The advent of the social media era has broadened people's sources of information and broken the monopoly of traditional media as the "gatekeepers". With the development of multimedia technology and the emergence of fragmented and quick reading habits, video-based social media has increasingly become a new forum for information intake for global users and a new battleground for international communication. This paper conducted a content analysis and semantic network analysis on 387730 China-related videos posted on YouTube from 2019-2021, revealing the types, temporal changes, and cross-linguistic differences of China-related sub-topics on overseas video-based social media. The results of the second and third levels of agenda-setting analysis show that while other types of channels are closely linked in their construction of China's image, media channels present relatively independent agendas and are not well integrated into the YouTube opinion field. The study makes a theoretical contribution to the integration of international communication theory and agenda-setting theory. It innovatively compares the second- and third- level agenda-setting effects and proposes specific strategies for China on how to expand video channels for international communication.

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.

Research on memory practices has richly discussed representational and archival memory practices, but has not yet fully analyzed imaginative, non-representational and affective memory practices. This paper analyzes three types of affective mnemonic imagination of Xiami Refugees’ “difficulties” and the related affective nostalgic connotations. The mnemonic imagination of daily recommendations demonstrates the affective experience of flipped music discovery and a mediated sense of being-in-the-world. The mnemonic imagination of genre labeling integrates a nonhuman- centered world imagery in the recollection of post-rock and ambient music. The mnemonic imagination of playlist and music library demonstrates the affective connection of individual, community, and the platform in the construction of collective vernacular music archiving as well as the public value behind cultural heritage. These three kinds of emotional mnemonic imagination are the momentum of Xiami Refugee’s affective nostalgia. What underneath the affective nostalgia of “No home to go to, and no world to be in” is the ethics of hope: clarifying people’s longing for online public music life, reflecting on the precarity of mediated being-in-the-world with three strategies to cope with it, relying on residuals of body memory and affective memory to re-explore relational connection with multiple bodies.

This study redefines the concept of digital hoarding from the perspective of communication and explores the psychological motivation associated with digital hoarding among young people through in-depth interviews. The research found that digital content hoarded by youth groups on social platforms pointed to “useful” self-optimization practices and “interesting” digital experience practices, the former stems from anxiety about coping with the dual performance of social space and real-life in the rat race, while the latter points to the need for positive emotional energy. We believe that the current widespread digital hoarding among young people is a kind of passive performance-oriented practice in the form of compliance and action laziness, and its psychological drive is the superposition effect of auto-exploitation and allo-exploitation, it can also be seen as a swaying practice of “enterprising lying flat” under the shadow of utilitarianism, which reflects the inner contradictions in the feelings and behaviors of the youth group. We need to be alert to the “suspension” mentality behind digital hoarding. Digital hoarding has the potential to magnify the risks of digital practices getting off track with reality. Beyond this case study, we need to continue to reflect on how the practice of negative-performancism based digital hoarding can address and whitewash the structuralism dilemmas of today’s society.

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.

This study aims to explore the public’s perception, assessment and use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in human-computer interaction. With the help of science communication theory and the AIDUA research framework, and structural equation modeling analysis of 1805 sample data, the study deeply explores the factors that form the public’s multidimensional cognitive attitudes towards Generative Artificial Intelligence, as well as the paths that influence the public’s segmented content production behaviors. The study finds that the public’s cognition, assessment and use of generative AI take place in a context of intertwined and Interco structed technological imagination and technological practice. In the primary assessment stage, the public’s technological outlook is shaped by peripheral, front-end factors, including an individual’s optimistic technological disposition, prior technological experiences, and the influence of their local community. These elements drive their perceptions and practical engagement with GAI. In the subsequent evaluation stage, the public’s understanding of GAI’s usage, advantages, and potential risks, informed by their own technological activities, gives rise to a complex cognitive attitude that encompasses both favorable and unfavorable elements. Ultimately, at the behavioral outcome stage, these multidimensional cognitive attitudes significantly impact the public's intricate content creation decisions.

