1
Introduction
WEIBO, COLLECTIVE MEMORY, AND SOCIAL TENSIONS
July 2012, Beijing. On a summer evening, a few days after the Chinese capital was hit by a thunderstorm that flooded the city and took 77 lives, I met with two staff members of Sina.com, a leading Chinese web portal. They were then in charge of the daily operations management of Weibo, Sina’s micro-blogging service, which at that point had been running for almost three years. As with previous events, the thunderstorm and the subsequent flash flood had put Weibo in the spotlight. During and after the disaster, Chinese netizens gathered on Weibo. There, they shared live reports and instant updates, mourned for the loss of life, highlighted the resemblance of the event to similar past disasters, and questioned what, or whom, should be held responsible for such a tragedy. There were many groups of participants, including journalists, media organizations, on-site witnesses, victims and families, the police, and local government officials, in narrating the event. These actors interacted with each other and all contributed to shaping memories of this significant moment. Not so coincidentally, it was also during this event that People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party government, launched its official Weibo account—an act that was seen as a milestone in the history of Weibo and Chinese social media in general. It was under these circumstances that my conversations with these two members of Weibo’s operations team took place, in which one of them said,
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 E.L. Han, Micro-blogging Memories, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59881-3_1
For me, Weibo gives expression to intensive social contentions accumulated in China during the past three decades (of China’s reform), perhaps even the past one-and-half century. Weibo is so important because these social contentions could not find such an effective way of expression before.1
As the above interview demonstrates, Weibo has had an important role to play in China, a country that has seen constant and dramatic changes— much like the landscape of social media itself. Weibo is a China-based micro-blog serving Chinese-speaking users worldwide. Launched in August 2009, it is one of many services provided by the web portal sina.com . Weibo users actively report and generate debates over news events locally and globally, with its par ticipants ranging from individuals to organizations across the world, most of whose primary language is Chinese. The dynamics of Weibo, especially the flow of news within and outside its domain, reflects the dynamics of contemporary social transition in China. This book is about Weibo. It aims to capture the highs and lows of this social media platform that, since its launch in August 2009, has substantially altered the ways in which Chinese people respond to ongoing public events. I became a registered Weibo user in March 2010. At that time, Sina marketed Weibo as a news and information platform; it regarded journalists and media professionals as an important part of its user base. What struck me most at that time was the presence of a strong desire to remember what was happening—in other words, an anxiety over forgetting—on this platform. The information updates involved extensive discussions intermingling the “now” and “then” aspects of these events, with a blending of local and global participation in the ensuing information flow. At that time, journalists and media professionals were at the forefront of utilizing Weibo as a news platform. They brought past events to Weibo while reporting and discussing the current news; they made efforts to keep the public remembering what was happening, against attempts to censor their stories; they also became actively involved in the investigation of past events. It was the presence of such an anxiety over forgetting that motivated me to further investigate the construction of collective memory in social media platforms. In addition to media-related individuals, I also followed people who were active in sharing their opinions on public events, including activists, lawyers, scholars, and some business elites. After the first phase of this research concluded in January 2013, I continued daily observations on Weibo to keep track of its topical events as the second phase. By doing so, I ensured that my analysis incorporated the most
up-to-date changes that were happening on and to this platform, providing continuity with what is now considered as the “past.”
Through the story of Weibo, this book explores the seemingly paradoxical relationship between transient information flows and the collective desire to remember ongoing events in the digital age. Its discussions are situated in an analytical framework that draws on three sets of interrelated social tensions: control–resistance, past–present, and global–local. Each of the three axes suggests a dimension of social contention: the penetration of state power into every aspect of social life, the accelerating information updates, and the rise of nationalism in the era of globalization. In this book, I conceptualize collective memory as a dynamic process through this three-dimensional framework, within the Internet culture that has taken root in—and is evolving along with—the search for modernity in a society constantly in transition. Collective memory is of particular importance in societies where the legitimacy of the ruling regime is constantly questioned due to unresolved past issues, where the pending threat of censorship and unpredictable policy changes have produced a strong sense of insecurity about remembering, and where official authorities need to be held accountable for misconduct that results in catastrophes or crises.
Operating on the three axes of social tensions, the making of collective memory on Weibo is a part of the culture of the contentious Internet, and journalism is an indispensable part of such a process. Over the past decade, studies on the Internet in China have generally focused on the relationship between the state and civil society, or state authority and grassroots resistance.2 Scholarship on the Chinese Internet has also been criticized for its predominant reliance on the Western-centric framework of democratization in authoritarian societies while ignoring the complexity of multiple actors and the historical contexts of new technologies.3
This book is cognizant of the debate between the proponents and skeptics of the efficacy of social media and the Internet in general. The overly optimistic view of social media’s liberation potential, the emerging “freer, more creative subjectivities” in social media and protest culture, needs to be balanced with the consideration of “institutional, professional and procedural forms of politics.”4 Studies have also revealed the limitation of social media in sustaining uprisings and revolution.5 Social media may well be used by government too, as governmental authorities are also learning to adapt to the new technologies very quickly,6 which leads to more effective control of online information flows.
Similarly, in this age of social media, the future of the Chinese Internet is far from clear or well-defined. Indeed, the Chinese cyberspace is becoming increasingly contentious. The Internet-based contentious activities are derived from “a broad spectrum of converging and contending forces, technological, cultural, social, and economic, as well as political.” These activities engage in contemporary social debates via a vibrant and creative Internet culture.7 With the emergence of new technologies and China’s deepening encounter with the world, the past has provided various sources of conflict that shape today’s social contention.8 Nevertheless, we should not be overly optimistic about the empowerment potential of social media, which mostly occurs at the symbolic level and is not easy to materialize.9 Acts of subversion (or even open defiance) pose no real threat to the system, and the influences they have on society at large are at best incremental.
