Asia in Focus
Asynchronous Session
A Study of the Affective Labor of Chinese High Popularity Star Fans View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yuruo Wei
In China, the way fans participate in media production is becoming more mainstream and diversified, and the fan groups themselves carry emotional attributes, so studies of affective labor involving fans are gradually increasing. Fan-controlled comments belong to a feature of fan culture that has received attention for its rapid growth and influence. This paper using sentiment analysis and keyword analysis examines the main types of "emotions" of today's high popularity fans and classifies them into four categories: idols, fan communities, self, and the outside world. Both positive and negative emotions coexist. The study found that fans engage in this kind of obligatory affective labor, creating secondhand in exchange for personal spiritual enrichment, and focusing more on building and expressing emotions. In addition, as affective laborers, they not only form group symbols because of their shared emotions and concerns but also gain a sense of belonging to a fan community. Throughout the process of controlling comments, the time and energy of fan groups are consumed, their emotions are controlled, and their behavior is restrained, but the immediate purpose they want to achieve is not really achieved. What seems to be an active choice is a trap of alienated labor, being bound and controlled by the forces.
Postsocialism and Artificial Intelligence in China View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Qiaoyu Cai
One flicker point of today’s geopolitics is around the race of artificial intelligence (AI), mainly between the two monolithic stakeholders, the United States and China. What if the logic, the twist, and the turn of such struggle, underlying the surface gloss of a national competition for technocratic primacy, is more fundamentally a competition between alternative articulations of cultural politics, expressed in the language of AI? The essay follows the “cultural turn” of Machine Learning and argues for an “end-to-end” sociological analysis of AI, not as a technical implement but as a techno-social semiosis working into a locality with implications of mutual transformation vis-à-vis grounded epistemologies. The essay delves into such a transformation process in the case of postsocialist China by mobilizing both AI and China as analytical as opposed to essential categories, with their own telos, cosmos, and historicity, and contends to prioritize “social” as the level of analysis where a cultural politics of AI is taking shape through AI’s “deep learning” of the postsocialist Chinese reality. The core pitch is a serious consideration of postsocialist informationalism as an alternative articulation of Cloud politics with nuanced but important differences in sociopolitical implications than the neoliberal one.
Featured Becoming Transhuman - the Machine Is Us : The Dash is Deluzean View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Amanda Long
Continuing an ongoing philosophical conversation about the order of rank and value, media theorist and evolutionary biologist Donna Haraway states in A Cyborg Manifesto that the classifications of human, machine, and animal species blur if one examines them at the genetic or molecular level; the order and rank of human supremacy dissolves. In the late 19th century following the acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution, how were the fuzzy lines between humans, animals, and machines drawn and by whom? At what point do we, as humans, become transhuman—enhanced by technology? Can order, rank, and classification of species be challenged or changed within the human-nonhuman kingdom as the transhuman world evolves through representations in media and in perception? Taking responsibility for classifications and ranking means recognizing, in Haraway’s words, that “the machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.” There is no “natural” body in posthumanism. The cyborg figuration problematizes borders between semiotic and material aspects of the body (for example, gender/sex), pointing to untenable clear separations between biomachinic materiality and sociocultural dimensions. We focus on how classifications of human, machine, animal species blur in the twenty-first century. Scholars present research on media representations of transhumanism, such as AI, vaccines, prosthetic extensions, bioengineering of life, cochlear implants, transgender identity, transrace status, sentient cars, communication with animals, and immortality research.
