Based on four key criteria—problem awareness, methodological norms, theoretical construction, and practical relevance—this article selects 148 research papers from 18 Chinese academic journals (including those from Hong Kong and TAIwan regions) published in 2025. It delineates the intellectual landscape of communication research in China over the past year through thirteen thematic areas: the history of communication thought, digital labor, platform studies, algorithmic practices, human-machine communication, media cultural practices, digital interactions, mediatized governance, health communication, media studies and the philosophy of media technology, the history of the internet, and new developments in classical theories.

In 2025, breakthrough progress in open-source large models, represented by DeepSeek, marked a new stage of deepened application for generative artificial intelligence, leading to profound changes in the social communication ecology. This year, the academic community conducted systematic and in-depth research centering on the new communication ecology and the new conditions of human existence in the era of artificial intelligence. Based on criteria such as the frontier nature of topics, the novelty of theoretical perspectives, and the depth of research, this paper identifies six major themes from new media and intelligent communication research papers published in core journals in 2025. These themes include: the transformation and reconstruction of human-machine relationships, human-machine affective practices, the transformation of knowledge production driven by generative AI, DeepSeek open source and new horizons in international communication research, “visibility” research in the platform context, and new media as “infrastructure.” Through the review and synthesis of these themes, this paper aims to provide references and insights for relevant researchers.

The tradition of “Shu Er Bu Zuo” in ancient Chinese classics and its evolution within specific historical contexts are fundamentally intertwined with communication. Communication bias of orality and literacy under the dispute of the New Text Classics and the Old Text Classics requires further interpretation. The New Text Classics, exhibiting the oral communication bias, fostered a classical knowledge system characterized by accessibility, open-ended meaning, and memorability. The New Text Classics demonstrated an anthropological presence in their oral tradition. By contrast, the Old Text Classics in written form developed exegetical formats like “shu”, “jian” and “zhangju”, which were well-suited to silent reading. Due to the ideographic nature of Chinese characters, endogenous authority was conferred upon the written words. Consequently, the Old Text Classics established a stable knowledge system. Distinct communication bias shaped corresponding knowledge systems, thereby providing pivotal mechanisms for different political culture. The flexibility and openness of the New Text Classics enabled people to reform to address societal and institutional anxieties. Conversely, the stable knowledge of the Old Text Classics was closely linked with a political mindset inclined to uphold authority and restorationism. The communication bias was not passively projected onto the political field, but was actively constructed as mutually exclusive clues by historical agents. The mediality of the New Text Classics and the Old Text Classics shaped distinct knowledge systems and political cultures.

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.

The development of emerging media presents the “Janus face” of technology: it brings convenience and prosperity, but also implies risks and crises. To some extent, the evolution of emerging media forms is promoting the development of emerging media to a macro context. In such a context, “security” is constantly on the agenda of national policies and media. As an important category of security issues,national security issues also show new types and characteristics in the new context. Due to the prominent nature of security discourse, national security issues in the context of emerging media are not only a problem with both traditional and non-traditional security, but also a discourse process and micro practice participated by emerging media, interwoven in politics, military, economy, culture, society, science and technology information and other aspects of holistic national security and show the characteristics of generalization, acceleration, hybridization and cross domain. Behind the emergence of these issues, it involves an important conceptual mechanism “securitization” in the security concept of constructivism. This paper holds that holistic national security issues have experienced two kinds of securitization process in the internal and external environment of emerging media construction. In this process, various interwoven security issues integrate different subjects and multiple actors into the technology of emerging media. In the logic of technology, a new type of risk with discursivity between subjects and derivative between fields comes into being. Theoretically and practically, the understanding of the context composition, type characteristics and process mechanism of holistic national security issues can provide a general antecedent reference for the construction of the overall cyberspace security governance system.

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.