Weibo occupies a unique position in the Chinese and global social media landscape as the sole victor of the 2010–2012 Chinese microblogging service boom. Certain features of Weibo belong to the prototype of a micro-blogging service, although it would be misleading to consider Weibo as only a variation of such a prototype. While it is usually characterized as “the Chinese equivalent of Twitter” (or sometimes “Chinese Twitter”),10 as this book will demonstrate, such a term is far too simplified to capture the complexity of a platform situated in this specific moment of Chinese social transition. We must also understand Weibo’s content and form as a continuation of its predecessors in the Internet culture, a response to continuously evolving state control over the Internet, and intensifying social dispute in China. The slogan at Weibo’s login page, “share what’s new around you anytime, anywhere,” encourages its users to post events around them, as well as thoughts and insights with a personal perspective. Such instantaneous, real-time, and ever-present informational updates create a web of awareness11 of the potential development of news events for journalists, Weibo staff, and individual users. So far as Weibo has been recognized as a mainstream social media platform in the Chinese-speaking media landscape, it has never ceased to produce or accommodate argument.
To follow a “moving target” in such a rapidly changing social media era is quite a challenge. This book therefore does not purport to offer a comprehensive analysis of Weibo, nor does it aims for a universally applicable model of studying social media, journalism, and collective memory. Instead, it offers insights into a moment of social transition by capturing
a short period when Weibo’s power and reach were at its zenith, exploring the twists and turns that accompanied its phenomenal rise. It is also a response to the notion that Weibo has suffered a “decline” in the midst of the tightening state control and competition from other platforms such as Weixin (WeChat). Though it has lost its hegemonic market position, Weibo still sheds light on a China in transition—and contention.
WEIBO AS A RESEARCH SITE
Fuch and Sandoval12 define social media on the basis of different forms of sociality13 they support: information, communication, and communitybuilding and collaborative work (most SNS and wikis). The broadness of this definition illustrates the flexible and sometimes unclear boundaries of social media. In this brave new world of social media that is digitized, mobile, and connectivity-oriented, journalism has begun to take on a new shape.
Weibo concentrated on news-led public affairs that pushed journalism to the forefront of social contention. Journalism benefits from the digital age and global network society, in which different groups of individuals collaborate to tell a story.14 The culture of journalism becomes more collaborative, responsive, and interactive,15 privileging the role of individuals. The participants of journalism in social media are not limited to professional journalists working for traditional media institutions. They include media-related professionals (media critics, columnists, scholars, web editors), media institutions, and those who are conventionally understood as “citizen journalists”— on-site reporters of a news event who are by no means trained as journalists. They spontaneously become “citizen journalists” because they happen to be at the scene during moments of crisis and feel an obligation to participate the news-making process. This “citizen witness” phenomenon has substantially contributed to news coverage by producing important firsthand accounts.16 However, in the Chinese context, the term “citizen journalist” is largely prohibited in public discourse, and activities bearing any resemblance to citizen journalism are closely monitored by the government.17 As early as Weibo’s inception, Sina began to invite journalists and media professionals to open Weibo accounts, among the first to users of the service, and these users played an important part in shaping Weibo into a news platform. Weibo participants who do not fit into these existing categories also contribute to the reporting on public events. For example, there are also scholars in the areas of
journalism and media, as well as scholars and professionals with expertise relevant to topics the news events cover, such as history, law, economics, political science, and so on. Together they share their interpretations of the ongoing events on Weibo, offer on-the-spot analyses, and enlarge the journalistic interpretive community.18
The moniker of “Chinese Twitter” does not do Weibo justice, as it has proven to be an intrinsic part of both Chinese Internet culture and social transitions in recent years. Weibo supports a broad, diverse space of expression, going beyond the standardized format of micro-blogging set by Twitter to accommodate the uncertainty and anxiety of the less wellestablished market and transitional social systems. Rather than accommodating dissent voices as Twitter does for some Chinese-language users, Weibo offers space for the application of strategies of questioning the existing power structure in subtle ways, producing seemingly subversive contents without undermining the system. It appears to be an arena for competing narratives and opinions on news events, where the individual’s position in the political spectrum matters.
Weibo is an event-oriented platform. Its survival and vitality are highly dependent on the constantly emerging events that can arouse public attention and stimulate participation. These public events are conceptualized here as “topical events,” drawing on the notions of “critical incidents”19, “new media events,”20 and Internet events/online collective actions.21 A critical incident involves a crisis that demands the rapid relay of information, which facilitates journalists’ negotiation of their professional boundaries.22 The idea of "new media event” is rooted in Dayan and Katz’s notion of “media event,”23 the live broadcast of pre-planned and ceremonial media events, which in recent years are shifting toward the unexpected, marathon coverage of ongoing disasters.24 The new media events, facilitated by the Internet and mobile technologies, highlighting the unplanned and unfolding elements of stories, move one step further to empower citizens through new media technologies.25 Similarly, in the Chinese context, Internet events are typically associated with Internet-based collective action.26 A topical event thus involves elements of crisis and a collective desire for instant information updates, public visibility, the potential for mobilizing citizen criticism and collective actions targeting the current power structure, and evidence of the active participation and opinion leadership of media and journalists on social media platforms. Even though a topical event is featured on social media platforms, its influences reach a wide range of public, far beyond the boundaries of the Internet.
The constant occurrence of topical events is key to Weibo’s survival in an intensely competitive environment that is situated between government censorship and people’s desire for information transparency. Compared to the recently emerged WeChat (Weixin),Weibo’s competitive edge lies in its active engagement with public events. WeChat, on the other hand, focuses on sharing information amongst a circle of friends, with its contents invisible to users outside of the circle. Weibo has always been the first to report breaking news and to generate public discussion, creating hotly debated issues in both cyberspace and the mainstream media. In this way, Weibo has gained credibility as an alternative news source for ordinary citizens, and it becomes a starting point for newspapers and television stations to follow news events. Weibo serves as a prism through which we can understand how public events are reported, circulated, and remembered in the age of social media.
