Rather than focusing on how surveillance shapes power relations, this study highlights that individuals’ perceptions of surveillance technology and their daily usage are more crucial. Based on a qualitative case study of Village B in Sichuan, this study takes social practices of rural household surveillance as an entry point to explore how the usage of household surveillance cameras, as a mediator, influences rural trust patterns. Findings indicate that the social practices of household surveillance reflect trust problems within acquaintance, semi-acquaintance, and stranger relationships. As a strategy to alleviate these problems, the usage of surveillance cameras hasn’t fundamentally restructured rural trust; instead, it integrates into existing orders, playing a limited regulatory role. Villagers’ situational trust in technology, manifested in the fact that they use technology to fill trust gaps while abiding by relational ethics to avoid disrupting rural social order, eventually leads to the formation of a new trust pattern combining technological rationality and rural particularities. This study provides empirical insights for understanding the dynamic operational mechanisms of rural social life in the process of digitalization and for improving the effectiveness of rural governance.

Can motherhood empower career development? Following this line of inquiry, this paper investigates the technological practices of media mothers in negotiating the workfamily boundary. The findings indicate that by drawing upon a composite resource configuration of “professional endowments and maternal attributes”, media mothers cultivate “digital-intelligence convergence skills” through boundary negotiation practices, thereby achieving “spacetime arbitrage” and re-functionalizing the professional efficacy of their maternal identity. These “digital-intelligence convergence skills” are embodied competencies defined by digital-intelligence media literacy and innovative cognitive schemas. Such skills enhance the coupling rate and penetration efficiency between digital capital and social resources, repurposing occupational expertise into innovative paths of maternal practice, thereby achieving cross-domain positive spillovers and reverse empowerment of embodied capital. Building on these insights, this paper proposes the concept of “elite motherhood”. The study reveals that “elite motherhood”, as exemplified by media mothers, is an emergent paradigm of maternal practice constructed by the nexus of occupational fluidity and technological embodiment in the digital-intelligence era. The “glimmer of gender” illuminated by this practice may serve to empower educated women, enabling them to exploit diverse career trajectories.

Smart home technology is reshaping the landscape of domestic labor within the household realm and constitutes a crucial point of entry for understanding the interplay between contemporary technology and gender relations. This paper employs qualitative methods of home visits and in-depth interviews, in conjunction with the theory of gender performativity, to explore whether and how domestic labor in the digital transformation has become a testing ground for the reconfiguration of gender division of labor. The findings reveal that the introduction of smart home devices endows housework with new features of de-skilling, chain-linking, and distributed labor. What was once perceived as burdensome routine is transformed into manageable tasks and triggered labor, while also creating new possibilities for redistributing responsibilities among family members. At the same time, smart homes serve as arenas for gender performance and the reshaping of dispositions: women may resist conventional disciplining through household delegation or “technological outsourcing,” whereas men, while retaining technological authority, also extend their masculinities toward forms of intimate care. In this light, the use of smart home technologies in Chinese households destabilizes the binary framework of “technological masculinity” versus “domestic femininity,” pointing to a conditional trend of de-gendering in household divisions of labor and highlighting the embeddedness of gender justice claims in everyday practices.

In the digital era, children’s smartwatches, as technological artifacts deeply embedded in daily lives, are systemically negotiating the pathways of children’s socialization. Based on a functionalism perspective, this study examines the adjustment effects of smartwatches on the core dimensions of children’s socialization-cognition, roles, and values-targeting Chinese children aged 9-12, employing mixed-method interview, non-participant observation, and technical walkthrough. The findings reveal that children’s smartwatches bring about a “dual-edged sword” effect: while they empower children’s social connections and autonomous exploration, they also introduce disciplinary controls and risks. At the cognitive level, its location positioning, instant messaging, and gamification features mediate children’s perceptions of space, time, and social interactions. However, these features may also inhibit exploratory desires, weaken offline interaction skills, and prematurely expose children to utilitarian value trade-offs. In terms of role adaptation, children function as both “safety-dependent individuals” and “active negotiators”. In peer relationships, they act as “community participants” and “marginal coping agents”. Although role fluidity enhances adaptability, rapid switching may lead to fragmented self-identity. At the value level, children face dilemmas in balancing safety versus privacy and autonomy versus rules, with their social relationships showing quantitative tendencies. They must navigate between instrumental rationality and emotional needs, making self-value susceptible to external indicators. The study argues that smartwatches, through deep integration with traditional institutions like families and schools, create a new, data-driven wrist-worn socialization model operating round-the-clock. To guide its healthy development, it is necessary to establish a multi-party collaborative intervention framework: families should adopt flexible monitoring and digital literacy dialogues to balance safety and autonomy; schools must integrate critical media education to unveil the capital logic behind technology; policymakers ought to advance ethical legislation and mandatory device interoperability standards to safeguard children’s data sovereignty and digital equity. Only through systematic guidance can technology truly serve the holistic development of children’s socialization.