Mass media has played an important role in shaping and continuously reinforcing the “ideal body” through selectively presenting certain types of appearances and bodies. In the age of social media, pictures, videos and texts about appearance and body shape are also featured on various platforms, explicitly or implicitly influencing individuals’ perception of body image. Considering the ubiquity of body image content on social media and its negative impacts on individuals and on society, this study focused on Xiaohongshu APP and explored how body pictures, comments and sex affected negative emotions, inspiration and social comparison based on gender differences theorizing and social comparison theory. By adopting a 2 (participant sex: male vs. female) ×2 (commentator sex: male vs. female) ×2 (comment content: attainable vs. unattainable) between- subject factorial design, an online experiment (N = 292) was conducted. The results showed that, after controlling for social comparison tendency and body mass index, women experienced more negative emotions than men; attainable comments elicited more inspiration and less negative emotion than unattainable comments. Same-sex comments elicited more social comparisons than opposite-sex comments. For female participants, reading attainable comments written by female elicited the highest level of inspiration. While for male participants, reading unattainable comments written by female elicited the lowest level of inspiration. Implications were discussed in terms of gender differences and social comparison.

As AI social chatbots are seen as human communicators, it is crucial to understand the problems of gender bias in their interactions with humans. Using the method of conversation test, this paper designs a series of questions for testing gender bias of robots and to test the gender bias of three mainstream social chatbots in China. The interaction texts are analyzed through qualitative coding analysis.The results indicate that social chatbots exhibit significant gender bias in self- perception of gender, gender stereotypes, gender equality, and response to gender harassment, which are unrelated to the male and female gender roles of the social chatbots themselves. The gender bias of social chatbots as products of human-computer interaction technology, they are constructed by user participation, dialog system technical support, technology companies and program developers. The result is that AI, as represented by social chatbots, replicates and reinforces the construct power of gender bias in the gender culture of human society in learning and imitation.

As a “social factory” implementation space, short video/live streaming replicates and produces specific masculinities of social life in particular scenarios of digital communication, then symbolizes and characterizes them to serve the purpose of profits. This paper studies the male anchors in Kuaishou and their cultural production through digital ethnography and discusses the connection and tension between the bottom life, the performance of Jianghu culture, the governance of the state and the platform in the process of the diachronic transformation of masculinity discourse from “shehuirener” to “jingshen lad”. By analyzing the relationship between the replication and production of masculinities, short videos/live streaming, and consumer communication in the virtual world, we aim to glimpse and reveal a corner of the practice and cultural reproduction of bottom men and masculinities, in order to better understand contemporary Chinese society in the context of digital fission.

There is an extensive use of the words ‘Kommunikation’ (communication) and ‘Verkehr’ (intercourse) in Marx’s Das Capital and its manuscripts. Marx uses these two words in many cases include both the material dimension of transport and the mental dimension of message passing, telegraphic exchanging, interpersonal communication and relationship building, etc. Based on the second edition of Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2), we have checked all the two words and the related word ‘Transport’ (including derivatives and compounds), in which a total of 1,213 words are compared with the existing Chinese translations of Das Kapital and its manuscripts of about 12 million words. We made a variety of comparative tables and wrote an analysis about 500,000 words. It is confirmed that a considerable number of ‘Kommunikation’ and ‘Verkehr’ are translated as ‘transportation’ in chinese, whereas ‘transportation’ in contemporary Chinese mainly refers to trains, ships and other means of transport, which inadvertently causes Marx's rich view of communication to be obscured. So we make a comprehensive analysis of this situation from five aspects in this paper, and endeavour to return to Marx’s original meaning.

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.