Weibo is not the first micro-blogging service launched in China. Prior to its appearance there had been similar-looking services but none of them lasted long. After its launch in August 2009, Weibo became well known and prompted many Chinese web portal sites to offer their own microblogging services. Like Sina Weibo, these services also called themselves “weibo,” such as Tencent Weibo and Sohu Weibo, launched by other major web portals in China. However, Sina Weibo was able to outclass these competitors, and by 2014, the term “Weibo” had become exclusive to the platform provided by Sina. It is now the only micro-blogging service with public influence in the Chinese micro-blogosphere.
The Weibo server is located in China and can be accessed by the majority of Chinese Internet users, which guarantees a large user basis. As of November 2015, the number of Weibo’s daily active users had officially reached 100 million.27 Due to the installation of the Great Firewall and recent regulations, accessing globally popular social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, is very difficult for the majority of Internet users in China, who do not have sufficient technological support to circumvent the Great Firewall. As control has tightened in recent years, people in China have become less likely to have access to those platforms, and there are a great number of people who have no awareness or memories of such websites and services outside China. Taking Twitter as an example, those who tweet in Chinese language are either technologically savvy or politically dissident, along with some overseas Chinese, and the contents are predominantly subversive.28 Their voices are less likely to be heard by Chinese people who do not have access to Twitter and therefore
they only have limited public influence in China. During the earlier stage of Weibo, Chinese Twitter users had made attempts to transport their tweets onto Weibo, but these tweets and even Weibo IDs (of the Twitter users) were quickly detected by the webmasters. Unlike Twitter, the accessibility of Weibo by the majority of Chinese people in China and global Chinese communities guarantees its influence on a remarkable number of users.
Like other media forms in China, Weibo is under the control of the Party and state authorities through their local bureaus, but it was considered as an alternative source of news and a space where people were relatively free to voice their opinions in a mediated space. Interactions between individuals and organizations have already taken effect by challenging the monopoly of information by official channels and even starting to question the legitimacy of the regime. In response, the state has taken a series of actions to strengthen its control over Weibo and other similar services, such as anti-rumor campaigns, real name registrations, permanent closing down of certain user accounts, temporary suspensions of certain functions, and so on. This kind of control places Weibo in a perilous position and, people argue, has contributed to its recent decline and uncertain future. Yet the very presence of such mechanisms marks Weibo as a highly contentious social space, particularly when state authorities have found their ways to join online conversations about public issues and events in a more sophisticated manner.
MATERIALS AND METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES
During the early stage of Weibo, its operations team created a topic page whenever important news broke. This topic page included posts with relevant key words and hashtags, often utilizing materials produced by onsite witnesses, journalists’ live updates, and general discussions or debates. Later on, the topic pages came to feature tailor-made timelines of an event’s chronological development. The “hottest” Weibo posts were also shown at the top of these pages, and sometimes opinions from both sides of a debate would be collected and displayed. The list of top-trending topics on Weibo’s front page is generated by specific algorithms, something that is beyond the scope of this research. However, the process of building a topic page—including chronicling the event, listing the hottest posts, and organizing debates under a certain topic—is based on the filtering and manipulation of information within the platform itself by the Weibo staff.
I did not follow any particular event on Weibo until the March 2011 earthquake in Japan, an event that marked a significant moment of collaboration between traditional and social media. The earthquake was a globally prominent event, drawing media attention all over the world. Hundreds of journalists in China were dispatched to file on-site reports from the disaster-hit area, and almost all national and local media outlets in China devoted space to the coverage of this disaster. It was the starting point for me to follow particular users, beginning with journalists and media professionals in the “suggest to follow” section on the topic page created for the event, where the Weibo operations team listed individuals and organizations that were on site or had expertise in relevant topics. Starting from this list, I followed more people and organizations each time there was an outburst of a topical event, from which I was able to generate a list of Weibo users from major national and local media organizations. These people are usually referred to, both by themselves and others, as “mei ti ren,” literally translated as “media people” but more accurately as “media professionals.” Additionally, from the “suggest to follow” list I also found experts in different areas related to the topical events under scrutiny.
Given the contentious nature of the Weibo platform, it is necessary to present views from all sides. For this book, I mainly conducted a critical analysis on the side of the so-called “liberal-leaning” camp, with the full awareness of the presence and influence of other groups with different ideological inclinations. The liberal-leaning camp is defined here as a group of individuals who generally have a critical view of the current political system in China. They tend to favor democratization, constitutio nalism, and the role of market, but they do not agree on every social issue, including the widening socioeconomic gap, women’s rights, and rights for socially marginalized groups, to name a few. In debates about social issues, this liberal-leaning camp sees an implacable enemy in those who generally defend the regime, even though the latter group is equally nebulous in its makeup and specific ideological orientation. The liberal-leaning camp enjoyed a significant presence on Weibo during Weibo’s prime, but recently it has faced many challenges. Indeed, its influence on Weibo has waned to a significant degree as a result of public persecution from the state authorities, account suspensions, migration to other platforms, and the transformation of Weibo itself. As is shown in the rest of the book, the simple dichotomist view of Chinese society promoted by the liberalleaning camp belies the complexity of the political spectrum of Weibo
users and Chinese netizens in general. As one navigates the sociopolitical terrain in Chinese cyberspace, it is essential to bear in mind the complexity of contentions within key public events and their underlying social issues.
For this book, I immersed myself on the Weibo platform, paid close attention to Weibo posts and their circulation status, and engaged in long-term interactions with particular users. As a result, I was able to receive critical insights into the relevant events and analyze them in specific historical/social contexts. Of course, it was extremely difficult to capture the constantly ongoing online conversations without the help of computer-mediated tools. However, I was still able to collect useful information by staying online for at least six hours per day, and I varied my times in and out to ensure data diversity during peak and non-peak hours. For each event, I participated the conversation with reposting and commenting on the existing posts, closely examined the top-ranked posts, and collected posts relevant to the event. I mainly used Weibo’s daily trending topic list to acquire the timeline of its development, key participants, and top posts. Users involved in each event were categorized into the following types: on-site witnesses/reporters, journalists, media organizations, scholars and experts on the topic, and other opinion leaders. I followed and analyzed their posts that contain relevant keywords, categorizing the posts into the following types: on-site report, mainstream media pickup, and personal opinions. I identified and collected Weibo posts during topical events, analyzing a number of their key textual features, especially the temporal markers.
