuals in crowds can be diverse, independent, and decentralized, an aggregation of the private judgments leads to intelligent collective decisions. He suggested that if informed individuals can be spared from the contagious influence that suppresses their agency, crowds are able to generate better outcomes than the situation in which individuals can fully communicate with each other through either emotional imitation or rational discussions. However, this elimination of what Park (1904/1972, p. 79) calls “primary reciprocity” from crowds only makes them more like masses.

Mass, as another concept constantly in comparison to public, was considered more worrisome than crowd to displace public (Blumer, 1946). Similar to what has been listed in Surowiecki’s book, individuals in masses are largely anonymous, highly heterogeneous, and have very little interaction or communication. An aggregation mechanism, such as an opinion poll, might be used to pool their intelligence. What binds together the masses is not shared emotion as in crowds but a common focus of attention. Different from crowds in LeBon’s sense, masses are so geographically dispersed and physically separated that they are not able to act effectively together. Mills (1956, p. 304) estimated that modern conditions appeared to be more favorable to mass rather than public because “fewer people express opinions than receive them” from mass media and the authorities that control the channels of political action penetrate the mass. The mediation through mass communication channels contributes to the formation of masses due to the systematic control over these channels by authorities, which successfully eliminates an autonomous sphere of communication between individuals.

The concept, public, differs from crowd in its critical ability to “think and reason” whereas crowd only has “the ability to feel and empathize” (Park, 1904/1972, p. 80). In addition, it differs from mass in the prominence of communication taking the form of disagreement and discussion surrounding a particular issue. Public also differs from Surowiecki’s intelligent crowd for the same reason: communication, in particular discussion, has to be a central mechanism that connects individuals in a public. In short, a communication mode of critical discussion separates public from crowd and mass. What is shared among the three concepts, however, should not be underestimated. All of them are “initial routes to the creation of wholly new social entities” (Price, 1992, p. 26). They are bonded by a collective force: emotional attachment in crowd, critical discussion in public, and mere attention in mass. None of them has evolved into formally organized collectivities, in which roles, norms, and traditions become fixed, and therefore, serve as “empirical preliminary stages” (Park, 1904/1972, p. 80) leading to social changes.

The conceptual distinction discussed above indicates a fundamental interest in the “associational relationships” (Emirbayer and Sheller, 1999) during the transformation of social morphology (Castells, 1996). One pillar of such transformation is the mechanism of mediation. When crowds are made possible through the “primary reciprocity” that is contagious and emotional, the emergence of masses is often attributed to the one-way communication mode of mass media (e.g., newspapers and TV). The mass circulation of popular texts (in the form of media products, sports events, celebrities, and more) also leads to the formation of another social category, audiences (Livingstone, 2005). A widely held view seeking to oppose audiences and publics puts the concept of audience closest to the concept of mass, in terms of passivity and isolation (Hartley, 2002). An alternative view, however, argues that as mediation becomes an irreversible reality, no publics can be formed without being audiences or, media users because media bring visibility or popularity that the concept of public entails. Yet audiences “sustain a modest and often ambivalent level of critical interpretation, drawing upon—and thereby reproducing—a somewhat ill-specified, at times inchoate or even contradictory sense of identity of belong which motivates them towards but does not wholly enable the kinds of collective and direct action expected of a public” (Livingstone, 2005, p. 31).

Among those most actively engaged audiences are fans. A negative image is often associated with fans in popular wisdom and mass media representations (Hills, 2002, p. ix). Fans are often depicted as atomized, manipulated, obsessed, and irrational, who in many aspects resemble crowds (in term of enthusiasm and emotionality) and masses (in terms of shared attention and lack of communication). However, academics found that fans are communicative by interacting with each other through various media (Baym, 2000); creative by engaging in interpretive and expressive practices that both enjoy and challenge the texts provided (Hellekson and Busse, 2006), and committed by investing their enduring emotion into the fan objects (Grossberg, 1992).

With the rebuttal against the anti-social and agency-deprived definition of fans, the contrast between fans and publics seems to dwell on one dimension: ration versus emotion. The normative notion of public prescribes rationality as the key feature of the communicative action seen in publics (Habermas, 1984). Specifically, a public, defined as private individuals coming to a public sphere to debate, thus has to conform to the principles of the discursive space, such as providing “validity claims” (Habermas, 1979). This rationality bias has been challenged from historical, theoretical, and empirical angles (Fraser, 1993). Historically, the reason-focused bourgeois public sphere has excluded subordinated and disempowered social groups based on such claims as that they are not capable of reasoning. Theoretically, the insistence on rationality limits the legitimate forms of expression to reasoned arguments and downplays the importance of other discursive means such as story-telling and emotional appeals. Empirically, non-rational expressions have been and are widely used in public contestations, making the exclusive focus on rationality a futile theorization. It is proposed that our definition of public shall loose its normative constraint, i.e., the rationality bias. Publics are connected through disagreements and discussions, which can take any forms of discursive expressions. Back to the fundamental question Watson (1992) asked, a public emerges when the individuals, who share the attention on certain issues, makes efforts to represent themselves to the larger society through engaging in debates among themselves as well as with other societal members. Fans, therefore, can become publics when they try to represent their interests and put up their appeals in front of the larger society.

Public as just vs. private as unjust

When Splichal (1999) reviewed the concepts of public, publicness, and publicity in American and European traditions, he noticed that in contrast to public as a specific social category (e.g., the Chicago School) or publicness as a specific nature of particular activities or spaces (e.g., Habermas), publicity has been used as a moral principle by political philosophers such as Kant and Dewey. The principle of publicity, according to Kant, means that the maxim of all actions that affect the rights of other human beings is that these actions have to be made pu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgement
• 1. Publics, fans, and social media
• 2. Popular culture and digital technologies
• 3. Rear window to movies: from fans to subaltern publics
• 4. Ten years after: from subaltern to regular publics
• 5. Online translation communities: from consumers to prod-users
• 6. House of cards: from entertainment to politics
• 7. Douban versus Renren: fan objects as network nodes
• 8. Weibo publics: celebrities as network nodes
• 9. Fandom publics: social formation in the network society
• Index