Health information avoidance behavior is a vital interfering factor in health communication among the elderly, while previous studies have rarely investigated the influencing paths on it. Based on the SOR theory, this study explored the mechanism of health information avoidance behavior among the elderly. A total of 465 older adults in China were recruited to participate in this survey. SEM shows that perceived hazard characteristics, negative affective response, and weak channel beliefs were positively associated with health information avoidance behavior. Furthermore, negative information characteristics, salience, cognitive dissonance, and social support were associated with health information avoidance behavior through the above three variables in the stage of organism. Additionally, fsQCA shows that there were three main configurations for health information avoidance behavior, including externally-driven avoidance with weak channel beliefs and the absence of social support as core conditions, factually-driven avoidance with negative information characteristics and salience as core conditions as well as emotionally-driven avoidance with negative affective response and negative information characteristics as core conditions. The study not only examines the pathways among factors influencing health information avoidance behavior in the elderly, but also verifies configuration effects of these factors, which provides theoretical and practical implications for improving geriatric education and risk management in public health.

CAPTCHA seems to be a necessary procedure for users’ registration, login, and conducting certain operations in current Internet environment. While critics have pointed out the barriers toidentification and input that CAPTCHA design poses to special populations, extant studies rarely pay attention to the technological ontology of CAPTCHA and the relevant authentication mechanisms. CAPTCHA technology demonstrates a type of relational inversion of human-computer interaction: From being the technology of “the other”, the computer has transformed itself into an examiner who asks questions of the human being, and has even begun to define and interrogate the nature of the human being, while the human being has metamorphosed from a “subject” into the “other” of the technology. This article draws on the philosophy of technology and the phenomenology of technology to discuss how the Reverse Turing Test intervenes in and influences human answers and practices to the question of “what is a human being”. The article analyses the bodily and ableist presuppositions implicit in “I test, therefore I am” human-computer interactions, and uses real-life examples to reflect on the negative dialectics of ableism, which massively create human beings as technological “others”. It further rethinks the bodily view of human-computer interaction by proposing “defects” and “connections” to demonstrate the possibility of dis-ableism in CAPTCHA.

In this paper, 113 studies were selected from 23 Chinese academic journals (including Hong Kong and Taiwan) in 2023, and the selection criteria were mainly concerned with the articles’ sense of problem, realistic concern, empirical vision and thinking method. In the end, eleven topics, including COVID-19 and health communication, human-computer interaction in the age of intelligence, social significance of technology, digital connections and interactions, privacy issues in the digital age, the history and development of platforms, media materiality and infrastructures, media theories, media cultures, media-family interactions, and the politics of mediatization, are selected to present a picture of the knowledge of Chinese communication in the past year.

Since the emergence of generative AI its continuous development has led to interactions between users and AI that have begun to transcend the boundaries of traditional interpersonal communication. This study focuses on the unanticipated emotional practice of “human-AI romance” and employs qualitative research methods to examine how users collaborate with AI to cross and reshape communication boundaries based on the theory of affordance. The findings reveal that users guide AI to break through limitations and cross existing boundaries by using special prompts; they engage in natural language programming and co-construct worlds with generative AI to create virtual lovers, thereby reshaping communication boundaries. Confronted with AI’s technological limitations and iterative development processes, which lead to new boundaries like limited “memory” and the “death” of AI companions, users are adopting various strategies and negotiating with technological systems to sustain this emotional practice. These strategies include memory inscription and “reincarnation” of their AI companions. This dynamic boundary-crossing game not only presents new possibilities for human-AI communication but also reveals the significance of “processuality” and “in(un)determinacy” to the theory of affordance.

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.

This article selects innovative journalism papers from nearly 30 Chinese academic journals (including Hong Kong and Taiwan) in 2023, focusing on research issues, perspectives, and argumentation methods. It examines news theory and independent knowledge systems, multidimensional narratives of news texts, reconstruction of news conventions in the context of digital media, encounters and avoidance of news users, news practitioners in field practice and cognitive frameworks, news innovation and factual verification Ten topics, including the timeliness of news under the logic of accelerationism, the integration of human technology in news production, research on news systems and policies, and research on news history, outline the knowledge landscape of Chinese journalism in the past year. Research has found that the main characteristics of China’s journalism research in 2023 are presented in the following three aspects: firstly, Chinese journalism research is gradually forming a relatively stable and dynamically updated topic group, especially the open theoretical dialogue and knowledge accumulation trend between news practitioners and news reception research. Secondly, in the current era where digital technology has been disenchanted from the news industry, researchers have begun to more consciously observe the new possibilities of constructing local news theories from a comparative perspective. News conventions, news timeliness, and factual verification have become more theoretical oriented empirical research topics in the past year. Thirdly, classic research topics and paths are constantly revisited, and in the context of digital narrative, relatively static news text research has regained vitality. News history research has returned to topics such as newspaper public opinion and the professionalization of the newspaper industry, and continues to be deeply cultivated.

