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.

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.

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.

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 ”.

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.

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.

Unlike existing human-computer interaction studies focused on functional exchanges, this research investigates emotional relationships between humans and computers. It examines how users, driven by psychological motivations and needs, engage in emotional transmission and communication with Affective AI Agents (AI agents with emotional communication capabilities) within specific contexts, thereby exploring the possibility and mechanisms of human-computer empathy. Focusing on users’ recent generative emotional empathy practice with Affective AI Agents, the study employs in-depth interviews to gather empirical data on emotional communication. It analyzes human emotional perception and empathy toward Affective AI Agents, alongside the underlying empathy dilemma. Key findings reveal that users’ psychological motivations are central to Affective AI Agents’ generation of emotional responses, with the agents’ “digital memory” serving as the primary basis for expressing and responding to human emotions. Concurrently, users’ contextual framing and agents’ capture and interpretation of situational cues emerge as critical elements for empathy generation. As human-computer empathy becomes a social strategy in an alienated society, fluid emotions arise from the interplay between flesh and computer. The “sense of witnessing” engendered by technological embodiment forms a vital foundation for empathy and offers new directions for re-evaluating the ethics and values of intelligent agents.

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.

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 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.

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 their work The German Ideology, Marx and Engels creatively introduced several core concepts, including “intercourse” (Verkehr) and a range of compound words derived from it. These concepts played a crucial role in the development of the materialist conception of history and communist theory. However, due to historical circumstances, both “intercourse” and its related compounds have long been obscured. The discourse on historical materialism has largely been dominated by terms such as material production, productive forces, and relations of production, while Marx’s sociological insight that “human nature is the true community of men” has been overlooked. This article discusses four reasons for the neglect and misinterpretation of the concept of “intercourse.”; examines all 168 instances of Verkehr in The German Ideology along with their corresponding Chinese translations; analyzes 608 occurrences in Marx and Engels’ other works and their Chinese translations; briefly surveys 1,119 instances found in their published notebooks (most of which remain untranslated); and studies the textual variants compiled in MEGA². These investigations collectively demonstrate that “intercourse” (Verkehr) and its compound forms constitute one of the core concepts of The German Ideology and of the theory of historical materialism.

The rise of social and networked communication has increasingly blurred the boundaries between public and private spheres. The interplay of rationality and emotion among diverse actors posed significant challenges to traditional social and communication theories, which are largely based on the assumption that consensus and agreement emerge from human reasoning and rationality. As a result, the goal of communication has shifted from consensus-building to fostering connectedness and reciprocal understanding, with empathy conceptualized as a key factor in facilitating meaningful connections, dialogue, and understanding. We argue that empathy does not arise spontaneously. Instead, the emergence of empathy requires specific antecedent factors as prerequisites. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of common ground and common knowledge from the field of psycholinguistics and game theory, we use shared knowledge to encompass the key connotations of both theories. We explore the antecedent role of shared knowledge, both foundational and emergent, in digital interactions, and discuss the impact of experiential appeal and linguistic expression and cultural identity on the formation of shared knowledge. On this basis, an entry point with theoretical value and practical significance is proposed for common and reciprocal understanding and even consensus in the present and future. Compared with traditional theoretical frameworks of interaction, such as intersubjectivity and rationality of interaction, shared knowledge is more adaptable, explanatory and practical in the ecology of digital interaction.

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.

Based on a clarification of the connotations and essential characteristics of the CPC “international image construction” and “international image identity construction”, this paper conducts an overseas survey to examine international perceptions and identification with the CPC’s image. It further investigates the underlying factors influencing such identification. The paper argues that the essence of the CPC’s international image construction lies in the Party’s behaviors and the interpretations of those behaviors by both the CPC itself and the “others”. The essence of international image identity construction refers to the CPC’s efforts to “cultivate” “guide” or “attract” recognition from international audiences through its own actions, while counteracting the “disidentification” generated by externally constructed narratives. At present, there exists a considerable gap between the actual international recognition of the CPC’s image and the ideal projection. This gap is manifested in a range of perceptions among foreign publics, including a lack of understanding and curiosity, fear or anxiety, “hostility”, as well as varying degrees of recognition and support. The major impediments to international identification with the CPC’s image stem from low levels of strategic trust caused by conflicting interests; ideological aversion rooted in systemic and institutional differences; value divergences across cultural contexts; and cognitive and attitudinal barriers arising from both intentional distortions and unintentional misinterpretations.

