Suchergebnisse

Disappeared websites are the missing pages of web history. We examine over 140 memory narratives of disappeared websites in China, in which 176 disappeared websites are remembered. We find that memories of disappeared websites rarely treat websites as dead objects, machines, or even as media, but more often as people whose death is mourned and memories cherished. They not only narrate the biographies of the websites but also the autobiographies of the story-tellers. The main biographical plot in these narratives of disappeared websites is a lovely life that was tragically cut short. Disappeared websites are most remembered for the passion, community, and sense of youthful idealism which they had inspired. Remembrances of disappeared websites are both retrospective and prospective. They resuscitate a lost golden age while expressing voices of protest at Internet censorship. They both highlight and repair a web history marked by disruption and disappearance.

Rankings of new media events function as an important way to define and interpret these events in public space. By analyzing 40 rankings of 413 new media events between 2007 and 2016, we first provide an empirical analysis of the widely discussed decline and substantial shifts of new media events around 2014, namely, the decrease of contentious events and the increase of consensus events. Second, we find that some of the actors construct the rankings based on their long-standing values and philosophies, such as commercial media's emphasis on progressivism and liberalism, and government propaganda departments' focus on social management and institutional order. The divergent constructions over the naming and ranking of new media events demonstrate that new media events have become sites of contestation over the dominance of the Internet space and the collective memory of the Internet history in China.