Suchergebnisse

The history of the internet in China is often narrated from the standpoint of infrastructural development, commercial growth, and social change—a framework that foregrounds governmental policies, corporate decisions, and large-scale public debates. And yet, in parallel to these processes, the widespread adoption of the internet and its domestication by hundreds of millions of Chinese users have resulted in a long history of digital folklore: everyday, vernacular practices responding to this new communication medium through creativity and invention. By extending the concepts of folk, the lore and the vernacular to the realm of digital media, the analytical framework of digital folklore helps understanding the relationship between creativity and new communication technologies. Drawing on a rich body of academic research on the topic, this short essay reviews three decades of Chinese digital folklore, highlighting the continuities and peculiarities of vernacular creativity throughout the country's internet history.

The relative novelty of digital ethnography as a research methodology, along with the challenges that it moves to classical understandings of fieldwork, participation and representation, results in a repertoire of professional illusions through which digital ethnographers justify their work when confronted with the disciplinary culture of anthropology. This essay is based on the author's reflexive experience of researching digital media use in China, and updates Gary Alan Fine's 1993 article "Ten Lies of Ethnography" by identifying three lies of digital ethnography. Illustrating each of these lies through an archetypal figure – the 'networked field-weaver', the 'eager participant-lurker' and the 'expert fabricator' – this article argues for the need to confront methodological illusions and embrace the tensions behind them as useful heuristics for conducting ethnographic research on, through and about digital media.

AbstractMachine vision is one of the main applications of artificial intelligence. In China, the machine vision industry makes up more than a third of the national AI market, and technologies like face recognition, object tracking and automated driving play a central role in surveillance systems and social governance projects relying on the large-scale collection and processing of sensor data. Like other novel articulations of technology and society, machine vision is defined, developed and explained by different actors through the work of imagination. In this article, we draw on the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to understand how Chinese companies represent machine vision. Through a qualitative multimodal analysis of the corporate websites of leading industry players, we identify a cohesive sociotechnical imaginary of machine vision, and explain how four distinct visual registers contribute to its articulation. These four registers, which we call computational abstraction, human–machine coordination, smooth everyday, and dashboard realism, allow Chinese tech companies to articulate their global ambitions and competitiveness through narrow and opaque representations of machine vision technologies.