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1. Publics, fans, and social media -- 2. Popular culture and ICTs -- 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 vs. renren : fan objects as network nodes -- 8. Weibo publics : celebrities as network nodes -- 9. Fandom publics : social formation in the network society.

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.

This study answers one general question using a country case: what shapes the young generations' political disengagement in Singapore? Taking the generational differences and institutional influence perspectives, this study highlights the time dimension to show the ebb and flow of political and (new) media landscape changes in a non-Western context, Singapore. By comparing focus group discussions conducted among 19–30 years old in 2011 vs. 2020, this paper finds that despite similarly claiming disinterest in politics, the 2011 youth were more attentive to political news than the 2020 youth. The changes in political institutions gave rise to this increased situational engagement. However, the gap between paying attention and taking action was still large in 2020, or even larger than in 2011, due to the increased complexity and competitiveness of politics that the 2011 youth observed via social media. The persistence of political disinterest suggests its dispositional connections to psychological barriers that are socially constructed over generations.

This article provides a focused analysis of perceived procedural fairness, including both its predictors and effects, within a context of moderated online deliberation. The article starts with a theoretical discussion about the concept, procedural fairness, against the background of deliberative democracy. Furthermore, the potential competitive relationship between procedural fairness and disagreement is reviewed in light of previous empirical evidence. The findings are made up of two parts: First, the predictors of perceived procedural fairness were explored among demographic variables, political involvement, and discussion activities. Second, the effects of perceived procedural fairness and perceived disagreement on outcomes such as enjoyment, satisfaction with group decisions, as well as intention of future participation are shown. A discussion on the roles of procedural fairness and disagreement in deliberation as well as the importance of experience in political participation is provided at the end of this article.

China currently has the largest Multi-Channel Networks (MCN) market in the world and developed a multi-layered ecosystem, which presents unique insights into our understanding of platforms as infrastructures. Through 18 semi-structured interviews and the walkthrough method, we found that Chinese MCNs can be divided into the following categories: (1) Live-streaming guilds, (2) E-commerce MCNs, (3) Agency MCNs, and (4) Old media MCNs. We also found that Chinese content platforms have not fully monopolized the intermediary power because they rely on Chinese MCNs to take on the risks of professional content production. In response, the intermediary risks of MCNs are also transferred to creators who work for MCNs. MCNs can help creators to game the algorithm and monetize their content, but can also exploit creators and leave them unprotected. The ambiguous roles played by Chinese MCNs point to an uncertain future for content platforms' infrastructuralization at large.

This article reviews extant conceptualizations of procedural justice and reports the results of an empirical study testing the effects of fair deliberation. From a communicative action perspective, we argue that Habermas's conceptions of speech conditions and validity conditions can be used to evaluate the discursive and substantive dimensions of procedural justice in deliberation. That is, fair deliberation is built on the fulfillment of discourse norms and the communicativeness of dialogic interactions. The communicative measures are compatible with extant procedural justice measures and provide a communication-centered ground for evaluating deliberative outcomes related to procedural justice. The case study involves public discussion of the Singaporean government's population policies on an online deliberative platform. The results show that when procedural justice is presented in the realization of both speech conditions and validity conditions, it fosters participants' beliefs in the rightfulness of deliberative policymaking. Additionally, speech conditions play a more important role than validity conditions in predicting citizens' specific policy support after online deliberation. The findings illustrate one instance of how communicative norms are prioritized in different deliberative settings and what deliberative benefits a fair procedure can achieve. The results shed light on the theorization of procedural justice and advance the extant knowledge of evaluating procedural justice in deliberation.

International audience ; Online deliberation offers a way for citizens to collectively discuss an issue and provide input for policy makers. The overall experience of online deliberation can be affected by multiple factors. We decided to investigate the effects of moderation and opinion heterogeneity on the perceived deliberation experience, by running the first online deliberation experiment in Singapore. Our study took place in three months with three phases. In phase 1, our 2,006 participants answered a survey, that we used to create groups of different opinion heterogeneity. During the second phase, 510 participants discussed about the population issue on the online platform we developed. We gathered data on their online deliberation experience during phase 3. We found out that higher levels of moderation negatively impact the experience of deliberation on perceived procedural fairness, validity claim and policy legitimacy; and that high opinion heterogeneity is important in order to get a fair assessment of the deliberation experience. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; Collaborative and social computing systems and tools; Web-based interaction.

Participation takes time in both synchronous and asynchronous communication. To encourage participation, most scholars suggested strategies to change participants' motivation to adjust the way how they distribute their time resources. We, instead, view time as an evolving environment with specific temporal norms. This study employed a multi-level event history model to explore what factors affect response behaviors in an online policy discussion forum. By proposing four time-constant individual post factors and four time-varying environment factors, and analyzing 1798 posts in the forum, the study found that both individual post and environment factors are significant predictors of online interactions in different time phases. Some interaction effects between individual post and environment factors were also found. Rather than merely focusing on participants' resource to take part in online discussions, we suggest that future studies should examine how contextual constraints that change over time can influence response behaviors.