Temporality, Embodiment, and Creativity: A Critical Multimodal Study of New Practices on Chinese Social Media

With state-led strategic decision to digitally transform China, China has witnessed rapid growth in digital industries and become one of the global leaders in digital innovation in the past two decades (Woetzel 2018; CPC news 2020). Seamlessly integrated into the daily life of ordinary Chinese people across all age groups, Chinese social media platforms are serving a diverse range of commercial, social, cultural, and political functions. As noted in a recent commentary (Huang 2021), just as physical time and space across China have been significantly condensed with the gigantic, standardized network of high-speed railways, the Chinese internet has been the biggest leveller in modernizing Chinese people’s lives. Online resources afford Chinese social media users new ways of expressing their voices, networking, conducting economic transactions, and participating in the imagined community of ‘all Chinese internet users’ (Yang et al. 2015). Novel linguistic and semiotic practices in the form of multilingual language play, neologisms, emojis, memes, ‘tranßcripting practices’ (Li and Zhu 2019), and the latest, multimodal performances, are adopted by both elite groups (including state actors) and ordinary people, to serve diverse social and political purposes (Li 2016; Dong, 2018; Zhou 2020a; Zhou 2022a).

In this project, we will conduct a comprehensive study of multimodal practices on Chinese social media, spanning across wide age/social groups and covering a diversity of new platforms. With an investigation of emergent digital technologies and their distinctive semiotic affordances, we seek to further conceptualize two under-theorized notions in multimodal studies, i.e., ‘temporality’ and ‘embodiment’. Overall, we aim to provide a more rounded and updated theorization of multimodal semiotic practices mediated by digital technologies, which will potentially inform other studies.

In addition, offering three case studies about new practices of under-studied user groups and their experiences on Chinese social media, we hope to expand the scope of current studies and shed light on latest developments in Chinese marketing industries, digital economy, youth cultures, and online communities. Most importantly, we will highlight the mediated circulations of people and data, affects and values, which characterize China’s distinct digital modernity.

Responding to recent calls to conduct more situated and ethnographic studies in digital discourse studies, sociolinguistics, and social semiotics, in this project we adopt a multi-disciplinary perspective to study social media users’ experiences and practices. The complex interactions between digital technologies, users’ creative practices, and wider social, economic conditions within the increasingly commercialized Chinese social media will also be explored.