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.

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.