Today, the trend of contextualization and datafication has brought about the transformation of human cognition and behavior, and reintegrated the traditional concepts of “presence” and “absence”. Physical, digital and multi-meaning communication practice provides physical presence with more social relevance. Based on theories of “media context”, “media-body conception”, “body image”, this study emphatically discusses the new interaction among body, environment and information. Through semi-structured in-depth interviews, the research found that: in the context of fitness media technology, “contextualization” plays an important role in regulating, constructing and reconstructing users’ body image, and the result of its “embedding” or “extension” reflects the victory of technology or body; driven by technical elements such as light, electricity and sound, individual discipline and transform their data bodies by “gazing” others data bodies, in this process, the physical body is actually “absent”. Meanwhile, users began to rethink the body subjectivity in the process of the continuous interweaving and deepening of the “media-body-life” experience, thus realizing the activation of that. As the result, the cut and docile body becomes “more alive ”.

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.

Universal connection defines the value rationale for digital association: seek the solidarity on the scale of Gaia. Universal connection is the belief in digital association, just as information is the starting point of communication. This paper discusses the following theoretical issues: (1) Bio-like Metaphor. The evolutionary philosophy of digital association is connectionism and oriented towards systematic biology. (2) Realistic Virtuality. It is still society and people, not media and technology, that determine digital interaction; Reality virtual means the idea that the reality contained in the virtual determines the virtual itself. (3). digital solidarity. The direction of universal connection is not homogeneity, but digital solidarity for coexistence of one and many. Only by upholding social justice can digital exclusion be reduced. (4) Schramm once expected that Communication would disappear, absorbed into the unity of behavioral science as an important component. This may mean that new communication studies should strive to build a universal connection with ecological, value rational, and super-instrumental characteristics, and thus become a fundamental discipline.

Since 2016, a large number of children companion robots have emerged in the Chinese mainland market, and these robots have entered thousands of families in China as childcare domestic smart media. At present, most of the research focuses on the gender of the robot, and there is a lack of in-depth and detailed discussions on the people who produce robots, as well as the complex relationship between people and technology in the production process. In order to deeply explore the AI technology and human gender mutual shaping, a six-month ethnography in a well-known technology company was conducted to investigate. Authors of this paper have personally participated in the development of a children companion robot. The study found that, the technology of children companion robot is masculine, and the masculinity of this technology also consolidates the “hegemony” masculinity of the “Zhiban Dad”. However, the masculinity of technology will also change in the process of technology implementation. In order to meet users’ needs for “parenting”, perceptual femininity and personal experience of motherhood are needed, which also urges “Zhiban Dad” to actively make a “compromise” of masculinity in technical practice. The emergence of masculinities shows that technology and gender are not essentialism, they shape each other in practice. The masculinity adjustment of “Zhiban Dad” also provides an opportunity for the appearance of negotiable gender robots. In short, clarifying the masculinities generation mechanism of the producer “Zhiban Dad” will help to understand the male gender and masculinities of current children companion robots.

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”.

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.

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.

Exploring the history of how the word “Television” was translated into Chinese is of great significance to trace the origin of Chinese Television history. The development of television technology in the west since the 1920s attracted the attention of some Chinese intellectuals, and many translations of “Television” had been since put forward. In 1934, Terminology of Physics with official background defined "Dian-shi" as the standard Chinese translation of “Television”, which gave the translation an ultimate authority. The logic of translation from “Television” to “Dian-shi” was not a strategic appropriation claimed by some previous studies, but an inherited creation: a scientific community in the field of physics and electrical engineering, which inherited the translation tradition of “tele” as “dian” (electricity) formed since the late Qing Dynasty, constructed the word “Dian-shi”, assimilating the Chinese translation of “telegraph” (as “Dian-bao”) and “telephone”(as “Dian-hua”). At the same time, the scientific community had actively promoted this professional concept to a wider social scope through mass media, which expanded the circulation and influence of the word “Dian-shi”. The translation-naming history of “Television” as “Dian-shi” was essentially an independent knowledge reconstruction with translation as the external representation, which reflected the cultural subjectivity of modern Chinese people in the introduction of foreign knowledge.