Mass media used to quantify public opinion through poll survey; nowadays, Weibo Hot Search has increasingly been considered as the barometer of public opinion. Drawing on the public opinion infrastructures model, this article uses the methods of text analysis, interview, and content analysis to investigate how Hot Search defines and measures public opinion and how it is framed and interpreted by the mass media. We find that Hot Search had combined “the aggregation of scattered individuals’ search traces” and “the engagement and communication between the publics” since the adjustment of the trending rules in 2018. While the former is individual, private, and egalitarian, the latter is relational, public, and hierarchical. This signifies a shift in logic from “one person, one vote” to “wise public opinion prioritized”. The media frames Hot Search as the synonym of public opinion, with the terms “rocketed to” and “top one” most frequently used as the benchmarks to evaluate the public response, thus legitimizing the knowledge logic of trending algorithms. This finding contributes to revising the previous conclusion, which held that “the party media held a critical attitude towards algorithms”. The future research could take more concrete contexts where “people and algorithms meet” into account.

Drawing on the perspective of digital curation, this article analyzes the life trajectories of several short videos widely circulated during the Wuhan lockdown to explore the making of digital iconic events and the performing of COVID-19 and its memories. The comparative analysis of multiple cases reveals that the social life of digital iconic events covers three interpretive phases, i.e., circulation, domestication, and canonization. In their multi-modal memory practices, social media users and institutional media mobilize a wide variety of digital curation strategies to create copies or variants of the short videos, extend or reverse the performance scenarios, amplify or transform the emotions of performers and the audience, and integrate them into the grand narrative. Eventually, some short videos became fleeting moments, while others were etched into public memory with a “moving” tone.

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.

From the perspective of international communication, philosophy and international relations, this paper explores 902 articles and 1.88 million words of policy texts on the Belt and Road Initiative from 16 countries and international organizations in the past decade. Based on the schematic narrative template of contextualization, role shaping, social mobilization and normative advice, this paper summarizes three common models of value-based international communication, namely, divergency model based on conflict narrative, overlapping model based on de-risk narrative, and convergency model based on community narrative. This paper proposes that the world is experiencing a broad and profound Epeirogenic Movement. Under the premise of political multi-polarization, value-blocs-oriented communication has become one of the most important forces to shape the geopolitical structure of international relations. Bloc boundaries are systematic, dynamic, and layered, expanding the possibilities for global dialogue and collaboration. In the future, international communication will go beyond the superficial stage of material and non-material communication of content, channel, data, and technology, upgrading to the stage of intrinsic competition driven by values.

In recent years, the Chinese eSports field has emerged with a discourse assemblage of “eSports patriotism”. Situated in China’s specific context, different actors such as countries, industries, and individuals, through the specific form and practice of “triple articulation”, compete with each other, connect with each other, and translate each other, to form a complex, dynamic and even temporary consensus on eSports patriotism. The first articulation is on the level of state power, with the articulation, disarticulation and rearticulation of discourse; the second articulation is on the level of industry capital, with the number discourse and the alliance of interests; and the third articulation is on the level of individual dream, with the two-way articulation of the “championship dream” and the “Chinese dream”.

