This study discusses the shifting dynamics of fan participatory cultures on social media platforms by introducing the concept of “platformized language games.” We conceive of a fan community as a “speech community” and propose that the language and discourses of fan participatory cultures are technological practices that only make sense in use and interactions as “games” on social media platform. Based on an ethnography of communication on fan communities on Weibo, we analyze the technological-communicative acts of fan speech communities, including the platformized setting, participants, topics, norms, and key purposes. We argue that the social media logic (programmability, connectivity, popularity, and datafication) articulates with fans’ language games, thus shifting the “form of life” of celebrity fans on social media. Empirically, fan participatory cultures continue to mutate in China, as fan communities create idiosyncratic platformized language games based on the selective appropriation of the social media logics of connectivity and data-driven metrics.

This study aims to update notions of how the practical elements of mobile communication (i.e., microcoordination and synchronization) alter the interconnectedness between places and mobilities. Based on ethnographic research on personal shoppers’ mobile purchasing practices between mainland China and Hong Kong (HK), this article argues that mobile communication, as a social practice, extends relational places in cross-border shopping, on the one hand, and transforms the performances of mobilities that are used to anchor the spatial identities of shoppers and localities for consumption, on the other. Shoppers’ mobile communication practices create variable interactions between mobilities and places, manifested as mobile communicating place and place-inscribed communicative mobilities. The consumer cultures of HK personal shopping are anchored by the multiplicity of places and shifting mobilities of people, data, and objects. Mobile communication in/of HK is a medium through which people from the mainland can consume the symbolic space and “localness” of HK, embodying the “spatial selves” of personal shoppers through digital expressions of mobilities. Shoppers produce place-inscribed communicative mobilities of themselves and of commodities in HK through differing synchronization and coordination patterns in two places (Tsim Sha Tsui and Sheung Shui), based on the fact that the former is an international and local-brand tourist center and the latter has risen as a new “parallel trading hub” for cross-border consumption.

The popularity of Internet and mobile media in China has weaken the collective TV viewing culture in Chinese families. Behind the decline of television, the China Central Television’s Spring Festival Gala Show (Gala Show) is hard to maintain its glory and gradually being questioned and challenged. Why does TV viewing and Gala Show still matter in some families but not the others? This paper conceptualizes and analyzes how and why the Gala Show became a media tradition, in the Chinese family-nation cultural reproduction for more than three decades. Based on twofold interviewing data collected by 2015 and 2021, respectively, the study found that the invented media tradition-the Gala Show, stimulates the cultural changes and continuity of Chinese family cultural traditions from the golden age of television (from the 1980s to the late 2000s) onwards. In the long processes of its cultural transformation, the evolving media tradition blends past and present cultural materials in the social institution, thus (re)shaping the cultural practices and values of the participants. Moreover, the interviews revealed that ordinary people read the roles of Gala Show as a media tradition in Chinese families differently, because the social implications of the Gala Show shifted and reacted to the social and cultural transformation from the age of television onwards. Finally, regarding the dynamic social changes in media technologies, Spring Festival customs, and collective TV viewing cultures, the Gala Show reflects the divergent structure of feeling of different generations and families’ social and technological nostalgia about the technology and cultural formats of television in digital era. The established media tradition to some extent maintains the sense of cultural continuity and particularly anchors a safe zoom particular in nuclear families.

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