What is reading and where does its meaning come from? The answer depends on the choice of perspective. In the traditional reading view based on printing technology, reading is conceived as a text-centered process of non-material symbolic reception and meaning negotiation that occurs within the mind, so as to lose the explanatory power to the new round of reading revolution triggered by digital technology. According to the phenomenological theory and the materiality approach of media research, if more attention is shifted from the “centre” of text to the “margin” of reading, such as material substrate, human body, and cultural context, we may get a new perspective on it. This paper applies the method of “phenomenology of practice” to the reading process, and finds that reading is not only a psychological representation of the text, but also a material, concrete, and situated practical activity; textual meaning is not only contained in the text, but also generated out of the reading, and is manifested as an “entanglement” structure and “mangle” process of text, body, and materiality. The article suggests that the theory of reading practice has important methodological significance for rethinking the new round of reading revolution triggered by digital information technology, establishing an epistemology informed by practical existentialism, and comprehending the mediated living situation of human beings.

In the era of intelligent media, the issues of personal information protection has become a social focus. With a questionnaire survey (N = 4,800) conducted in 16 cities across China, this study outlines the differences in attitudes towards personal information protection among different groups of users (promotion focus vs. prevention focus), and clarifies the mechanism of privacy invasion experience on the intention to protect personal information. The findings of this study are as follows: First, there is a positive U-shaped relationship between the experience of privacy invasion and the intention to protect personal information, and regulatory focus plays a moderating role in this relationship. Second, both perceived risk and perceived benefit could mediate this effect, specifically, perceived benefit and perceived risk have a strong explanatory power in the declining stage and in the rising stage, respectively. Third, the awareness of personal information protection of the promotion-focused individuals is stronger than that of the prevention-focused individuals, however, when the level of privacy invasion is extremely high, the awareness of personal information protection of the prevention-focused individuals is stronger than that of the promotion-focused individuals. In the process of balancing risks and benefits, the turning point of the prevention-focused users appears obviously earlier than the promotion-focused users. These research results provide theoretical supports for understanding the privacy practices of Chinese intellectual media users.

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.

In the past, the development of traditional cartography in China has been summarized as a scientific practice process in which theoretical level and technological techniques have been continuously improving over times. This thesis attempts to get rid of the established conclusion from the perspective of the history of science, and re-understand the social function and historical significance of cartography from the perspective of it as a communication practice of constructing and disseminating geographic information. The traditional cartographic activities in China emerged from the tradition of witchcraft, and due to its good presentation and information intuitiveness as a medium, it has always been used as a symbol of power relations and a political tool for producing authority in bureaucratic practice.In ancient China, the production, circulation and application of maps have always been closely related to the flow of political resources, which also leads to its “embodied” characteristics in communication activities, which are distinct from Western cartography.

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.

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.

By screening and clustering column articles from 23 core and comprehensive journals in Chinese journalism and communication, this article provides an overview of the impact and shaping of the intelligent communication context on the research foci and thematic orientations of Chinese journalism over the past year, across eight key areas: journalism theory, systemic transformation of mainstream media, assessment of mainstream media effectiveness, Chinese journalism, news production, news practitioners, news consumption, and the history of Chinese journalism.

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.

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.

This paper aims to explore, through a local perspective, the complex changes triggered by the downward expansion of large domestic platforms into local areas, as well as the indigenous modernization development directions embedded in the subjective daily practices. In Liangshan's Yanyuan County, platform sinking is an objective consequence of coordination among state power, platform commercial expansion, and local socio-cultural elements. On one hand, platforms provide employment opportunities for returning youth in the county town, and county-based riders have formed symbiotic strategic behaviors with the system through their connections with relatives and friends. On this basis, the youth have developed an amphibious local lifestyle rhythm between urban and rural areas, balancing work, leisure, and family, gaining both material support and emotional care. On the other hand, the actual operation methods of platforms integrated with the county's spatiotemporal structure have brought about a series of issues such as traffic management, market rule formulation, and enforcement. Local elites with multi-identity backgrounds can leverage their local social capital to coordinate differences in perspectives and interests among the government, platforms, and platform practitioners. During the interaction between platforms and localities, this kind of agentic strategic practice—which coordinates multi-party power relations based on locality—helps county youth obtain less alienated work and life, while reconfiguring the county's urban spatial form. This not only aids the adaptation between platforms and localities but also helps transform previously disadvantaged local elements into new development directions. The author argues that this subjective force rooted in locality harbors the future direction of China-style modernization development.