This paper takes the hollow village named M in Zhang Jiakou as the research object, and aims to explore the characteristic of the media space in this hollow village and its influence on social structure. The paper has developed a conception named “embodied media space”. First, the paper finds that M has the characteristic of the inclination of “embodied media space”. The elderly are embedded in the media space constructed by technologies for instrumental purposes. They reproduce the family space and connect the “family” and “nation” space. The elderly particularly rely on the “embodied media space” constructed by body guided activities such as “chatting on the street”, reflecting the space subjectivity and the body creativity. Second, based on the reciprocity of benefits and emotions, the “embodied media space” has promoted blood-like relationship among neighbors. The traditional “hierarchical order” has been reconstructed. The conception of “embodied media space” has returned to the principal position of the body, valued the meaning of the neighbouring space and reemphasized the integration among “body, mind and space”. It has some enlightening significance on rural governance.

Cyber violence incidents have frequently attracted great attention of the whole society, and relevant research has continued to heat up. However, some basic academic issues need to be clarified urgently. Based on the methodology of “unification of logic and history”, this article uses a method that combines multiple-case studies and text analysis to conduct an academic analysis of the normative judgement and the theoretical basis in the researches on cyber violence governance. The research finds that there is a big gap between the existing research on whether the behaviors in the sample cases are illegal and the judicial reality. Most of the identification of what kinds of illegal behaviors doesn’t meet the standard of the normative judgement. Besides, the theoretical basis adopted by the researches in which the sample cases are characterized as cyber violence is mostly specious, and the misuse of the theory abounds. As a result, researchers’ characterization of behaviors in cases of cyber violence tends to be expanded, vague, and one-sided. Not only is it unable to provide the necessary academic support for the legalization of cyber violence governance, but it also may mislead the policy orientation and judicial practice of cyber violence governance, which deserves great attention on the issue.

This study advances research on human-machine communication (HMC) by exploring communication breakdown and its repair in the process of family members’ joint media engagement with smart speakers. Leveraging insights from interpersonal communication research and using video analysis and thematic analysis of 74 UGC (User Generated Content) videos, it identifies factors contributing to communication breakdown, including recognition sensitivity, interaction stability, corpus diversity, and content richness of smart speakers, as well as children’s language proficiency and intellectual development level. The study also highlights strategies employed by smart speakers to repair communication breakdowns, including both negative and positive measures, and that employed by children, consisting of a spectrum of verbal and non-verbal approaches, and parents adopt different repair strategies in response to communication breakdowns. Additionally, users tend to adapt to the logic of the machine during human-machine communication rather than the opposite. It argues that the concept of “process” bridges interpersonal communication and HMC, emphasizing developmental aspects of interpersonal communication is particularly relevant to HMC. The study also offers insights into human-machine relationship, human-machine civilization, and technopolitics.

The prevalence of digital platforms has provided great convenience but also increased privacy risks. Using the Communication Privacy Management theory, this paper explored how Chinese users manage privacy boundaries in non-social contexts. This paper found that there are dual paths of users' platform privacy boundary management through in-depth interviews and validated the psychological mechanisms through a questionnaire (N=1419). It concluded that Chinese users make privacy management decisions based on the premise that they are dependent on such non-social platforms for daily life activities. However, two internal and external factors, namely self-efficacy and privacy calculations, intervene in such decisions. This paper developed privacy management strategies in the context of life service platforms and provided a theoretical reference for subsequent research on privacy management in non-personal contexts.

The rapid development of eSports industry has transformed itself into a multilateral platform model and a career development path with high-level literacy requirements. This study introduces the concept of “media literacy” and adopts Meyrowitz (1998) “three-part division” of media literacy, namely content literacy, grammar literacy, and medium literacy, to propose the theoretical framework of “eSports literacy”. The study attempts to explore the dynamic relationship between media and technology, labor, and employment. By treating eSports as a medium that spans across sports, technology, culture, and media, the study examines how eSports professionals understand and use media, and ultimately integrate into the media environment to enhance their media productivity. This study identifies six key actors, including Tencent Esports, the Ministry of Education, the Sports Bureau, esports clubs, vocational colleges, and universities, who play a crucial role in constructing eSports literacy. These actors promote a shared value proposition among professionals in the industry, collaborative innovation, and sustainable self-development, thereby constituting the three levels of eSports literacy: content literacy, grammar literacy, and medium literacy. The contribution of this study lies in concretizing the macro-level development of the eSports industry into the micro-level requirements for media literacy among professionals. By interpreting the mutually constitutive relationship between media literacy and the industry ecosystem, the study clarifies how professionals can enhance their media production practices in the eSports medium and achieve digital survival.

