Social Media and Ordinary Life: Affect, Ethics, and Aspiration in Contemporary China

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Cara Wallis

Social Media and Ordinary Life

Affect, Ethics, and Aspiration in Contemporary China

Cara Wallis

$192

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

New York University Press
29 April 2025

Asian history; Media studies; Communications engineering & telecommunications

Series: Critical Cultural Communication

How Chinese citizens use social media

Focusing on domestic workers, rural microentrepreneurs, disadvantaged young creatives, and young feminists, Social Media and Ordinary Life is a deeply moving ethnography of how digital media infrastructures and platforms are woven into the rhythms of ordinary, everyday life. In choosing to foreground marginalized groups and communities, Cara Wallis gently shifts our attention away from the world of “social media influencers” and tech-centric discourses of entrepreneurial lives towards a decidedly ambivalent terrain of routine life practices.

Social Media and Ordinary Life argues that understanding these individual experiences of the everyday enables greater insight into larger transformations taking place in contemporary China. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork across China, Wallis foregrounds the entanglement of affect, emotion, ordinary ethical decisions, and desires connected to social media as it is used for self-expression, self-representation, fights for equality, maintenance of community, and economic livelihood. Four case studies show how social media is integrated into the articulation of affects by a wide variety of “ordinary” Chinese subjects: disadvantaged young creatives who migrate to Beijing from rural areas and use social media to cultivate their personal aesthetics; micro-entrepreneurs in rural Shandong province, especially women whose affective ties to the patriarchal family constrain their use of technology for economic enhancement; domestic workers, all women, in urban homes who use social media to build community and construct themselves as ethical subjects; and young feminists spread across China who engage in various types of cultural production and deploy social media in their fight for gender equality, often facing social and/or political marginalization in the process.

Amid daunting forces—big data, artificial intelligence, massive surveillance—this book centers the “small,” showing how structural inequality, the urban/rural divide, patriarchal gender norms, and generational differences lead to contradictory or ambivalent outcomes of technology use. Even so, for these individuals and many others, social media is deeply intertwined with aspirations for a better future.

By: Cara Wallis
Imprint: New York University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781479825035
ISBN 10: 1479825034
Series: Critical Cultural Communication
Pages: 296
Publication Date: 29 April 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Cara Wallis is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones, and her articles have been published in numerous journals, including Feminist Media Studies and New Media & Society.

Reviews for Social Media and Ordinary Life: Affect, Ethics, and Aspiration in Contemporary China

Based on over a decade of research and a deep understanding of Chinese society and its transformations, Cara Wallis uses social media as a lens through which to tell the story of social life in 21st-century China. Combining theoretical sophistication with ethnographic sensitivity, this book is a richly detailed and astute account of everyday life and technological mediation. It will be required reading for anyone interested in social media and China by one of the most eminent scholars in the field. * Mirca Madianou, author of Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful * Through longitudinal ethnographic research, Cara Wallis provides innovative analyses of labor, technology, and aspirations for a better future in China. Wallis delves into Chinese cultural traditions and insightfully engages affect theory, Western literature on neoliberalism, and Chinese notions of ethics and morality to develop the concept of a neo/non-liberal China. Social Media and Ordinary Life makes significant and distinctive contributions to studies in communication, labor, and gender from ethical, affective, and psychological perspectives. * Jie Yang, Simon Fraser University *