Remembering disappeared websites in China: Passion, community, and youth

Abstract

Disappeared websites are the missing pages of web history. We examine over 140 memory narratives of disappeared websites in China, in which 176 disappeared websites are remembered. We find that memories of disappeared websites rarely treat websites as dead objects, machines, or even as media, but more often as people whose death is mourned and memories cherished. They not only narrate the biographies of the websites but also the autobiographies of the story-tellers. The main biographical plot in these narratives of disappeared websites is a lovely life that was tragically cut short. Disappeared websites are most remembered for the passion, community, and sense of youthful idealism which they had inspired. Remembrances of disappeared websites are both retrospective and prospective. They resuscitate a lost golden age while expressing voices of protest at Internet censorship. They both highlight and repair a web history marked by disruption and disappearance.

Doing Ethnography on Social Media: A Methodological Reflection on the Study of Online Groups in China

“…The Chinese state's information control has intensified the fluid and fragmented nature of social media. The Chinese censorship system not only filters public information through computation and human reading (King et al, 2013;Yang & Wu, 2018) but also fabricates hundreds of millions social media comments every year to distract the public from criticisms of the regime (King et al, 2017). In addition, the internet usage in China is disciplined to be highly individualistic through the state's extensive and repressive responses to any collective action online or offline (e.g., D. Fu & Distelhorst, 2018;Mackinnon, 2011;Tsai, 2016).…”

Online lockdown diaries as endurance art

“…There is something fundamentally ephemeral about the web (Chun 2008). Many websites and web postings disappear quickly, not the least because of censorship in China (Yang and Wu 2017). On February 1, the poet Xiao Yin wrote that he had archived ten postings for future use on his WeChat, but when he opened them again in the evening, five of the ten were gone, a "death rate" of 50 percent (Xiao Yin Diary, February 1, 2020).…”

Weibo and the making of Chinese networked publics: Witness, debates and expertise

“…Unlike the disappeared websites that live in the memory narratives (Yang & Wu, 2017), Weibo is still evolving and new features keep emerging, while the memories about it are also being produced and shared. Our memories of particular events are inseparable from how events are covered by particular media platforms (Olick, 2014).…”