The indication of live updates: words and images suggesting real-time updates of what is happening on the ground;
The presence of a past event: a past event (or time period) that is mentioned in an original Weibo post, implicitly or explicitly; any post that contains links to a video, blog post, or images (photographs or cartoons) about past events or commemorative activities; The presence of key words mobilizing mnemonic activities: key words related to memory, such as “memory,” “remember,” “commemorate,” “do not forget,” etc.
At the same time, I also took notes of the circulation of particular posts mainly through analyzing the reposts. This approach is arguably limited in its ability to capture a full description of an event on Weibo, but it does suffice for purpose of this research.
I conducted 17 in-depth interviews with Weibo users and Sina staff members (see Appendix). These users include journalists, online (and offline) witnesses, and media researchers. In addition, I also had a great many daily interactions with Weibo users, including the 17 people whom I had interviewed. I openly invited research participation on Weibo and selected participants from those who volunteered, but I also directly contacted potential interviewees. Due to the restrictions placed on interviewing Sina employees, my interviews with them were made possible through personal contact and conducted in the form of informal, personal conversations. As some of the interviews contained politically sensitive information, I have assigned my interviewees pseudo names in order to ensure that they remain publicly unidentifiable. In the same vein, I have also chosen not to name my non-Sina interviewees’ affiliated institutions; and for Sina employees, I do not reveal their exact positions but generally refer to them as “Weibo operations team/administrators.” In addition to interviews, I kept track of the posts of particular individuals and institutions, including those who were involved in the topical events (citizen journalists, victims of an accident, and witnesses). The people I follow cover a wide range of geographical locations across the Chinese-speaking community.
ORGANIZATION OF THIS BOOK
Weibo is no exception to the consequences of increasingly proactive state policies of control of the Internet29 and the creativity of online activism.30 State control and its public response through engagement with news events have shaped the ways in which these events are remembered. The proliferation and density of news events on social media with accelerated information relay have blurred the distinction between past and present. The changing temporality in social media has transformed how we store the past and how it is used in the present social contentions. The transnational flow of news and the mobility of people transcend geographical boundaries and have enhanced the global–local dynamics of collective remembering. The dynamics of Weibo reflect the dynamics of a transitional society which embraces globalization and at the same time is struggling with its own historical legacy, adapting to new technological revolutions yet displaying anxiety over the potential of these new technologies in challenging the status quo.
Chapter 2 lays out the analytical structure of this research. It sets up a theoretical framework in the form of the three axes of social tensions
in social media dynamics—control and resistance, past and present, and global and local—in which journalism draws on the symbolic resources to narrate the ongoing event and mobilize mnemonic activities in social contentions. This chapter incorporates a detailed analysis of one particular topical event, a high-speed train accident in 2011 (the “7.23” high-speed train accident), which is a definitive moment that established Weibo as the leading social media platform for public events in China. Event-oriented Weibo is also compared with its major competitor, the relationshiporiented WeChat, as the latter has gained remarkable popularity with Chinese users worldwide in recent years.
Chapter 3 focuses on how multiple forces of control and resistance have shaped the meanings of public events. It examines how mnemonic practices have been effectively utilized by these forces to manipulate public opinion, contributing to an escalation of contention over remembering and forgetting. This chapter captures the changing hierarchy of cultural authority in interpreting an event and organizing collective remembering in these processes. Personalized narratives of public events, including that of journalists and ordinary citizens, have begun to challenge institutional (particularly official) authorities, calling for information transparency. As a provider of social media platforms Sina have actively mobilized media institutions, journalists, and witnesses to contribute to its platform during each event, integrating diverse sources, which in turn have collaboratively combated forced forgetting, pushing the boundary of journalism in China. Recently, official media organizations began to join conversations and establish authorities on Weibo, which added to the complexity of the competition for discursive power within the environment of tightening state control over the Internet sphere.
Chapter 4 focuses on how the past has been made use of in the service of the present on Weibo with the blurring of the past–present boundary. Weibo has provided a space that invites rewriting and reusing of the past, with contributions from both the elite and the grassroots users. This chapter examines how factors such as extensive coverage, simultaneously updated and stored contents, and the reservoir of large number of past events reported by media have changed the ways in which past and present are related to each other on Weibo. The revisiting and reusing of the past, the practices of commemorating in the present, and the preserving of its “memory value” (something worth remembering) for the future, all together incite criticism of the current power structure. But at the same time, formulaic mnemonic practices also produce meanings that serve to strengthen the current political order.
Chapter 5 looks at the global scope of remembering on Weibo in conjunction with journalism, which has provided the ground for argument over nationalism based on transnational imaginations. One is largely hinged upon a negative assessment of the national image, attributing it to the fault of current regime, and the other one is based on singing praise of the Chinese government during moments of crises, at both global and local levels. These imaginations of China in the global world, however, took uncritical views of societies and cultures of both “others” and “ours,” without a truly historical and balanced view of the past.
Chapter 6 expands on the three previous chapters’ findings: how the three sets of social tensions work together in orchestrating collective remembering, in the service of understanding Chinese modernity. In this chapter I start with the Southern Weekend incident in January 2013, an online and offline protest initiated by journalists, which pushed the debate forefront and started a new stage for Weibo. On Weibo, a condensed display of the past 150 years in China and its encounter with the global world, and the practices of remembering emerging topical events, have enriched the debate on Chinese modernity, between two visions of China becoming a “modern nation”: “Chinese characteristics” versus “universal values.” Such an understanding of the “modern nation” in binary, admittedly, is too simplistic and limited to reflect all the intertwined interests and ideological conflicts at the present transitional moment. Yet this debate reflects intensifying conflicts on a larger scale, between state power and the rights of individual citizens, between those who are in favor of the political establishment and those who desire further reform that leads to democratization and constitutionalism.