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 introduces the theory of technology affordance and applies the SOR (Stimulus-Organism-Response) model to explore how do Chinese live-streaming platforms utilize technology affordance to influence viewers’ continuous viewing?” Employing “the walkthrough method” and a questionnaire survey (N=418), this study finds that based on technical functions and algorithmic systems (e.g., online PK, virtual gifts, and same-city modes), live-streaming platforms have contributed to the formation of “co-performance” (CP) and “association” (AS) between viewers and anchors. As external stimuli (S), CP and AS affordance positively affect the viewers’ perception of “virtual presence” (VP) and “commercialized intimacy” (CI) respectively. The stronger the individual perception (O) is, the higher the viewers’ willingness to continue watching (R) will be. In addition, the findings reveal that the weak connection is not enough to stimulate viewers’ perception of VP or create CI due to the limitation of interactive contexts and terminal equipment. This reveals that in the era of “networked individualism”, platforms still need to focus on the development of AS, characterized by “group”, “circle” and “organisation”, and weak relationships are more useful than weak connections in increasing viewer stickiness. The theoretical contribution of this study lies in introducing the theory of technology affordance to understand the interaction between live-streaming platforms and viewers and providing quantitative evidence for previous qualitative studies. The practical significance lies in providing a reference for the live-streaming industry to maintain viewers’ stickiness.

In the public discourse shaped by the “media risk” narrative, restrictive mediation has become a widely adopted parenting strategy among Chinese families. This study investigates whether restrictive mediation safeguards adolescents’ mental health by curbing entertainment-oriented Internet use or, conversely, exacerbates depression by triggering reactance towards parental authority. Based on survey data from 7,965 adolescents, the results show that frequent restrictions indeed reduce entertainment-oriented Internet use, thereby lowering adolescents’ depression. However, these restrictions also provoke reactance towards parental authority, which not only directly harms mental health but also increases engagement in entertainment-oriented Internet use, undermining the intended protective effects. Notably, in families with better parent-child communication, restrictive mediation can significantly enhance adolescents’ mental health without triggering reactance, allowing its protective effects to prevail. This study highlights the complexity and context-dependency of restrictive mediation effects, offering valuable insights for optimizing digital parenting practices.

In today’s internet society, sympathy remains an important force driving social integration. However, to transform the observation of others’ pain into social cohesion, it is necessary to first clarify the “threshold” issue of sympathy in the online public opinion area, which is the practical question of how the structure of “Chinese-characteristic” ideal victims is perceived. This study selected 35 cases during 2017 to 2023 based on purposive sampling from the internet society’s hot topic aggregation platform. It employed the crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis (csQCA) method to determine four pathways for constructing the image of ideal victims and distilled four structural characteristics of ideal victims. Based on that, this study attempts to figure out the power dynamics in the arena of sympathy expression among the online public, media, and victims from a micro-political perspective to explain the emergence of sympathy thresholds and proposes the respective sympathy responsibilities of each entity to contribute to achieving the ultimate goal of social cohesion through sympathy.

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.

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”.