This study takes “more-than-representational theory” as the theoretical lens and “Onflow” as the core concept. It examines three novel digital map applications distinct from traditional cartography: bodily performance in creative mapping, affective encounters in street-view maps, and ephemeral interactions in real-time traffic data. The study unfolds its analysis through three levels-experiential flow, life flow, and action flow—to explore the mediating practices of digital maps. Research reveals that within specific contexts and purposes, digital maps not only represent locations and spaces with greater precision but also generate lived experiences and actions through multifaceted interactions among people, places, and maps. These practices, where representation and non-representation coexist and intertwine, are reshaping the world. The more-than-representational turn of digital maps offers a new interpretive framework for communication studies beyond the traditional paradigms of "media as channel" or “media as text”, namely, “media as process”.

Focusing on “algorithm aversion” within the context of news consumption, this study employs a controlled experiment to systematically examine the differences in news consumers’ subjective evaluations of algorithm-recommended versus human-recommended texts. It further explores the moderating effects of demographic characteristics and content preferences on recommendation preferences. A total of 800 participants were involved in the experiment, with three dimensions—willingness to accept recommendations, perceived personalization, and overall evaluation—measured using Likert scales. Data were analyzed using independent samples t-tests, multiple linear regressions, and path analyses. The statistical results reveal that human recommendations significantly outperform algorithmic recommendations overall, eliciting higher subjective satisfaction in the dimension of users’ overall evaluation, thereby verifying the existence of “algorithm aversion” in the Chinese news consumption sector. Although the algorithm group generally scored lower in the dimensions of recommendation willingness and perceived personalization, these differences did not reach statistical significance. Multiple linear regressions and interaction effect analyses indicate that variables such as occupation, gender, daily news reading time, and active news-seeking behavior significantly impact subjective evaluations across different recommendation modes. Notably, significant or marginally significant interaction effects were observed in certain dimensions for “occupation × recommendation mode” and “content preference × recommendation mode”, indicating that occupation and news content preferences moderate users' subjective evaluations of recommendation approaches. For instance, among users with a high preference for international news, the satisfaction gap between the algorithmic and human recommendation groups is narrowed. Furthermore, the three-dimensional path analysis demonstrates that overall evaluation partially mediates the effect of perceived personalization on the willingness to accept recommendations. The findings suggest that when algorithmic recommendations demonstrate a precise understanding of user interests, users are more likely to tolerate algorithmic opacity, which enhances their overall evaluation, whereas relying solely on technical optimization yields limited outcomes.

With smartphones deeply embedded in everyday interaction, young people develop shared rules for mobile communication that shape media behavior and psychological well-being. Guided by a sociotechnical perspective and a dual-process model, this two-stage mixed-methods study first conducted six focus groups (N = 36) to identify four interaction norms: responsiveness, disturbance avoidance, public reciprocity, and social presence. Then we surveyed 831 respondents to validate the norms and test the pathways from interaction norms to subjective well-being through purposive and habitual phone checking. Results show that responsiveness and social presence increase both purposive and habitual checking; purposive checking is associated with positive affect and, in turn, higher well-being. Disturbance avoidance reduces purposive checking and relates to lower well-being through negative affect. Habitual checking is associated with both negative affect and well-being, indicating a double-edged effect. This study develops and validates a typology of youth mobile interaction norms and clarifies how social expectations translate into individual media practices and psychological outcomes.

The global communication of China’s art toys has opened a new vista for promoting Chinese culture and soft power. Among which, China’s art toys act as local media, transcending national boundaries to carry and interpret regional culture, offering new empirical perspectives on Culture Communication and Spatial Communication. In light of this, this study is rooted in the local context with a global vision and is carried out by a face-to-face interview with internationally renowned professor Scott McQuire, an expert on geomedia and spatial communication. We will explore the global communication mechanisms of Pop Mart, a well-known Chinese art toys brand, and the theoretical insights it brings, aiming to infuse the academy with vitality empirically and theoretically.