On March 21st, Harvard Berkman Center hold a workshop entitled “Understanding the New Wave of Social Cooperation: A Triangulation of the Arab Revolutions, European Mobilizations and the American Occupy Movement” and the class of Networked Social Movements reflected on this event through this series of blog posts:

Artist As Researcher? Researcher As Artist?
–Gabi

In democratic countries, activists of social movements tend to create adversarial or controversial scenes to attract attention from media and expand their influence in society. This strategy aims to generate pressure from the public to the authority, and thus increase the possibility of success of the movements. However, scholars of Chinese studies find the strategy of resistance in authoritarian countries is not explicitly adversarial. Activists often position themselves in line with the official ideology so as to obtain rightful identity. Based on this discussion, my approach further invites the factor of media ecosystem in discussion. Strategies adopted by activists are inherently mediated by the media environment if they reach out for the support of the public.

I propose that in a complex media ecosystem in China, a more effective strategy of positioning is non-adversarial, if the appeal made by actors is materialistic. If the appeal of the movement is about high politics supported by oppositional ideologies, actors will adopt an adversarial strategy, but the information about this movement cannot flow to mainstream channels of Chinese media ecosystem.

This week I am working on a model to map out civic actions in China. I borrowed models on social movements in the field of political science and added one dimension, the level of centralization of the media involved in the civic actions, to understand various types of civic actions in China. I do not intend to include all forms of participations but to provide an analytical method when categorizing them.

1. Hierarchy of Media

Newspapers/Broadcasting: State-owned national newspapers (People’s Daily), State-owned TV (CCTV), provincial party owned newspapers/TV, Southern Newspapers (South Weekend Newspaper, which is ideologically liberal in contrast with pro-party media).

During the past two months, I examined the use of the term "media ecology" by different scholars and reviewed some works on Chinese Internet. One school of study on the media ecology defines it in broader way, and focuses on its fundamental influence on the society as a whole, the impact on the culture and its potential to alter people's way of thinking. I also wrote about how Chinese scholars approach the topic of media and civil society. They call for the redefinition of various terms such as "civil society""public sphere" and "political participation" in Chinese context and the stronger role of the state and the priority of economic development should not be neglected in our discussion.

In the article “The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flow During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions”, Gilad Lotan, Erhardt Graeff and others use the term ecosystem by referring to the relationships between different actors in a networked online environment. Providing snapshots of the information flow in 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions, they point out that the nature of news work is experiencing the shift from the era of mass media to the networked digital media. Traditionally the news organizations are considered as the agency of professionalism, but in networked news environments, the production of news is described in terms of connected actors including non-professionals in various geographic locations, which challenges the normative models of journalism. Within the context of Twitter information flows during Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions, they demonstrate a recurring pattern that professionals interacted with bloggers, media organizations, non-media groups, activists, researchers and many other actors through commenting, retweeting, and hashtagging.

This week I examined several books on the political implications of the Internet in China and all of them called for studies on the intricate complexity of the relations between the Internet and political sphere. Factors such as market, state-society, culture, civil society, public opinion and international relations more or less are included in the discussion. There seems to be a consensus from the current literature that the great dynamics and complexity of social conditions should be taken into consideration rather than simply to adopt a technological determinism view that assumes the use of Internet will automatically lead to democratization. It does not sound like a profound discovery, but actually it is one of the most difficult tasks for current scholars to reveal the complexity of various relations in this field. Scholars situate themselves to different levels of interventions, some touching on political backgrounds(Tang, 2005), some historicizing the Internet (Zhou, 2005), some on policy advocacy(Kalathil, 2003). All of the books provide vivid and substantial evidence such as case studies, interviews, and surveys, but not all of them are theoretically coherent.

The question how Internet empowers or disempwers Chinese civil society has haunted me for some time and in 2010 I did a Chinese college students survey to try to establish the linear causal relationship between social networking sites use and their political participation, but when I look back I feel the question being asked might be too simplistic. Studies on the relations between Internet use and Chinese civil society ( the term civil society definitely needs to be re-examined in an authoritarian context) should not be reduced only to discover a positive/negative linkage pattern, but instead other social factors, and cultural contexts should be taken into consideration to complicate the research questions.

The term of media ecology has been used in various contexts, so when we ask about the themes under the media ecology tradition, different intellectual groups might give distinct answers. One theory group has been thoroughly illustrated by Casey Man Kong Lum and many other contributors in the book “Perspectives on Culture, Technology, and Communication: The Media Ecology Tradition”. Lum described that the term media ecology has been used as a metaphor including McLuhan, while it was Neil Postman that gave the term a formal definition as the study of media environments encompassing new field of media studies dated in 1968. (p.10-p.11). Postman addressed the fundamental principle of media ecology as “a medium is a technology within which a culture grows; that is to say, it gives form to a culture’s politics, social organization and habitual way of thinking” and the word ecology suggests “interaction between media and human beings give a culture its character; and one might say, help a culture to maintain symbolic balance.” (p.62)