The prevalence of digital technology is profoundly reshaping the media trust structure of middle-aged and elderly people. Based on the theory of technology domestication and using data from the 2021 China Social Survey, this study empirically examines the impact of online communities on media trust among middle-aged and elderly people in China, as well as its heterogeneity. It also delves into the underlying mechanisms and the differential impacts of various types of online communities. The study finds that: firstly, online communities participation significantly weakens trust in media among middle-aged and elderly people, and this negative effect intensifies with age and the absence of intergenerational support, but social networks can mitigate this effect. Secondly, technology domestication operates through dual pathways of “institutional authority deconstruction” and “trust compensation relationship reconstruction”. The former, with the decline of political trust as an intermediary, intensifies the loss of media trust, while the latter improves media trust through enhanced social evaluation, forming a partial masking effect revealing cognitive adaptation characteristics of authority dilution and relationship proliferation. Thirdly, there are differential impacts among types of online communities, with utilitarian communities significantly eroding media trust, whereas relational and interest-based communities have no significant effect on media trust. The findings suggest that media trust reconstruction among middle-aged and elderly people is not a non-linear replacement, but rather the result of a dynamic game between institutional authority and relational trust, highlighting the important impact of the dialectical interaction between algorithmic logic and social logic on the construction of media trust systems in the process of technological domestication.

Livestream e-commerce has become a key site for the performance and fabrication of consumer desire in the digital era. This article conceptualizes “phantom consumption” as an analytical framework to investigate how desire is produced among livestream shoppers through imitation, competition, and repetition. Desire is generated through imitation, as consumers, embedded within multiple layers of streamer performances, community interactions, and algorithmic recommendations, translate others’ desires into their own will. Desire operates through competition, where strategic discounts and conspicuous thrift create a new logic of distinction in digital consumption. Ultimately, desire is sustained through repetition—rendering consumption an endless routine and embedded in daily habits and reaffirmations of self-identity. This cycle reveals a phantom-like perpetual motion of digital consumer desire—trapping individuals within a paradoxical cycle of confusion and escapism.

In 2025, research on Marxism Journalistic Views in China achieved profound and far-reaching advances with fruitful outcomes. Scholarly communities in journalism and communication have clarified its core connotations and conceptual boundaries through theoretical genealogical analysis, revisited its historical origins to delineate the formative pathways and evolutionary trajectory via classical textual studies, and examined how CPC has deepened and practiced this perspective by anchoring on pivotal historical junctures in the CPC’s journalistic development. Researchers have also expanded the research agenda to encompass institutional policies, discursive texts, and educational practices, elevating both theoretical and practical inquiries into the Sinicized Marxism Journalistic Views. Furthermore, guided by Xi Jinping Thought on Culture and the Recommendations for the 15th Five-Year Plan, scholars have advanced studies on the Marxism Journalistic Views in the new era as an integral part of constructing an independent knowledge system for China’s journalism and communication discipline.

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.

Movement theory demonstrates particular strength in explicating top-down campaign-style governance, with analytical focus on regime characteristics and the dynamics of central-local interactions. Leveraging this theoretical framework, this study contextualizes and systematically examines three historical cases of fake news governance. By embedding these cases within their respective political movement contexts, this paper contends that fake news governance assumed distinct historical significances across different periods: first, facilitating the advancement of radical land reform; second, eradicating the residual influences of the “Gang of Four” to break free from the shadow of the Cultural Revolution; and third, imposing rigorous ideological discipline on market-oriented media and new media platforms. Journalistic practice and concept have a mutually constitutive relationship. These three fake news governance campaigns not only reflect the governing entities’ pursuit of a purified journalistic and public opinion sphere, as well as uncompromising political integrity, but also embody two core tenets of movement theory: the revolutionary-educational regime’s inherent moral mission and its pursuit of extraordinary performance. Furthermore, this analysis sheds light on the institutional impetus that underpins the state’s efforts to achieve the reproduction of legitimacy through the initiation of anti-fake news campaigns.