Chapter 7 analyzes the memory of Weibo, particularly at the emerging trends that have led Weibo to a new phase, one of them being how state control of social media platforms has intensified and gained in sophistication, another being the rise of competing platforms. It is now much easier for the authorities to directly participate in discussions and shut down undesirable opinions on Weibo, while competition from other platforms has siphoned off a significant portion of Weibo’s user base. Its main competitor, WeChat, is becoming popular among Chinese users across age group and social status. Under such circumstances, Weibo itself becomes part of the collective memory of specific modes of empowerment and accountability in transitional societies and contentious politics. This final chapter argues that Weibo should be understood as a witness and product of Chinese social transition and Internet culture, with a unique position in the global social media landscape.
Finally, the conclusion summarizes the three sets of tensions that sustain patterned collective remembering on an event-oriented social media platform and the significance of this research. It also points out the recent trends on Weibo, as it has been working to find another niche within the global Chinese-speaking community in the face of its seemingly declining popularity and vitality; at the same time, it celebrates its financial success, refuting the idea of Weibo’s decline in public influence.
The transformation of Weibo reflects the transition of Chinese society in the past few years. Over the past few years, Weibo has changed, from an arena of news and public opinions that encouraged citizen participation that collaboratively pushed for social change, to a platform serving the state’s intervention of information flow and at the same time commercial interests. This book only captures part of this transformation process, through which we may have better understanding of how journalism is embedded in the dynamics of social media, its relationship with other discursive powers, and its role in the remembering and forgetting processes in these platforms.
Lastly, a few notes on format: In this book, all Chinese names (except for scholarly citations) are written in the Chinese style, with surnames followed by personal names. The Chinese characters in Weibo IDs appear in the form of pinyin transliterations, and Weibo users who have registered with verified identity (real name and institutional affiliation) are cited with real names as they appear on their Weibo profile pages. All timestamps for the quoted Weibo posts and interviews are in Beijing Time (GMT+8). Unfortunately, as a result of government censorship in the form of Weibo content control and the closing down of some Weibo accounts, the original links for some Weibo posts quoted in this book are no longer accessible.
NOTES
1. My interview with Wu Yutao, Weibo operations team, July 25, 2012.
2. Zixue Tai, The Internet in China (New York: Routledge, 2006); Yongnian Zheng, Technological Empowerment (Stanford, 2007).
3. Bingchun Meng, “Moving beyond Democratization: A Thought Piece on the China Internet Research Agenda,” International Journal of Communication 4 (2010): 501–508; Yongming Zhou, Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in China (Stanford University Press, 2006).
4. Tim Markham, “Social Media, Protest Cultures and Political Subjectivities of the Arab Spring,” Media, Culture & Society 36, no. 1 (2014): 102.
5. For example, Magdalena Wojcieszak and Briar Smith, “Will Politics be Tweeted?,” New Media & Society 16, no. 1 (2014): 91–109; Halim Rane and Sumra Salem, “Social Media, Social Movements and the Diffusion of Ideas in the Arab Uprisings,” Journal of International Communication 18, no. 1 (2012): 97–111.
6. Jonathan Sullivan, “A Tale of Two Microblogs in China,” Media, Culture & Society 34, no. 6 (2012): 773–783; Guobin Yang, “Internet Activism & the Party-State in China,” Daedalus 143, no. 2 (2014): 110–123.
7. Guobin Yang, The Power of the Internet in China (Columbia, 2009), p. 1.
8. Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden, eds., Chinese Society (Routledge, 2010 (2003)).
9. Lijun Tang and Peidong Yang, “Symbolic Power and the Internet: The Power of a ‘Horse’,” Media, Culture and Society 33, no. 5: 675–691.
10. Here is a recent example: Sui Mingxiao and Raymond J. Pingree, “In Search of Reason-Centered Discussion on China’s Twitter: The Effects of Initiating Post and Discussion Format on Reasoning,” International Journal of Communication (2016).
11. Alfred Hermida, “Twittering the News: The Emergence of Ambient Journalism,” Journalism Practice 4, no. 3 (2010): 297–308.
12. Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval, “Introduction: Critique, Social Media and the Information Society in the Age of Capitalist Crisis,” (2014): 6.
13. Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Emergent Information, 3 (World Scientific, 2013).
14. Bregtje Van der Haak, Michael Parks, and Manuel Castells, “The Future of Journalism: Networked Journalism,” International Journal of Communication 6 (2012).
15. Mark Deuze, “The Changing Context of News Work,” International Journal of Communication 2 (2008): 18. 858.
16. Stuart Allan, Citizen Witnessing (John Wiley & Sons, 2013).
17. See http://www.nytimes.com/video/2013/05/14/opinion/10000000 2225772/a-long-ride-toward-a-new-china.html for an example of a Chinese independent investigator. His activities were strictly monitored by the state, and the term “citizen journalist” (and citizen journalism) is prohibited in the public discourse in China.
18. Barbie Zelizer, “Journalists as Interpretive Communities,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 10, no. 3 (1993): 219–237.
19. Barbie Zelizer, Covering the Body (University of Chicago, 1992).
20. Joseph M. Chan and Jack L. Qiu, eds., Research on New Media Events (Renmin University Press, 2011).
21. Yang, 2009.
22. Zelizer, 1992.
23. Elihu Katz and Daniel Dayan, Media Events (Harvard, 1992).
24. Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes, “Upstaged Media Events,” Media Events in a Global Age (2009).
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A businesslike atmosphere filtered through the quiet of the Smokies. Though wolves and panthers had largely disappeared by 1910, fur buyers and community traders enjoyed a brisk exchange in mink, raccoon, fox, and ’possum hides. Oak bark and chestnut wood, called “tanbark” and “acid wood” because they were sources of valuable tannic acid, brought $7 per cord when shipped to Asheville or Knoxville. As the sawmills flourished, makeshift box houses of vertical poplar and chestnut planks gave way to more substantial weatherboarded homes of horizontal lengths and tight-fitting frames. Slick, fancy, buggy-riding “drummers” peddled high-button shoes and off-color stories. The spacious Wonderland Park Hotel and the Appalachian Club at Elkmont, and a hunting lodge on Jake’s Creek graced the once forbidding mountainsides.
