- Title
- Social media interactions and Chinese identities: a comparative ethnographic study of Chinese youth and rural women’s identity constructions
- Creator
- Wang, Yini
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- The contemporary political and economic context in China has shown strong momentum for the development of information and communications technologies. The impacts of these technological developments have drawn wide discussion by both Chinese and western intellectuals. However, current research on Chinese identity practices in these contexts focuses mostly on the political aspects of Chinese online participations and the activities of the younger generation. Yet alterative groups of emerging Internet and social media users, especially older rural women have rarely been looked at. The polemics of Chinese identity constructions in online spaces is therefore open for investigation. This thesis meets this challenge by contributing to an understanding of Chinese identity played out in ordinary contexts through social media integrated as part of everyday life activities. Specifically, it interprets how Chinese youth and older rural women engage with social media, thereby making sense of themselves and their identity roles. The research has been enlightened by social phenomenology and social constructionism theories and adopted an ethnographic methodology. The methods involved 5.5 months of fieldwork in Hunan University and Hanpu Town in Changsha, China in 2015. Accounts were collected from 26 final-year university students who were aged between 21-25, and 25 rural women who were aged between 40-52, and were based on both online and offline participant observations, in-depth interviews, informal interviews, participants’ diaries and questionnaires. The evidence uncovered from the fieldwork demonstrates that Confucian cultural values and norms have been unreservedly cultivated in Chinese online self- presentations for both the younger cohort’s and the older women’s everyday identity performances. The thesis proposes a new model of the differential mode of association proposed by the Chinese anthropologist Xiaotong Fei (2012) adding new interpretations of the Chinese ‘situational self’ that speak to the transformations brought about by social media within the current dynamic of Chinese social, cultural and political contexts.
- Subject
- social media; online identity; ethnography; rural women; Chinese identity
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1395158
- Identifier
- uon:33823
- Rights
- Copyright 2018 Yini Wang
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 7 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 273 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |