Orígenes del framing

3.1 The One Child Generation and their digital communication engagement

Parallel to social aspects of the risk society, the global development of digital technology offers technical affordances and opportunities for the One Child Generation’s participation, negotiation, and social engagement.

The bourgeoning of the online/offline community in China is accelerated by the rise of digital media platforms and the One Child Generations is experimenting with new activities and forms of sociality that support their interests on line and off line. According to a statistical report about the use of the Internet from CNNIC China Internet Network Information Centre (2014), China has 513 million Internet users, more than double the 245 million users in the United States. This is the largest number of Internet users in the world. China also has the world’s most active environment for social media. With the development of the Internet, Social Networking Sites are the most lucrative Internet sector in China recent years, accounting for more than 300 million users in China in 2014 (CNNIC, 2014). More

than 300 million people use blogs, social-networking sites, microblogs and other online communities. Especially, young people aged below 35 are the most active users. The Internet and mobile usage is significantly more common among young people. China’s online users spend more than 40 percent of their time online on social media, a figure that continues to rise rapidly. Having the world’s biggest Internet user base of 513 million people, China also has the world’s most active environment for social media. More than 300 million people in the country actively engage with blogs, social-networking sites, microblogs, and other online communities (Chiu et al., 2012). Social media began in China in 1994 with online forums and communities and migrated to instant messaging in 1999 like Tencent QQ. Tencent QQ, popularly known as QQ, is an instant messaging software service developed by Chinese company Tencent Holdings Limited. In 2015, there are 829 million active QQ accounts, with a peak of 176.4 million simultaneous online QQ users. Blogging took off in 2004, followed a year later by social-networking sites with chatting capabilities such as Renren and Kaixin001. The Digital service Douban emerged in 1995 targeting the youth demographic. Sina Weibo launched in 2009, offering microblogging with multimedia. Tencent WeChat appeared later in 2010, offering instant messaging application services similar to WhatsApp. According to CNNIC (2014), the use of mobile technologies to access social media is increasingly popular in China. There were more than 100 million mobile social users in 2010, a number that is forecast to grow by about 30 percent annually. Almost all these digital media platforms have technological functions for organising community building like QQ group, Weibo Group, WeChat group and Douban group. Digital media orchestrates the sharing of community activities by social media and mobile applications (apps). Social spaces are created around and through the use of

communication technology. These spaces create sociality, a sense of belonging through social integration and communities and they engage the young generation in politics or civic activities.

The One Child Generation, who were born after 1980 have grown up immersed in digital technologies, with a life fully integrated with connectivity, public display, sharing, feedback, and the constant availability of the Internet. The term

‘digital natives’ and related terminology such as ‘digital generations’ illustrate that technology offers a new form of empowerment for young people while accentuating a generational gap. The use of digital media communication has enhanced young people’s sense of efficacy and self-expression, but also has a reductive affection on young people’s face-to-face communication. Net-generation aids technology liberating and employing young people, enabling them to become global citizens (Prensky, 2001). Digital media has enhanced young peoples’ use of technology in self-construction and self-expression, identity performance and experimentation. The Internet, mobile technology, social media have become prominent in the new platforms of the digital era. The young generation uses this digital technology to construct personalised networks of friends, colleagues and affinity groups. However, David Buckingham (2011) argues the idea of digital technology is utopian and overstates generational differences:

‘Proponents of the digital native argument typically overstate the extent and effects of technological change and ignore elements of continuity. Yet the history of technology suggests that change, however rapid, is generally incremental rather than revolutionary’ (Buckingham, 2011, p. ix-x).

Moreover, Turkle (2010), and Howard Gardner and Katie Davis (2013) shifted attention to the problem of over-engagement with digital communication among teens. They note the drawbacks of digital disconnectedness and how teenagers are

substituting perceptions by others online for real self-exploration in shaping their identities, intimacy and imaginations. The threat is of its replacement of primary human relationships. Chinese generation’s digital engagement has been gained academic attentions in China, however, in the Chinese context how the younger cohort of the One Child Generation relates to the lack of face-to-face trust is understudied.

