The digital Dasein of Chinese Rural Migrants

Abstract

This paper sets out to acknowledge the radical possibilities in the way in which human existence is perceived and constructed in the digital age. A 15-month ethnography, focused on the use of social media among Chinese factory workers, is employed to create a conversation with philosophical thoughts on human existence and anthropological thoughts on objectification. Social media is more than a form of communication, or a technology, that facilitates the connection between different locations. By exploring the three layers of existential experience of Chinese rural migrants in the context of ubiquitous social media use, this paper suggests that we might start to consider the degree to which digital media is itself a place in which people actually live and feel at home. The acknowledgement of such place-making via the digital allows us to re-think the relationship between the materiality and digital possibilities for human existence and further explore the fundamental process of objectification through the lens of digital anthropology.

Emotion work via digital visual communication: A comparative study between China and Japan

“…The underlying fear has been that the ubiquitous appropriation of digital communication technologies would make human beings lose some of their ‘real’ selves and lead to a decline in ‘genuine’ relationships (Turkle, 2011). Yet a growing body of research has argued that offline relationships are no more authentic than online ones (Miller et al, 2016; Miller & Sinanan, 2014), and indeed that online lives can be more real in terms of personal aspirations and the feeling of ‘being-at-home’ than offline (Wang, 2016, 2020). At first glance, the common discrepancy between a person’s ‘authentic feelings’ and the exaggerated facial expression facilitated by WeChat and LINE stickers in both Chinese and Japanese cases can be seen as evidence supporting concerns about lack of authenticity in digitally mediated communication.…”

Compressed Environmentalism: Greening a Digital Chengdu through Digital Platforms and Smart Housing Estates

“…For instance, digitalisation is claimed to support the realisation of the Sustainable Development Goals, but with variability from one country to the next due to contextualising factors (ElMassah and Mohieldin, 2020). While scholars have explored digitalisation in China through the desired sociality of migrant workers on social media (Wang, 2020) or the use of digital money to produce working-class subjectivities (McDonald, 2020), there has been little attention paid to the way digital technologies influence environmental actions. This is important to consider because Environmental Protection Agencies in China are looking to digital platforms of environmental information to strengthen environmental governance.…”

“…In China, it is possible that for some rural migrants, the creation of a digital self may allow them to feel more at home in the social relationships they have on social media than those they have in their villages or factories (Wang, 2020). Moreover, the different kinds of digital currencies available in China allow migrant workers to construct diverse forms of sociality that were perhaps less available to them through the use of paper money (McDonald 2020).…”