There are different deformations in the implementation of different policies in county-level converged media center, such as symbolic policy implementation, selective policy implementation, copying policy implementation and wait-and-see policy implementation. Based on the analysis framework of three-level bureaucratic organization model, the reasons of such policy deformations lie in the attention allocation dilemma of county-level converged media center, which leads to the localization of policy implementation under multitask principal-agent; the incentive dilemma of the county publicity department, which leads to the path dependence and lack of innovation; the dilemma of control rights distribution of the provincial publicity department, which leads to the elasticity of policy implementation in vague goals and easy examination standards. The correction of policy implementation deviation needs to redistribute attention, establish a working mechanism and evaluation system that adapts to multitask; redistribute salary performance to stimulate innovation vitality; redistribute control rights to encourage positive policy innovation.

This study, based on a nationwide survey of psychology and behavior investigation of Chinese residents (PBICR), explores the impact of social media identity bubble on loneliness, depression and anxiety of Chinese adolescents, and examines the mechanism of perceived social support (PSS) and problematic Internet use (PIU) between identity bubble and mental health, as well as group differences. The results indicate that the impact of identity bubble on adolescents’ mental health is multifaceted, exhibiting a double-edged sword effect. Identity bubble can not only improve mental health through the mediating effect of PSS, but also lead to PIU and become a risk factor of mental health. The multi-group analysis shows significant differences in the risk mechanism of identity bubbles on adolescents’ mental health across gender, residence, and schooling stage. Female, urban, or high school and above adolescents are more susceptible to PIU triggered by identity bubbles, which in turn exacerbates their mental health problems. In addition, identity bubble directly reduces depressive emotions in female adolescents, but this positive effect is suppressed by PIU. With the popularity of online social interaction, being involved in identity bubble can either build a fortress for adolescents’ self-identity or become a hotbed of mental health risks. These findings provide new insights to the impact of online social interaction on adolescents’ mental health.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) reshapes human-machine collaboration and innovative behavioral patterns in journalism by visualizing cognitive process through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) technology. Grounded in threat-rigidity theory and cognitive fit theory, this study employs a 3 (Thinking Visualization Type: full process/brief process/no process) × 2 (Task Complexity: simple/complex) two-factor experimental design to conduct an online experiment with domestic journalists (n=300). Utilizing two-way analysis of variance and mediation analysis, the study examines the pathways through which GenAI thinking visualization influences journalistic innovation behavior. The findings indicate that thinking visualization has a significant positive impact on journalistic innovation behavior, with the brief process yielding the strongest effect. Both the full process and the no process conditions were less effective than the brief process, demonstrating an inverted U-shaped relationship. AI identity threat plays a significant negative mediating role between thinking visualization and innovation behavior; however, strong emotional identification mitigates this negative impact. Furthermore, task complexity primarily influences innovation behavior by exacerbating job-related threat. The discussion concludes that under varying conditions of task complexity, transparent design nonlinearly enhances journalistic innovation behavior, it simultaneously intensifies a dual professional crisis. This dynamic produces a transparency paradox where empowerment and threat coexist, offering a new theoretical perspective for research on journalistic innovation in the intelligent era.

In the 1940s, Kurt Lewin underwent an academic transformation in the later stage of his career. Moving away from Gestalt psychology, he shifted his focus toward applied psychology research addressing social governance issues and developed his field theory into the more communication-oriented “channel theory”. Based on group dynamics and topological psychology, Lewin drew on his “food habits study” conducted during World War II to observe mechanisms of information dissemination and resource flow within groups. From this, he derived key concepts such as “gatekeeper”, “gate region” and “channel”, which profoundly influenced later sociological studies of news production and communication research. However, when scholars like White introduced Lewin’s ideas, the holistic framework of “channel theory” was largely overlooked. Only the concept of the “gatekeeper” was extracted and emphasized, while the complex considerations in Lewin’s original theory—such as social conflict, group psychology, and material factors—were diluted. Moreover, early gatekeeping studies were heavily influenced by the information theory paradigm, whose explanatory power somewhat suppressed the group structural perspective emphasized by channel theory. With Lewin’s premature death, the theory was never systematically refined or widely inherited, eventually becoming a “gray area” in the history of communication scholarship.