3.2 Digital media’s empowerment on individual and collective forms

While digital media has empowered individuals, the Internet demonstrates the interplay of individualism and collectivism. Kelly (2009) notes the Internet allows a spectrum of attitudes, techniques and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, user-led content creation and aggregation. Wikipedia, Flickr and Twitter are examples of an emerging collectivism as vanguards of a cultural movement in social media, consequently new digital collectivism lies in community and peer to peer participation and collective production, not in economic ownership. The process begins with ‘sharism’. In this thesis, sharism is the interaction and grassroots community building to share information, lifestyle, values and social capitals that produces new forms of social awareness and civic engagement. In other words, there is emerging independent ethos concerning a collective social consciousness, which is a combination of self-development with the expressed in altruism and respect for the welfare of others. In the same line with the digital sharing, it moves from cooperation, collaboration, and finally to the new collectivism (Shirky, 2008).

The process of digital collaboration and production is echoed by Yochai Benkler (2006). In The Wealth of Networks, Benkler sees the emergence of social production and peer production as an alternative to both state-based and market-based closed proprietary systems. The Internet has become a hybrid system that blends market and nonmarket mechanisms. Enabled by free software, the networked information economy departs from the industrial information economy by improving the efficiency of nonmarket production. Generally it is radically decentralised, collaborative, non-proprietary and based on sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on either market signals or managerial commands (Benkler, 2006). 

3.3 The One Child Generation’s community building through digital sharing

China’s One Child Generation’s digital engagement is part of the global trend of digital sharing culture. It is rational to contextualise sharism with media theories of digital connection, digital ‘We Culture’, and Remix Culture allowed by Creative Commons. Charles Leadbeater in We-think (2009) argues the communitarian potential of social media tools is not only based on mass consumption but also on mass innovation, exemplified in phenomena such as Wikipedia and YouTube. This new mode of ‘We-think’ is social media-inflected and is reshaping fundamental aspects of the economy, lifestyle, work, consumption, and innovation, all activities associated with concept of sharing collective intelligence at the global scale (Levy, 1997; Fuchs, 2009). When people are working together on social media applications towards common goals, they therefore benefit from their shared contributions towards a greater goal, which challenges and extends the notion of the Internet as a

self-presentational culture. Charles Leadbeater (2009) also highlights digital sharing in aiding an unparalleled social creativity. This web inherited communal culture has a link to the counter-culture of the 1960s, ‘combined with pre-industrial ingredients, it has resurrected folk culture and the commons as a shared basis for productive endeavor’ (Leadbeater, 2009, p. 6). ‘The web’s underlying culture of sharing, decentralisation and democracy makes it an ideal platform for groups to self-organise, combine their ideas and know-how, and to create together (Leadbeater, 2009, p.7).’ Therefore, it can lead to collective creativity and community building.

Some leading thinkers (Lessig, 2007; Jenkins, 2008) behind Creative Commons describe how digital media is aiding social functions of sharing through free tools that enable creators to easily make their work available to the public for legal sharing and remix. Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that legitimates the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools (Lessig, 2002). Remix Culture is where diverse genres constantly are remixed and redeveloped on the Internet (Fagerjord, 2010). People with inexpensive computers are able to copy and paste elements from digital mass culture and assemble them into new works (Lessig, 2007). The idea of universal access to research, education, and culture is made possible through the shared culture of Creative Commons and digital Remix Culture. Early Chinese Internet users online blogs, sharing posts, photos on microblogging services and social media platforms, discussion forums, as well as the decoration of personal mobile phones, demonstrate what Jenkins (2008) calls the

‘participatory culture’ of new media technologies. In Chinese context, Mao (2008) argues new digital technologies are reviving sharism in closed culture in China exemplified by the early blogging activities from 1999 that allowed information sharing, networks and connections. The rapid emergence of technological social

applications that can communicate and cooperate, by allowing people to output content from one service to another, are letting users spread their memes² into a pipeline-like system. This interconnectedness allows memes to travel along multiple online social networks, and potentially reach a huge audience. As a result, such a micro-pipeline system is making Social Media an alternative to broadcast media (Mao, 2008).

Differing from the legitimated sharing allowed by Creative Commons, remix and sharing culture is rooted in the grassroots sub-culture and digital communities in China (Li, 2010). With the development of digital communication technologies, micro-involvement of the sharing community in China and new patterns of urban youth’s sociality has emerged. Shang et al. (2012) argues that the community based

‘small worlds’ appeals to the urban youth. ‘Small world networks’ (Shang et al., 2012) are defined as ‘collective activities by shared identity; sometimes they are constituted by friends or family or by people who share common interests or pursuits’ (Shang et al., 2012, pp.383-385). These are largely the result of individuals socialising with peers who share similar consumer values since the opportunities of digital social networking have provided a new way to facilitate the spread of ‘opt-in community’ to urban youth in China.