Undergirding this development was a growing cash base: peaches and chestnuts, pork and venison, wax and lard—translated into money—brought flour and sugar, yarn and needles, tools and ammunition. Yet in the midst of this new-found activity, many clung to their old habits. Children still found playtime fun by sliding down hills of pine needles and “riding” poplar saplings from treetop to treetop. Hard-shell Baptist preachers, such as the hunter and “wilderness saddle-bagger” known as “Preacher John” Stinnett, still devoted long spare hours, and sometimes workdays as well, to reading The Book: “I just toted my Bible in a tow sack at the handle of my bull tongue and I studied it at the turn of the furrow and considered it through the rows.”
But whatever the immediate considerations of the hour happened to be, logging was the order of the day. From the Big Pigeon River, all the way to the Little Tennessee, the second generation of timbercutters had moved into the Smokies on a grand scale.
The companies, with their manpower, their strategically placed sawmills, and their sophisticated equipment, produced board feet of lumber by the millions. The rest of the country, with its increased demands for paper and residential construction, absorbed these millions and cried for more. By 1909, when production attained its peak in the Smokies and throughout the Appalachians, logging techniques had reached such an advanced state that even remote
stands of spruce and hemlock could be worked with relative ease. Demand continued unabated and even received a slight boost when World War I broke out in 1914.
Pages 100-101: Sawmills, such as this one at Lawson’s Sugar Cove, were quickly set up in one location and just as quickly moved to another as soon as the plot was cleared.
National Park Service
High volume covered high costs. The Little River Lumber Company, perhaps the most elaborate logging operation in the Smokies, cut a total of two billion board feet. Cherry, the most valuable of the woods, with its exquisite grain and rich color, was also the scarcest. Yellow-poplar, that tall, straight tree with a buoyancy that allowed it to float high, turned out to be the most profitable of all saw timber.
Coniferous forests, the thick, dark regions of pungent spruce and hemlock, yielded a portion of the company’s output.
Extraction of such proportions was not easy. Timber cruisers combed the forests, estimating board feet and ax-marking suitable trees. Three-man saw teams followed the cruisers. One, the “chipper,” calculated the fall of the tree and cut a “lead” in the appropriate side. Two sawyers then took over, straining back and forth upon their crosscut saw until gravity and the immense weight of the tree finished their job for them. The work was hard and hazardous. Sometimes, if the lead were not cut properly, the trunk would fall toward the men; sudden death or permanent injury might result from the kickback of a doomed tree’s final crash, or from a moment’s carelessness.
To remove the felled timber, larger companies laid railroad tracks far up the creeks from their mills. At the eastern edge of the Smokies, for instance, one such terminus grew into the village of Crestmont, which boasted a hotel, two movie theaters, and a well-stocked commissary. Such accommodations seemed a distant cry indeed from the upper branches of Big Creek, gathering its waters along the slopes of Mt. Sterling, Mt. Cammerer, and Mt. Guyot. Workers from improbable distances—even countries “across the waters,” such as Italy—teamed with the mountain people to push a standard gauge track alongside the boulder-strewn streams. Bolted onto oaken ties that were spaced far enough apart to discourage foot travel, the black rails drove ahead, switched back to higher ground, crossed Big Creek a dozen times before they reached the flat way station of Walnut Bottoms.
Dominated by powerful, blunt-bodied locomotives, the railroads gave rise to stories that were a flavorful blend of pathos and danger. “Daddy” Bryson and a fireman named Forrester were killed on a sharp curve along Jake’s Creek of Little River. Although Forrester jumped clear when the brakes failed to hold, he was buried under an avalanche of deadly, cascading logs. There were moments of comedy as well as tragedy. In the same river basin, Colonel Townsend asked engineer Noah Bunyan Whitehead one day when he was going to stop putting up all that black smoke from his train.
Bun answered : “When they start making white coal.”
Railroads could reach only so far, however. The most complex phase of the logging process was “skidding, ” or bringing the felled logs from inaccessi ble distances to the waiting cars. As the first step, men armed with cant hooks or short,
Little River Lumber Company
Massive steam-powered skidders pulled logs in off the hills to a central pile. Then the loaders took over and put the logs on trains, which carried them to the mills.
harpoonlike peavies, simply rolled the logs down the mountainsides. Such continuous “ball-hooting,” as it was called, gouged paths which rain and snow etched deeper into scars of heavy erosion. Sometimes oxen and mules pulled, or “snaked,” the timber through rough terrain to its flatcar destination. Horses soon replaced the slower animals and proved especially adept at “jayhooking,” or dragging logs down steep slopes by means of Jhooks and grabs. When the logs gained speed and threatened to overtake them, the men and nimble-footed horses simply stepped onto a spur trail; the open link slipped off at the J-hook and the logs slid on down the slope under their own momentum.
Even more ingenious skidding methods were devised. Splash-dams of vertical hemlock boards created reservoirs on otherwise shallow, narrow streams. The released reservoir, when combined with heavy rains, could carry a large amount of timber far downstream. In the mill pond, loggers with hobnailed boots kept the logs moving and uncorked occasional jams. Another method devised to move virgin timber down steep slopes was the trestled flume. The large, wooden graded flumes provided a rapid but expensive mode of delivery. One carried spruce off Clingmans Dome.
There were, finally, the loader and skidders. The railroad-mounted steam loader was nicknamed the “Sarah Parker” after “a lady who must have been real strong.” The skidder’s revolving drum pulled in logs by spectacular overhead cables. Loaded with massive timber lengths, these cables spanned valleys and retrieved logs from the very mountaintops.
National Park Service
George Washington Shults and some neighbors snake out large trunks with the help of six oxen. Sometimes the lumber companies would hire such local people to handle a specific part of the operation. Today we call the process subcontracting.