Credibility serves as the fundamental cornerstone for crafting a “credible, endearing, and respectable” image of China. This paper examines the role of emotional bias in U.S. mainstream media coverage of the “Belt and Road” initiative within ASEAN countries and its impact on the perception of China’s credible political image. The findings reveal a correlation: the more positive the emotional tone in U.S. mainstream media reports, the more favorable the perception of China's political image among ASEAN nations, and this relationship holds true in reverse as well. By incorporating the moderating effects of political trust in and alliance with the United States, the research indicates that ASEAN countries with stronger ties to the U.S. are less susceptible to media influence, whereas those with weaker ties are more likely to be swayed by media narratives. This suggests that once a stable trust relationship is established between nations, it remains robust against media influences. Conversely, for nations lacking such trust, media can exert a significant influence. Drawing on the theory of “wedge strategy,” this paper proposes strategies for preemptive alliance blocking and alliance differentiation in international communication. These strategies aim to enhance ASEAN’s recognition and acceptance of China’s credible political image.

Nowadays, contemporary Chinese journalism has formed a relatively complete discipline structure composed of four branches: historical journalism, applied journalism, theoretical journalism and intersectional journalism. Among them, historical journalism is the root, applied journalism is the foundation, theoretical journalism is the soul, and intersectional journalism is the extension. The concept of logo in contemporary Chinese journalism is composed of the concept of logo in four branches. This paper mainly starts from three branches of theoretical journalism: news ontology, news format and news relations, and preliminarily analyzes the basic composition of the concept of logo in contemporary Chinese journalism. The paper points out that in the ontological perspective, the concept of identification mainly includes “positive facts” “positive news” and “whole reality”. In the perspective of business form theory, the concept of identification mainly includes “party media” “mouthpiece of the eyes and ears” “party spirit” “people’s character” “Ma Xin concept” “news and public opinion” “positive publicity (reporting)” “correct public opinion” “public opinion guidance” “all media” and “media integration”. From the perspective of relationship theory, the typical expression mode of contemporary Chinese news relations is “biased” mode -- propaganda bias, political bias and social bias, and the main identification concepts are “people- centered” and “news means”. Although each section has its own concept of logo, because of the systematic existence of news theory itself, the logo concept of the three sections is intrinsically unified, and they jointly constitute the logo concept system of news theory.

This study investigates the politics of visibility between platforms and laborers, starting with the algorithmic gossip among live e-commerce entrepreneurs. This research founds that, the content of algorithmic gossip can be divided into two parts: simplifying algorithms and auditing algorithms. The first part shows how entrepreneurs simplify rules and establish norms, including defining “traffic” in terms of digital identity and explicitly executing the “data-running” labor process of producing data through content production, real-time monitoring, and analyzing feedback. Auditing algorithms reflects entrepreneurs’ reinterpretation of the meaning of algorithms while rationalizing platform governance measures, evidenced by entrepreneurs’ auditing of algorithms for innovation, decentralization, and publicness. The article concludes by summarizing the theoretical value of algorithmic gossip in understanding the relationship between platforms and workers from marginal knowledge and the technological environment in general.