The right to memory refers to the rights of individuals and collectives to tell the public about past experiences or historical narratives in their own way. With the development of this concept in English-speaking scholarship, the notion of the right to memory has begun to encompass a range of related obligations, principles, interventions and social practices. Media and communication have emerged as key areas of inquiry in the study of the right to memory. Emerging digital platforms not only offer new opportunities to safeguard this right but also introduce new inequalities and blind spots. By considering the different facets of collective and individual memory, the right to memory seeks to safeguard all aspects of memory processes through a right-oriented discourse that respects the plurality of memory narratives and promotes the free expression and dialogue between different memory stories. In terms of media and communication, at the practical level, the right to memory provides memory activists with discursive resources for mediated action. At the official level, it calls for media policies and regulations to protect the media accessibility of disadvantaged groups. At the conceptual level, it advocates a communication ethic of tolerance, openness and mutual respect.

As a worthy “old-yet-new” question in digital journalism studies, there is still a lack of empirical studies on journalistic truth from the perspective of journalistic practice. Drawing on the “institutional work” theory, this study focuses on “verification”—a typical practice of journalistic truth, and explores how and why Chinese instant news practitioners in professional media maintain the institution of verification in their work. Findings indicate that practitioners have found it increasingly strict and difficult to verify information in recent years. As a response, they have strengthened the review process and the oral culture of verification within the newsroom, and intensified or transformed verification in individual practice, including verifying channels, news sources and ways of presentation. The institutional maintaining of verification is a result of the interaction between practitioners, organizations, and the institutional norms, as well as a kind of practical adjustment to the current institutional environment so as to ensure factual accuracy, obtain core information and avoid uncertain risks. Aside from the internal motivation to maintain cultural authority, the imagination of perfect journalistic truth and irrational anti-press pressure from external expectations are affecting verification more directly.

Participatory production is held in high regard in journalism academia, yet it is less commonly applied on a large scale in professional news organisations, where participation is a mirage. In recent years, the development of digital technology has further empowered productive audiences, and new startups born in the Internet arena have ignited a new wave of enthusiasm for participatory journalism. This paper focuses on a news startup in China that adopts a participatory production model, and examines the process of the participatory experiment in this case, providing a typical sample for an in-depth understanding of the occurrence, development, and change of participatory journalism in the digital era. Based on multiple research methods over time, it is found that this organisation, which is on the fringe of the journalism field, has adopted a full-scale participatory production model since its inception, attracting many people to participate in the process of video news production, but this model has been gradually transformed into a networked and flexible system of employment in the course of subsequent development, with the scale of the model being greatly reduced and the connotation of participation being dissolved. This process of decline suggests that, similar to traditional professional news organisations, entrepreneurial digital-native media are still unable to move beyond the dilemma of participation, which is ultimately moving towards professional domestication and normalisation. However, the public role of participatory journalism has not been weakened by the domestication of professionalism, but rather shows the synergistic public-enhancing effects of professionalism and participation. This case study enriches the understanding of participatory journalism in the digital age and responds to academic explanations of why participation is limited.

This study investigates the persistence of offline gatherings in China’s day labor markets, where workers wait for job opportunities despite the rapid platformization of the gig economy. This phenomenon is particularly unusual in the context of the booming digital economy. Moving beyond a simplistic logic of media adoption, the study presents the concept of “digital rejection” as an analytical lens to better understand practices of digital non-use. Digital rejection highlights how individuals establish boundaries for digital engagement through active practices and relational connections, thereby achieving a sense of control over their preferred lifestyle. Within the context of day labor, traditional day-labor markets not only embody workers’ habits of limited digital use, but also sustain their social relationships and daily lives. As a result, the decision to wait for work offline and selectively reject recruitment platforms becomes a strategic choice for shaping their own way of life. By centering on the articulation of users’ interests and connecting their agency to their social lives, the concept of digital rejection offers a valuable framework for explaining daily practices of non-use in the digital age.

