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  • 2024 Volume 46 Issue 7
    Published: 23 July 2024
      
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  • Influence of Citizens’ Perceived Quality of Governmental Online Response on Their Political Trust and Continued E-participation Intention: A Mixed-methods Perspective
    ZHANG Yu HUANG Huimin
    2024, 46(7): 6-27.
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    As the digital government continues to evolve, citizen engagement in public governance through e-complaints has become a significant channel. However, addressing the challenge of providing high-quality online responses that align with citizen expectations to resolve their e-complaints and foster positive interactions in civil affairs remains unresolved. This study addresses this issue through a two-stage mixed-method approach. The research identifies that the perceived quality of governmental online responses encompasses five dimensions: responsiveness, reliability, procedural, powerful, and personalization. Furthermore, the perceived quality of governmental online responses enhances citizens' perceived equity and satisfaction with the e-complaints handling, thereby bolstering their political trust and continued e-participation intentions. Notably, the perceived quality of governmental online responses by bystanders has a more pronounced positive impact on their perceived equity and satisfaction with e-complaint handling compared to claimants. The conclusions offer practical recommendations for e-government management agencies and personnel to adeptly handle citizen e-complaints through high-quality online responses, thereby upholding public political trust and nurturing a commitment to co-governance.
  • Rediscovering the State: An Attempt to Expand the Concept of Media Trust in China
    ZHOU Zijie
    2024, 46(7): 28-53.
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    In Western media trust research, content trust (audience's trust in news content) has become almost the only connotation of media trust, which later has been absorbed by Chinese researchers, resulting a systematic neglect of the state in an empirical way. Considering such deficiency in knowledge production, the essential goal of this paper is to incorporate institutional-based trust (audience’s trust in the media institution, referring to the relevant regulations, policies and other formal institutions formulated by the state) into the conceptual connotation of media trust as a latitude of equal importance to content trust, and to promote the localization of media trust research. To this end, this paper discusses the validity problem that may result from the Chinese scholars’ dependence on Western research results when doing domestic explorations, then highlights the presence of the state when talking about the concept of media trust in China; introduces institutional- based trust from sociological research and legitimizes its inclusion in the conceptual scope of media trust, explaining the connotation of institutional-based trust in China and providing clues for its operationalization; ueses confirmatory factor analysis, spearman correlation analysis, and path analysis (N=678), finding that the convergent validity of indicators of institutional-based trust is good and have good discriminant validity with content trust, and the combination of institutional- based trust and content trust has high concurrent validity with media trust, which can reflect the conceptual connotation of media trust in a more comprehensive way. This paper also discusses the localization path of media trust research in China, either by continuing to explore the measurement of trust in China or by reconstructing and reinterpreting the concept of trust with sufficient materials accumulated, while both ways should be based on the emphasis of the authority of the state.
  • The Double-coding of Platform Infrastructure and Textile Patterns: A Case Study of Zhinv (Needlework Women) as Digital Gig Workers
    KONG Yuye WANG Hongzhe
    2024, 46(7): 54-76.
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    Different from the mainstream framework that focuses on the examination of conflicts between platform companies and workers, this study turns its attention to the non-mainstream group in the digital gig economy –“Zhinv”(needlework women), that is, those who use platform infrastructure to engage in textile gig work. Drawing on online ethnography, in-depth interviews, and survey, this study found that “Zhinv” are composed of women with different backgrounds and skill levels. They have developed complex strategies and double-encoded manual labor and platform infrastructure to form an informal economic network that is both flexible and resilient. Starting from the labor and organizational practices of “Zhinv”, the study further discusses how Zhinv digitalized the traditional textile gig work by making use of the platform infrastructure, and develops an imaginary of living labor based on their flexible strategies. Furthermore, a historical comparative perspective is introduced to connect the historical relationship between women and coding and its realistic paradoxes. This study hopes to provide empirical observations through the case study, supplement the gender perspective of the gig economy, and offer a more theoretically extensible vision for mapping aspects of China’s gig economy.
  • Discussion on the Transformation and Upgrading of Advertising Education in Mainland China: Based on the Study of 24 National First-class Advertising Majors
    LIN Shengdong WU Junting LI Weijuan
    2024, 46(7): 77-94.
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    The year of 2023 marks the 40th anniversary of advertising education in mainland China. Due to significant changes in the media industry and technological environment, traditional advertising operational models face severe challenges. Consequently, Chinese advertising education is also undergoing a transformative upgrade. This paper presents findings from in-depth interviews with faculty members from 24 top-tier national undergraduate advertising programs. It reveals that advertising programs are now cultivating talent for the broader advertising-related industry. The core of advertising education remains the cultivation of creative and innovative capabilities in information production, while adapting to evolving media environments, audience behaviors, and new technologies is crucial. Advertising programs must also foster students' abilities to adapt flexibly and respond to changing conditions. In evaluating top-tier programs, it is advisable to encourage unique features and move beyond rigid quantitative metrics. The research findings may also offer valuable insights for other disciplines within the field of journalism and communication.