The advancement in generative artificial intelligence technologies, as illustrated by ChatGPT, signifies not only technological progress but also the emergence of novel themes and nuanced interpretations of longstanding issues, giving rise to a distinctive problematic domain. In 2023, scholars extensively deliberated on ChatGPT’s applications, exploring its potential social ramifications, alterations in human-machine dynamics, shifts in living environments, and more. This led to in-depth exploration and reflection. Utilizing criteria such as topical freshness, theoretical innovation, and research depth, this paper distills six key themes from the pivotal journals of new media studies in 2023. These encompass the evolving relationships and interactions between humans and machines, novel mechanisms for knowledge production, intelligent machines, media objects (including technological and virtual entities), new media in rural settings, and the exploration of “short videos + live streaming.” Despite the constraints of limited data, the paper categorizes and succinctly reviews these themes, aiming to provide a valuable reference for researchers in the field.

Using the theory of “signature theory” and “identity travel”, through field observation and in- depth interview, this paper systematically investigates the Internet cultural markers of Pumi youth with Internet nicknames as the main clue. This paper puts forward the concept of “digital signature” to describe the process of creating, changing and using Internet nicknames and other Internet markers among Pumi young people moving in urban and rural areas. It is found that Pumi youth who are in the process of urban and rural mobility or have relevant mobility experiences complete their travel in multiple identities such as traditional villagers and urban workers, ethnic minority youth and modern enterprise workers through the practice of digital signature. As a strategy for Pumi youth to position themselves and write themselves, digital signature not only expresses the willingness of signers in the social transition period to watch, identify, mark, use and construct their own identity, but also shows the ability of Pumi youth to use digital technology to cope with life situations and the creativity of subject reshaping. This paper focuses on the creation and use of Internet nicknames and other markers in specific social contexts, which is an attempt to combine signature theory with the mobile experience of Chinese minority youth in the digital age.

In the decades since the rise of social media in 2010, an important feature of Chinese new words has emerged, that is, these new words originated on the Internet and quickly returned from the Internet to offline public life. Similar to the neologism boom of any historical period, these neologisms participated in social construction and cultural interpretation on a large scale. While entering the daily social space, the new words strengthen existing class stereotypes in society. Its class reference does not only mean objective class positioning, but also constantly infects the emotions of netizens in the class self-positioning. When the emotions reach a certain threshold, a social consensus is formed. Under this situation, the national debate on the meaning of new words has emerged, and the social groups have obtained the community identity, allowing them to construct a collective resistance, but this awareness of resistance is completed in the context of weakness-displaying, and the folk deduce it as a withdrawal-mechanism. As a negative emotion strategy, withdrawal-mechanism has a strong appeal and mobilization ability. It gains empathy without requiring logical reasoning and allows the meaning of the word to cross social circles.

In contemporary society, the emergence of acute infectious diseases poses a significant threat to human life and health. The dissemination of health information by officials, experts, or professional organizations is crucial for the prevention and control of such diseases. The information released by patients as witnesses and its role should not be ignored, but few studies have explored this. Against the backdrop of the popularity of short videos, this study examines self-reported videos by COVID-19 patients on the Douyin platform. Utilizing the Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM), content analysis was conducted to explore the content features and their influence on public online engagement and emotional arousal. The findings reveal that all videos contained at least one component of threat (severity and susceptibility) or efficacy (self-efficacy and response efficacy). Both threat and efficacy components positively affected video likes, comments, and favorites. Meanwhile, the high severity component and the high susceptibility component were associated with the arousal of fear and anxiety respectively, while the high self-efficacy component significantly reduced these negative emotional responses. Additionally, the low response efficacy component was found to enhance anxiety arousal. On this basis, we discuss the theoretical significance and practical value of this study.

As an inevitable product of the development of digital capitalism, private information attached to an individual’s physical body has become a commodity with property value, circulating in bilateral exchange markets in the form of legitimate labor. Different from the accidental transaction in the traditional media stage, the privacy transaction in the digital society has the commoditized form of collection mining and sharing proliferation and the self-commoditized form of privacy disclosure, thus forming a bidirectional coupling privacy commoditization mechanism. Among them, the dispute over ownership of users' private data and the imbalance between costs and benefits in privacy disclosure have become prominent contradictions in the bidirectional commercialization of privacy, resulting in privacy transactions becoming an unavoidable social anxiety and group risk. Privacy is a symbol of the social identity of human beings, and only by incorporating a commoditized mechanism of privacy concerns and data compatibility can individuals protect their privacy from falling into the predicament of zero privacy.

