To view Plato as a staunch anti-media theorist is an inference based on the allegory of the cave that, while seemingly unproblematic, in fact completely strips Plato from the context of his own media environment. This is detrimental to understanding the complexity and richness of his thought on media. Situated in an era of rising literacy, Plato opposed oral culture, especially the hijacking of the Athenian citizen’s soul by the oral creations of rhapsodes and tragic poets. Plato’s ideal republic is, in fact, a republic of letters. In his later years, Plato adopted a rather positive attitude towards the formless and imageless medium itself. Centered on the concept of chora, the nascent form of media ontology can already be seen in his work. However, media ontology diverges significantly from the metaphysics centered on “Ideas”, rendering Plato’s late-stage ontology deeply entangled in contradictions. From the perspective of media ontology, everything Plato was capable of imagining—including his world of Ideas—was nothing more than what could be articulated through his writing.

As an important social science research method and inscription, ethnography has been increasingly widely used in interdisciplinary fields, but it also has problems such as unclear methodology, opaque data, and low replicability and testability of research, which have led to constant questioning of its authenticity, professionalism and authority. Based on this, this paper, from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge and the theoretical framework of “boundary work”, sorted out the three turning points of ethnographic knowledge production over the past century, and critically examined how ethnographic knowledge production constructed and negotiated its legitimacy under the theoretical tension between positivism and “phenomenology-hermeneutics”. It focuses on analyzing the rewriting of the core method of face-to-face direct observation of ethnography by technological mediation in the digital age. It argues that ethnography should pay more attention to the mediation mechanisms and relationship generation of digital society and culture, and construct a research framework of new intersubjectivity and human-machine combination mediated by “data/technological objects”, responding to the challenges of contemporary data practice to phenomenology at the epistemological level.

As a major driver of technological transformation, generative artificial intelligence is reshaping the paradigm of human-machine interaction. Understanding human-AI interaction mechanisms is essential for realizing the potential of intelligent technologies and advancing deep human-AI collaboration. Grounded in the computers as social actors (CASA) framework, this study develops a conceptual model linking human-AI interaction and social capital and examines the psychological pathways through which this linkage occurs. Using survey data from 1,800 respondents, the results show that generative AI users report significantly higher levels of social capital than non-users, and interaction intensity is positively associated with social capital- particularly bonding online social capital. Further analyses indicate that anthropomorphism and media richness positively predict human trust in AI, which in turn is significantly related to social capital and human trust in AI mediates the relationship between the two AI attributes and social capital. Moreover, social presence positively moderates the effect of human trust in AI on social capital. These findings provide empirical support for incorporating intelligent technology into social capital research and offer theoretical insights into how emerging intelligent systems shape individual and societal relationship structures.

Digital parenting devices, which are increasingly embedded in family settings and parent-child relationships, often function as electronic safeguards for children but can inadvertently become potential traps. This paper examines children’s smartwatches through in-depth interviews with 28 parents and children, analyzing how such devices are integrated, adapted, and at times rejected in everyday caregiving practices. Centering on the ongoing negotiations among children, parents, and technology companies, this study finds that families achieve only a provisional suturing of the digital parenting devices’ meaning, allowing their incorporation into family routines. However, as ongoing product optimizations and feature upgrades unfold, smartwatches steadily evolve into trap technologies. Amid this continuous technological tug-of-war, children acquire intricate knowledge of device operations and parental controls, develop sophisticated coping and resistance strategies, and ultimately devise methods to escape or subvert these traps - whether by discontinuing use or by engaging in “poaching games” with the developers. As a result, the promise of mediatized parenting afforded by children’s smartwatch is frequently interrupted or thrown off course.

Since the appearance of news truth in the 19th century, although its connotation has varied, it is generally based on empirical facts and believed that the audience has the rationality to pursue truth. However, with the attack of new media and post-modernism, news truth is faced with different forms of deconstruction and falls into an unprecedented dilemma of interpretation. Existing perspectives on news truth are either confined to an epistemological viewpoint, evading axiological issues and thus falling into mechanical materialism, or they resort to value-based verification, which undermines the materialist foundation of truth while overcoming the rigidity of the former viewpoint. Therefore, it is necessary to rediscover the theoretical value of Marxist practical truth from the truth theory of philosophy, and on this basis, put forward news veridiction, a view of news truth as practice, which is embodied in the famous statement of “speaking with facts”.

The network of British newspaper journalists organized by the early propagandist of the Hing Chung Woey, Tse Tsan-Tai, rapidly accumulated social resources for the revolutionary cause in the initial stage. The formation of this network was linked to the organization, propaganda, and military aspects of the Society's efforts to overthrow the Manchu Qing Dynasty, forming an English-language public opinion space centered in Hong Kong and gradually radiating inland. In this study, we have compiled evidence of the political alliance between Tse Tsan-Tai and journalists of Hong Kong's mainstream British press in the Shen Pao Daily and The South China Morning Post. The roots of Western civilization in Tse Tsan-Tai 's spiritual core determined his pro-British media propaganda strategy, and his South China Morning Post was a propaganda newspaper in favor of the Chinese revolutionaries even though it belonged to the British press at the early stage of its existence. Between 1895 and 1905, the Hing Chung Woey paid attention to using newspapers for propaganda before it launched its armed revolt. However, its operation mechanism was still immature, and the Hing Chung Woey split up without forming a long-term stable external voice.

Fashion culture is liable to be overlooked in academic research due to its pervasive everydayness and prominent practicality. With the deepening of the Belt and Road Initiative, China has become a major supplier of everyday fashion in the Global South, and fashion products have emerged as a primary medium through which cultural individuals in the Global South imagine Chinese popular culture. This study takes the circulation of “Made in China” clothing in the Global South as its research entrance, employing fieldwork research conducted in Guangzhou and Nairobi to explore how the Global South understands and imagine Chinese fashion culture. This study finds that the “localized imagination” of Chinese everyday fashion mainly encompasses three dimensions: the imagination of authenticity, the imagination of creativity, and a de-platformized imagination. Compared to the process of Northern cultures entering Southern countries, South-South transcultural communication should prioritize the following steps under pragmatism-driven conditions: (1) a reciprocity-based culturalsynergy imagination grounded in everyday survival needs, (2) a community-level synergy imagination of shared destinies built upon limited cultural knowledge, and (3) an openness imagination derived from rooted cosmopolitanism.

Media archaeology is renowned for its interdisciplinary nature, but this interdisciplinary nature also leads to problems such as unclear positioning and methodological ambiguity. According to Professor Zielinski, media archaeology is not a completely new discipline, but rather should be understood as a breakpoint in contemporary media theory and history. This article engages in a dialogue with Professor Zielinski, focusing on early media studies in Berlin, aiming to provide theoretical insights and references for the positioning of media archaeology through the lens of media studies. The dialogue concludes that early media studies in Berlin was deeply influenced by the historical and political context of the time; they emerged from the interdisciplinary soil of linguistics/poetry, sociology, linguistics/semiotics, and electronic communication; and media archaeology, emerging from the media studies system, connects the diversity of civilizations past and future. This dialogue aims to delve into the origin and positioning of media archaeology, thereby providing insights for related fields in communication studies.