Tendencias y tecnologías actuales relacionadas con las aplicaciones web

Chapter 2: Conceptualising DST as practice and method for digitally afforded self-representation offers an overview of DST among technology-afforded participatory practices which are emerging in the digital era, and among the methods which have been used in media studies. I separate DST into a range of processes based on the theory of mediation embraced by an increasing number of researchers. While DST has been lauded for its activist potential, recent studies have revealed processes that might normalise the practice, and some processes are much less studied than other ones. With a cautious attitude, I bring together literature to show the tensions that could possibly arise around various processes and dimensions of DST. It is in this academic context that DST workshops are examined. Furthermore, I explore the methodological significance of DST as one of the participatory and creative media practices that are increasingly being used in media studies. By comparing DST with traditional qualitative methods of participant observations, interviews and focus groups, I point out gaps in existing methodology to address in research on the uses of new media technologies.

Chapter 3: Methodology and methods presents the methodological thinking and concrete uses of methods for this comparative study. Overall, the study builds a storytelling approach to Chinese international and internal migrants’

self-representation, which incorporates narrative inquiry methodologies in considering story as construction. In this approach, I aim to reveal three kinds of narratives that emerge in the process of the DST workshops, namely, the first-person narrative from migrant participants, the researcher narrative based on the researcher’s observation on bottom-up participation, and the technology user narrative based on the

participants’ approach to using technologies. In order to present the three narratives in two locations comparatively, I adapt the DST workshop to make it reproducible across countries and realistic for migrant participants. In the data collection, I further supplement the workshop with qualitative research methods including participant observations, interviews and focus groups. To deal with the collected videos, observation notes and verbal responses, I conduct textual and discourse analysis to describe the formation and amplification of migrant voices. This is followed by a comparative analysis between the three-narrative combinations in two locations, in a

bid to establish an unbiased view towards the democratisation potential of DST in the respective countries.

Chapter 4: Narrating transnationality presents the case study on DST based in the state of Western Australia, Australia. The WA-based workshops demonstrate diversity in participants’ cultural backgrounds, occupations, ages and their reasons for settling overseas. Young Chinese participants, in particular, showed an obvious intention of socialising with people from other cultures in participation. While Chinese participants actively engaged with non-Chinese counterparts in oral

storytelling activities, which I hosted interaction between participants, issues of self-confidence, language and cultural difference and racialisation of non-white

participants emerged as factors causing the separation of Chinese participants in the unhosted stages involving individuated software uses. In relation to technology use, being immersed and ambitious in video creation, participants faced a loss of time in cross-cultural interaction. Some participants also withdrew from workshops because of privacy risks that arise from high identifiability in the use of visual media. In regard to digital stories, Chinese participants implicitly challenged the prevalent socio-economic assumptions on migration with leisure, autobiographical and

anecdotal accounts of overseas experience. Implying disappointment, self-doubt and struggles, their stories question the notion that migrants can find a ‘greener pasture’

overseas. Young Chinese participants who make leisure stories face constraints in relation to their anticipated parent audience. Overall, the Chinese participants’

participatory and creative vitality throughout the workshops do not result in a straightforward release of critical points of view on life overseas in their digital stories.

Chapter 5: Remaking south presents the second case study on DST based in the southern coastal province of Zhejiang, China, and also follows the storytelling approach. This was the first workshop-based DST project of its kind which was carried out in China and had internal migrants as participants. Differing from the counterparts in WA, workshops in Zhejiang consisted of a homogenous group of participants who were mainly interprovincial students working in media production disciplines. This group encountered a different set of issues in forming bottom-up participatory dynamics, which included the facilitator’s poor supply of devices, the

participants’ weak consciousness of being internal migrants in the receiving city, and the participants’ low valuation of DST as skill training. In using technology,

participants generally demonstrated craftsmanship and a better ability to mobilise audial and visual resources in developing stories. As the unexpected authors of Zhejiang, an economically more developed part of China, participants’ digital stories established a repertoire of symbolic resources to produce new meanings of South China. Their digital stories served to decentre the persistent geo-advantage discourse that state policy has consistently enhanced. By presenting the experience of leaving their home provinces in the north and resettling in the south or travelling incessantly from city to city, or the imagination of the country’s impoverished past, they refuted the entrenched notion of the wealthier southern coastal cities as a terminal for a better life. Specifically, they presented these experiences in terms of accessibility to the distinctive local culture, life quality and career development opportunities. It was noteworthy that several participants were reserved in expressing critical views on migration in their digital stories. I argue that workshops in Zhejiang showed a more conspicuous achievement in forming alternative migrant stories than those in WA.

Interprovincial students’ act of authoring internal mobility in contemporary China also, remarkably, constituted the alternative authorship formed in DST.

Chapter 6: DST for digital inclusion amid technology advancement further discusses the common practical and methodological issues that both case studies bring

forward, in view of changing opportunities and challenges for social inclusion in the digital era. Based on policy agendas and research on removing the digital divide, I discuss an increasing emphasis on the processual quality of audience reach through digital technology. Adopting this perspective, DST did achieve a quality reach with Chinese international and internal migratory audiences. On the one hand, the

facilitator assumed a neutral role of resource mobiliser to allow for the largest extent of free expression. On the other hand, the workshop received invisible support from three kinds of non-digital resources, an often-neglected area in which DST may be further improved. These resources included migrants’ natural need for

communicating over an expectation-reality gap, the embodied congregation that multiplied the workshop energy and led to a decentralised skills exchange, and highly individuated creativity which valued humanness and hence increased chances of interpersonal and intercultural understandings. Nonetheless, privacy concerns,

which the majority of participants showed in their heightened distrust of the

Internet’s ability to provide a safe and unmonitored environment, seriously reduced the chances for DST as a means to amplify individual voices in the public sphere.

In regard to methodological significance, practice-based DST demonstrated effectiveness in looking into Chinese migrants’ self-representation to counter the official sociological approach to migrants. The success of reaching migrants using minimal digital and non-digital resources demonstrates new possibilities for DST and research using DST. Considering that the vast field of internal migration in China is insufficiently studied, I call for more research on Chinese internal migrants’ uses of new media technologies in the future.

Chapter 7: Conclusion gives a summary of the thesis and continues to develop understandings of migrants’ digitally afforded self-representation in relation to improvement in social inclusion. It also points out the shortcomings of the study and the directions for future research on the use of technology.

This introductory chapter outlines the key issues in media studies that are pertinent to this research. The next chapter offers a systematic summary of existing studies that focus on participatory media practices including DST.