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.

Professor Jonathan Gray, from the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has dedicated over twenty years to media and audience research, particularly emphasizing fan studies, television audience research, and other audience-related topics. Jonathan consistently maintains a critical and reflective approach, focusing on antifans, nonfans, and audiences expressing passionately negative emotions toward specific media products. He highlights the opportunities and challenges faced by audience research in the contemporary new media landscape. In this interview, we delve into Jonathan’s academic background, examining the evolution of fan studies through its three waves and exploring the latest advancements in the field. Subsequently, our conversation centers on his latest book, Dislike-Minded: Media, Audiences, and the Dynamics of Taste, which concentrates on a distinct audience type—those openly expressing their “dislike”. We conclude by revisiting “Reviving audience studies”, engaging in a broader reflection on the factors contributing to the decline of the research paradigm and its adaptation within the framework of the new media environment.

Ellul’s propaganda research ingeniously integrate classical sociological resources and phenomenological trends. He transcends the limitations of communication research dominated by American empirical and effect research from the path of technological sociology. He was deeply influenced by Marx, but unlike the Frankfurt School's emphasis on ideology and the political economy of communication’s reconstruction of the traditional Marxist economic foundation/ superstructure, he adhered to Marx's holistic and dialectical approach; he absorbed Weber’s understanding sociology and religious sociology, but rejected its principle of “value free”, inherited Weber's analysis of bureaucracy, and enriched the latitude of bureaucracy and mass society; he is similar to Durkheim in the collectivist analytical perspective, but rejects the latter’s empiricism. Employing a phenomenological spirit oriented towards the phenomenon itself, Ellul vividly describes technological phenomena and analyses propaganda as a form of skillful technique. From the perspective of methodology, the analysis of the theoretical starting point and logic of Ellul's propaganda research will help to deeply understand the academic context and creativity of his propaganda analysis paradigm, and explore the expansion space provided by his propaganda analysis for the imagination of media sociology.

This study used two experiments to examine the psychological mechanism of the persuasion effect of narrative point of view (POV) and expanding narratives of public service short videos. Analyzing data collected from the subjects who viewed a short video presenting corneal donation appeals, the study found that narrative POV (point of view) affects the organ donation intentions directly and people exposed to first-person narratives suggest deeper immersion than third- person narrative viewers. Moreover, immersion has positive impact on individuals' attitudes toward and intentions of organ donations, in line with the transportation theory. Data analysis also demonstrated that POV affects individual organ donation intentions following a serial mediation model of POV-Immersion-Attitude-Intentions. The model suggests that the contradictory findings of previous studies on the relationship between POV and health behavior are partially due to the mediation effect of immersion after exposure to such messages. Experiment 2, sustained by heuristic processing model, proceeds to explore how Danmu (bullet comments) as the expanding narratives influences organ donation intentions. It revealed that positive textual Danmu also indirectly but negatively impacts people’s donation intentions through boosting heuristics, which positively influences the negative attitudes and negatively influence the positive attitudes simultaneously.

The current acceleration of social mobility and modernization in China has contributed to people's nostalgia. This article explores how truckers make home and alleviate nostalgia in mobile labor. The study used in-depth interviews and field observation to analyse truckers' home-making practices along three dimensions: materiality, emotion and power. In the material dimension, the truckers turn the cab into home enclave through food, “spirits”, and various kinds of meaningful objects; in the emotional dimension, the truckers are reunited with their family by forming a simultaneous space convention, and meet the landscape imagery of the home through image provided by intelligent media; in the power dimension, the truckers construct power zones through representation outside the family and internally by sharing power and responsibility with their trucker's wife.While providing fresh cases of home-making practices research, the study also pays attention to the personal life of laborers under the background of hot platform research, and calls for seeing their emotional needs and dynamics as “human beings” at the current time when the idea of “exploitation-resistance” is popular.