Little River Lumber Company
Of the many kinds of trees logged in the Great Smokies, the largest and most profitable were the yellow-poplars, more commonly known as tulip trees. A man could feel pretty small standing next to one of them.
Little River Lumber Company
The great scale of the logging machinery was like nothing the Smokies had seen before. Long trains carried loads of huge tree trunks to sawmills after the flat cars were loaded by railroad-mounted cranes.
To coordinate all of these operations efficiently required skill and judgment. The lumber companies devised numerous approaches to the problem of maximum production at lowest cost. They contracted with individuals; Andy Huff, for example, continued to run a mill at the mouth of Roaring Fork and paid his men a full 75 cents for a 16hour day. The corporations sometimes worked together; in one maneuver, Little River helped Champion flume its spruce pulpwood to the Little River railroad for shipment to Champion’s paper mill at Canton, North Carolina. Haste and carelessness could lead to shocking waste. When one company moved its operations during World War I, 1.5 million board feet of newly cut timber was left to rot at the head of Big Creek.
The ravages of logging led to fires. Although fires were sometimes set on purpose to kill snakes and insects and to burn underbrush, abnormal conditions invited abnormal mishaps. Parched soil no longer held in place by a web of living roots, dry tops of trees piled where they had been flung after trimming the logs, and flaming sparks of locomotives or skidders: any combination of these caused
more than 20 disastrous fires in the Smokies during the 1920s. A two-month series of fires devastated parts of Clingmans Dome, Siler’s Bald, and Mt. Guyot. One holocaust on Forney Creek, ignited by an engine spark, raced through the tops of 24-meter (80-foot) hemlocks and surged over 5 kilometers (3 miles) in four hours. A site of most intense destruction was in the Sawtooth range of the Charlie’s Bunion area.
Despite the ravages of fire, erosion, and the voracious ax and saw, all was not lost. Some two-thirds of the Great Smoky Mountains was heavily logged or burned, but pockets of virgin timber remained in a shrinking number of isolated spots and patches at the head of Cataloochee, the head of Greenbrier, and much of Cosby and Deep Creek. And as the 1920s passed into another decade, the vision of saving what was left of this virgin forest, saving the land—saving the homeland—grew in the lonely but insistent conscience of a small number of concerned and convincing citizens.
Conducting a preliminary survey of the park’s boundaries in 1931 are (from left) Superintendent J. Ross Eakin, Arthur P. Miller, Charles E. Peterson, O. G. Taylor, and John Needham.
George A. Grant
Birth of a Park
Logging dominated the life of the Great Smoky Mountains during the early decades of the 20th century. But there was another side to that life. Apart from the sawmills and the railroads and the general stores, which were bustling harbingers of new ways a-coming, the higher forests, the foot trails, and the moonshine stills remained as tokens of old ways a-lingering. One person in particular came to know and speak for this more primitive world.
Horace Kephart was born in 1862 in East Salem, Pennsylvania. His Swiss ancestors were pioneers of the Pennsylvania frontier. During his childhood, Kephart’s family moved to the Iowa prairie, where his mother gave him a copy of the novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. In the absence of playmates on the vast Midwest grassland, young Kephart dreamed and invented his own games, fashioned his own play swords and pistols out of wood and even built a cave out of prairie sod and filled it with “booty” collected off the surrounding countryside.
Horace Kephart never forgot his frontier beginnings. He saved his copy of Robinson Crusoe and added others: The Wild Foods of Great Britain, The Secrets of Polar Travel, Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West. Camping and outdoor cooking, ballistics and photography captured his attention and careful study.
Kephart polished his education with periods of learning and library work at Boston University, Cornell, and Yale. In 1887 he married a girl from Ithaca, New York, and began to raise a family. By 1890, he was librarian of the well-known St. Louis Mercantile Library. In his late thirties, Kephart grew into a quiet, intense loner, a shy and reticent man with dark, piercing eyes. He remained an explorer at heart, a pioneer, an individual secretly nurturing the hope of further adventures.
Opportunity arrived in a strange disguise. Horace Kephart’s largely unfulfilled visions of escape were combined with increasingly prolonged periods of drinking. Experience with a tornado in the streets of St. Louis affected his nerves. As he later recalled:
“... then came catastrophe; my health broke down. In the summer of 1904, finding that I must abandon professional work and city life, I came to western North Carolina, looking for a big primitive forest where I could build up strength anew and indulge my lifelong fondness for hunting, fishing and exploring new ground.”
He chose the Great Smokies almost by accident. Using maps and a compass while he rested at his father’s home in Dayton, Ohio, he located the nearest wilderness and then determined the most remote corner of that wilderness. After his recuperation he traveled to Asheville, North Carolina, where he took a railroad line that wound through a honeycomb of hills to the small way station of Dillsboro. And from there, at the age of 42, he struck out, with a gun and a fishing rod and three days’ rations, for the virgin mountainside forest. After camping for a time on Dick’s Creek, his eventual wild destination turned out to be a deserted log cabin on the Little Fork of the Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek.
His nearest neighbors lived 3 kilometers (2 miles) away, in the equally isolated settlement of Medlin. Medlin consisted of a post office, a corn mill, two stores, four dwellings, and a nearby schoolhouse that doubled as a church. The 42 households that officially collected their mail at the Medlin Post Office inhabited an area of 42 square kilometers (16 square miles). It was, as Kephart describes it:
“... the forest primeval, where roamed some sparse herds of cattle, razorback hogs and the wild beasts. Speckled trout were in all the streams. Bears sometimes raided the fields and wildcats were a common nuisance. Our settlement was a mere slash in the vast woodland that encompassed it.”
But it was also, for Horace Kephart, a new and invigorating home. He loved it. He thrived in it. At first he concentrated his senses on the natural beauty around him, on the purple rhododendron, the
George Masa
Horace Kephart, librarian-turnedmountaineer, won the hearts of the Smokies people with his quiet and unassuming ways. He played a major role in the initial movement for a national park.
flame azalea, the fringed orchis, the crystal clear streams. Yet as the months passed, he found that he could not overlook the people.
