This article examines conditions placing China’s livestreamers as central focal points in the increasing tensions between the cultural politics and economic ambitions of digital China. Framed by concerns around ‘platformization’, this research uses a creator-centric critical media industries studies perspective. Chinese livestreamers enjoy a greater degree of opportunity than their Western counterparts, including competing gameplay platforms that vie for premier gameplayers who can dictate their own terms. Decades-old cultural policies fostered underlying conditions that advantage female streamers engaging in gendered performativity to appeal to lonely rich men. Livestreamers ride marketing imperatives directing consumers to cross-integrated e-commerce platforms that fuel China’s emerging consumption culture. But livestreamers engage in ‘edge ball’ violations of Chinese norms that make them subject to an ever-increasing level of state regulatory restraint, signaling the return of ideology designed to mold online expression and behavior.

\r\nThe relative novelty of digital ethnography as a research methodology, along with the challenges that it moves to classical understandings of fieldwork, participation and representation, results in a repertoire of professional illusions through which digital ethnographers justify their work when confronted with the disciplinary culture of anthropology. This essay is based on the author’s reflexive experience of researching digital media use in China, and updates Gary Alan Fine’s 1993 article “Ten Lies of Ethnography” by identifying three lies of digital ethnography. Illustrating each of these lies through an archetypal figure – the ‘networked field-weaver’, the ‘eager participant-lurker’ and the ‘expert fabricator’ – this article argues for the need to confront methodological illusions and embrace the tensions behind them as useful heuristics for conducting ethnographic research on, through and about digital media.\r\n

Based on Internet Ethnography of a popular female live streamer on YouTube Gaming, this article theorizes how game live streaming invokes new forms of paid emotional labor that intersect with traditionally feminized demands of unpaid attentive and caring work. Drawing from an intersectional feminist framework that takes seriously small data and everyday life, this article suggests there is a shift toward one’s work being part of a personalized media economy that can relate to one’s audience. This study concludes with an invitation to think how folks under neoliberal capitalism are willing to leave secure, traditional 9-to-5 jobs, in order to be a professional gamer without any social safety nets and ultimately be always-on-the-clock.

This literature review was conducted to investigate the association between emotional labor and burnout and to explore the role of personality in this relationship. The results of this review indicate that emotional labor is a job stressor that leads to burnout. Further examination of personality traits, such as self-efficacy and type A behavior pattern, is needed to understand the relationships between emotional labor and health outcomes, such as burnout, psychological distress, and depression. The results also emphasized the importance of stress management programs to reduce the adverse outcomes of emotional labor, as well as coping repertories to strengthen the personal potential suitable to organizational goals. Moreover, enhancing employees' capacities and competence and encouraging a positive personality through behavior modification are also necessary.© Copyright: Yonsei University College of Medicine 2018.

This article explores how the political economy of the cultural industries changes through platformization: the penetration of economic and infrastructural extensions of online platforms into the web, affecting the production, distribution, and circulation of cultural content. It pursues this investigation in critical dialogue with current research in business studies, political economy, and software studies. Focusing on the production of news and games, the analysis shows that in economic terms platformization entails the replacement of two-sided market structures with complex multisided platform configurations, dominated by big platform corporations. Cultural content producers have to continuously grapple with seemingly serendipitous changes in platform governance, ranging from content curation to pricing strategies. Simultaneously, these producers are enticed by new platform services and infrastructural changes. In the process, cultural commodities become fundamentally “contingent,” that is increasingly modular in design and continuously reworked and repackaged, informed by datafied user feedback.

Guided by the frameworks of niche and polymedia theories, this study sought to understand the phenomenon of platform-swinging on social media, which refers to the routine use of multiple social media platforms that has become commonplace across different ages. Based on focus group discussions (FGDs) with 62 social media users in Singapore, this study found that social media users engage in platform-swinging for relationship management and self-presentation gratifications. While these gratifications are also served by individual social media platforms, platform-swinging allows social media users to navigate structural, social, and norm barriers to obtain greater gratification opportunities. This has implications on how social media users subsequently regard and segment their personal relationships.

Over the past decade, social media platforms have penetrated deeply into the mech­anics of everyday life, affecting people's informal interactions, as well as institutional structures and professional routines. Far from being neutral platforms for everyone, social media have changed the conditions and rules of social interaction. In this article, we examine the intricate dynamic between social media platforms, mass media, users, and social institutions by calling attention to social media logic—the norms, strategies, mechanisms, and economies—underpin­ning its dynamics. This logic will be considered in light of what has been identified as mass me­dia logic, which has helped spread the media's powerful discourse outside its institutional boundaries. Theorizing social media logic, we identify four grounding principles—programmabil­ity, popularity, connectivity, and datafication—and argue that these principles become increas­ingly entangled with mass media logic. The logic of social media, rooted in these grounding principles and strategies, is gradually invading all areas of public life. Besides print news and broadcasting, it also affects law and order, social activism, politics, and so forth. Therefore, its sustaining logic and widespread dissemination deserve to be scrutinized in detail in order to better understand its impact in various domains. Concentrating on the tactics and strategies at work in social media logic, we reassess the constellation of power relationships in which social practices unfold, raising questions such as: How does social media logic modify or enhance ex­isting mass media logic? And how is this new media logic exported beyond the boundaries of (social or mass) media proper? The underlying principles, tactics, and strategies may be relat­ively simple to identify, but it is much harder to map the complex connections between plat­forms that distribute this logic: users that employ them, technologies that drive them, economic structures that scaffold them, and institutional bodies that incorporate them.

Daigou, literally translated as buying on behalf of, is a Mandarin term that refers to a form of personalised transnational trading activity, which is generally characterised by practices of purchasing locally manufactured products overseas and reselling them to consumers in China via international courier services. This article examines Chinese international students’ digital labour invested in daigou and their use of social media, particularly WeChat, in running their personal enterprises. Through the analytical lens of ‘boundary’, the article reveals how daigou activities involve sustained crossing and reconstructing boundaries of privacy through selective self-disclosure of personal information. This study contributes to the empirical literature on international students’ everyday use of digital media by highlighting their work practices in the digital age. Conceptually, the case study of daigou suggests overlapping spaces between various forms of digital labour and the relevance of ‘unproductive’ labour which constitutes a necessary dimension of online work.