  • The Subjectivity Construction of Digital Gamer in Symbolic Interactionism
    LI Junxin
    2024, 46(7): 95-113.
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    Digital game is an open symbolic field and playing digital game is a creative signifying practice. By focusing on the self-presentation and emotional narrative of gamer who is the main action subject of meaning construction in the game world and through semiotic analysis and semi- structured interviews, it is suggested that the gamer trend to establish the “transitional self” by avatar identification and objectification as well as construct the interactive subjectivity of “social self ” by interactive action and meaning sharing. Furthermore, they can shape collective identity and “cultural self ”by community symbol co-creation and interaction rituals and form a “right-subjectivity” to resist digital capitalism in the real-time or indirect symbolic struggle and feedback. By using and creating symbols, gamers not only promote the development of the game world, but also construct and evolve their self-concepts , social relations, and group identity.
  • Amusing Ourselves to Death: The Impact of Entertainment Techniques on the Number of Likes Received by Anti-Fraud Short Videos
    RUI Jian
    2024, 46(7): 114-136.
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    Currently, entertainment-oriented expressions are gradually occupying the public sphere, and it seems to have become a consensus that communication effects can be enhanced by means of entertainment. However, further research is needed to examine whether entertainment will necessarily enhance communication effects. Built on the elaboration likelihood model and consistency theory, this study explores how topics and media attributes moderate the influence of entertainment on the number of likes, an important indicator of the communication effect, by content analyzing 467 anti-fraud short videos on Douyin. The results show that preventive education and unveiling scam information inhibited the positive effect of entertainment on the number of likes, but case description and property loss information strengthened the positive effect of entertainment on the number of likes. The use of entertainment in self-media significantly boosted the number of likes, and this effect was not affected by any type of information. However, the number of likes received by official media was not affected by entertainment. This study not only provides strategies on how to use entertainment techniques for public communication, but also reveals the boundaries of the effect of entertainment on communication effects, shedding new insights on the relationship between audiences and media in this era of pan-entertainment.
  • From Gazing Images to Operational Images: A Study on Military UAVs’ Interface from the Perspective of Phenomenology of Gestures
    CHEN Jing FAN Weitang
    2024, 46(7): 137-158.
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    The use of UAVs has changed the execution of action, memory, and representation of contemporary warfare, which involves in communication directly without serving as any content. However, previous media studies on military UAVs have employed an ocularcentrism discourse which adopts the classical screen apparatus of the film as its paradigm and obscured the UAVs’ role as action apparatus and the body’s important part in it. Through the phenomenological analysis on the interface apparatus and the operation gesture of the military UAVs, this study tries to reveal a different kind of embodied relationship between humans, images and apparatus. The operation in a interface reunifies the multiple functions of apparatus and the operator, and realizes the telepresence of the body, which should be interpreted as a embodied practice of aiming instead of being summarized by the optical surveillance. In this feedback mechanism with operational images as the knot, the operator identifies with the apparatus through the synchronization of body operation and visual feedback in the image, and the presence of the body runs through multiple spaces, forming a new kind of subject, a distributed subject. As a result, vision and touch, previously separated by visual media, are reunified into the body as a whole, so vision falls from a transcendent and exclusive status. In the operation, images hide as a transparent surface to the human senses, while also shielding the hermeneutic technical code text. The unification of operation not only reconstructs the sensory configuration of media, but also shows a new human-image-world relationship which is brought by the technological development.
  • Between the Appropriation System and the Marketization: The Financial Distress and the Sources of Funding of the Communist Party of China’s Press
    SHANG Jianhui DONG Ziyao
    2024, 46(7): 159-176.
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    Since the founding of the Communist Party of China “CPC”, the “appropriation system” had become the mainstream of the source of funding for the CPC’s press, that was the party or the government’s finance to support. This system which bound the CPC’s press to the party or government finance, often made the CPC’s press fall into an untenable situation when the finance fluctuated greatly. Once this situation occurred, how did the CPC’s press respond to the shortage of funds? This paper takes the three times in the history of the CPC’s press financial outlays as the investigation background, and the response of the CPC’s press to the market-oriented reform to reduce the financial burden of the Party or government as the investigation object. We can see that in the past hundred years, the funding source of the CPC's press was like a pendulum, oscillating between the appropriation system and marketization, forming a variety of combinations, and transforming under certain circumstances. Once the financial difficulties occurred, the CPC’s press would adjust the newspaper price, advertise, improve the distribution network, seek diversified management and other ways to alleviate the shortage of funds.