The mountain people were as solidly a part of the Smokies as the boulders themselves. These residents of branch and cove, of Medlin and Proctor and all the other tiny settlements tucked high along the slanting creekbeds of the Great Smoky Mountains, these distinctive “back of beyond” hillside farmers and workworn wives and wary moonshine distillers lodged in Kephart’s consciousness and imagination with rock-like strength and endurance.
Initially silent and suspicious of this
stranger in their midst, families gradually came to accept him. They approved of his quietness and his even-handed ways, even confiding in him with a simple eloquence. One foot-weary distiller, after leading Kephart over kilometers of rugged terrain, concluded: “Everywhere you go, it’s climb, scramble, clamber down, and climb again. You cain’t go nowheres in this country without climbin’ both ways.” The head of a large family embracing children who spilled forth from every corner of the cabin confessed: “We’re so poor, if free silver was shipped in by the carload we couldn’t pay the freight.”
Kephart came to respect and to wonder at these neighbors who combined a lack of formal education with a fullness of informal ability. Like him, many of their personal characters blended a weakness for liquor with a strong sense of individual etiquette. He heard, for example, the story of an overnight visitor who laid his loaded gun under his pillow; when he awoke the next morning, the pistol was where he had left it, but the cartridges stood in a row on a nearby table.
He met one George Brooks of Medlin: farmer, teamster, storekeeper, veterinarian, magistrate, dentist. While Brooks did own a set of toothpullers and wielded them mercilessly, some individuals practiced the painful art of tooth-jumping to achieve the same result. Uncle Neddy Carter even tried to jump one of his own teeth; he cut around the gum, wedged a nail in, and made ready to strike the nail with a hammer, but he missed the nail and mashed his nose instead.
None of these fascinating tales escaped the attention of Horace Kephart. As he regained his health, the sustained energy of his probing mind also returned. Keeping a detailed journal of his experiences, he drove himself as he had done in the past. He developed almost an obsession to record all that he learned, to know this place and people completely, to stop time for an interval and capture this mountain way of life in his mind and memory. For three years he lived by the side of Hazel Creek. Though he later moved down to Bryson City during the winters, he spent most of his summers 13 kilometers (8 miles) up Deep Creek at an old cabin that marked the original Bryson Place.
Kephart distilled much of what he learned into a series of books. The Book of Camping and Woodcraft appeared in 1906 as one of the first detailed guidebooks to woodsmanship, first aid, and the art we now call “backpacking,” all based on his personal experience and knowledge. There is even a chapter on tanning pelts. But the most authoritative book concerned the people themselves. Our Southern Highlanders, published in 1913 and revised nine years later, faithfully retraces Kephart’s life among the Appalachian mountain folk after he “left the tame West and came into this wild East.” And paramount among the wilds of the East was the alluring saga of the moonshiner
Wiley Oakley, his wife, and children gather on the porch of their Scratch Britches home at Cherokee Orchard with “Minnehaha.” Oakley always said, “I have two women: one I talk to and one who talks to me.”
Laura Thornborough
National Park Service
Oakley was a park guide before there was a park. And in that role he nearly always wore a red plaid shirt. He developed friendships with Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller and became known as the “Will Rogers of the Smokies.”
In Horace Kephart’s own eyes, his greatest education came from the spirited breed of mountain man known as “blockade runners” or simply “blockaders.” These descendants of hard-drinking Scotsmen and Irishmen had always liked to “still” a little corn whisky to drink and, on occasion, to sell. But as the 1920s opened into the era of Prohibition, the mountain distiller of a now contraband product reached his heyday He found and began to supply an expanding, and increasingly thirsty market.
Stealth became the keynote in this flourishing industry Mountaineers searched out laurel-strangled hollows and streams that seemed
remote even to their keen eyes. There they assembled the copper stills into which they poured a fermented concoction of cornmeal, rye, and yeast known as “sour mash” or “beer.” By twice heating the beer and condensing its vapors through a water-cooled “worm” or spiral tube, they could approximate the uncolored liquor enjoyed at the finest New York parties. And by defending themselves with shotguns rather than with words, they could continue their approximations.
In this uniquely romantic business, colorful characters abounded on both sides of the law. Horace Kephart wrote about a particular pair of men who represented the two legal extremes: the famous moonshiner Aquilla Rose, and the equally resilient revenuer from the Internal Revenue Service, W. W. Thomason.
Aquilla, or “Quill,” Rose lived for 25 years at the head of sparsely populated Eagle Creek. After killing a man in self-defense and hiding out in Texas awhile, Rose returned to the Smokies with his wife and settled so far up Eagle Creek that he crowded the Tennessee-North Carolina state line. Quill made whisky by the barrel and seemed to drink it the same way, although he was occasionally seen playing his fiddle or sitting on the porch with his long beard flowing and his Winchester resting across his lap. His eleventh Commandment, to “never get ketched,” was faithfully observed, and Quill Rose remained one of the few mountain blockaders to successfully combine a peaceable existence at home with a dangerous livelihood up the creek.
W.W. Thomason visited Horace Kephart at Bryson City in 1919. Kephart accepted this “sturdy, dark-eyed stranger” as simply a tourist interested in the moonshining art. While Thomason professed innocence, his real purpose in the Smokies was to destroy stills which settlers were operating on Cherokee lands to evade the local law. He prepared for the job by taking three days to carve and paint a lifelike rattlesnake onto a thick sourwood club. During the following weeks, he would startle many a moonshiner by thrusting the stick close and twisting it closer.
When Kephart led the “Snake-Stick Man” into whiskyed coves in the Sugarlands or above the Cherokee reservation, he found himself deputized and a participant in the ensuing encounters. More often than not, shots rang out above the secluded thickets. In one of these shootouts, Thomason’s hatband, solidly woven out of hundreds of strands of horsehair, saved this fearless revenuer’s life.