In the fast-paced world of journalism, time constitutes a critical issue of professional legitimacy. Existing studies have examined the influence of technological transformation, organizational routines, and user relations on the pursuit of timeliness, often critiquing the alienation of time within news production. However, the explanatory scope of timeliness remains to be further explored. Drawing on in-depth interviews and textual analysis, this study investigates the causes of the alienation of time in news production through three relational dimensions: the relationship between individuals and information, between individuals and others, and between individuals and time. The findings reveal that timeliness encompasses three dimensions: type, perspective, and medium. Furthermore, temporal value in news production is shaped by tensions between normative expectations and lived experiences across physical, social, and economic domains. While timeliness and temporal value constitute the explicit framework and implicit logic of journalistic production time respectively, the overloaded meaning of timeliness obscures the underlying sources of the alienation of journalistic production time. In contrast, the notion of temporal value provides a potential pathway for addressing this issue. A comparative analysis of the temporal reference systems underlying timeliness and temporal value suggests that understanding the alienation of time in news production requires an embodied perspective that takes into account the life courses of journalistic practitioners.

The Conference and Alliance of Mibing was held by Jin and Chu in 546 B.C. largely due to the interstate public opinion, which was one of the most important interstate meetings constructing the interstate order in the middle-late of Spring and Autumn Period. Jin and Chu belonged to different cultural community and didn’t trust each other, but both of them had difficulties to keep competing on the leadership of interstate society. With the signal of Mibing (peace) released, Song took the responsibility to communicate message between different states, Mibing was becoming the main interstate public opinion and the Conference and Alliance of Mibing finally was held at the capital of Song. The following can be inferred from the Conference and Alliance of Mibing: In the Spring and Autumn Period, although the spreading of interstate opinion information was constrained by the environments and dependent on interpersonal transmission, the rules of state power and “Xinyi” as the fundamental of interstate public opinion are still working today.

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.

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.

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the proposal of the new mainstream media strategy, this study is based on the local social context framework and communication system, focusing on constructing a scientific and systematic credibility assessment scale for new mainstream media. It aims to solve the problem that traditional evaluation tools cannot adapt to the new communication field and new mainstream media, enrich the practical exploration with Chinese characteristics, and also contribute to the further improvement of media credibility theory. This study strictly follows the scale development procedure to construct a two-factor, four- dimensional credibility scale of new mainstream media from the public perspective. Supported by relevant literature, it screens the potential measurement items of new mainstream media credibility through in-depth interviews and expert consultations; using questionnaire methods, it conducts the initial scale test with exploratory factor analysis (n=500), and determines the fitting situation of the scale through confirmatory factor analysis and reliability and validity tests (n=1723). Finally, this study constructs a credibility scale of new mainstream media covering four dimensions: “authenticity/professionalism”“national image/authority”“public value” and “broadcasting skills”. It also engages in theoretical dialogue with previous studies, exploring the continuity and development of media credibility theory.

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.

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

As a prevalent soft communication tactic, cuteness has been widely studied in many fields, but it has not received enough academic attention in the field of political communication. We provide an empirical research to examine the persuasive effect and mechanism of acting-cute political propaganda on social media, supplementing the empirical evidence on this issue in political communication. First, we conceptualize acting-cute political propaganda. Drawing on important rules in political psychology, we then propose a double-soft model that emphasizes the congruence between the tactics and content of soft propaganda. It was tested using an online survey experiment in China. We found that soft content employing an acting-cute tactic in video form on Weibo significantly improves the specific support of young Chinese through emotional appeals. This indicates that under the conditions of adopting video format, disseminating soft content, targeting young audiences and conducting short-term measurements, the model has been verified. Our results will pave the way for research on soft propaganda and acting-cute propaganda in diverse political and cultural contexts, and provide important practical guidance for political propaganda and persuasion activities in the digital age.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

AI has disrupted the traditional certainty paradigm of advertising, which has historically focused on capturing attention. This paper examines the characteristics of the certainty paradigm in AI advertising, based on the impact of AI on advertising activities. It firstly proposes five stages of the certainty paradigm throughout the evolution of advertising: the uncertainty of the “product” searching for the “consumer” in the natural media era, the certainty of the “product” searching for the “consumer” in the mass media era, the certainty of the “consumer” searching for the “product” in the early internet era, the certainty of the “product” searching for the “consumer” in the early programmatic advertising era, and the certainty of the “consumer” leveraging the virtual-real world to serve themselves in the AI era. Then it further explores the fundamental mechanisms of certainty paradigm in AI advertising. Certainty is determined by the temporal, spatial, interactive, sensory, interoperable, and transparent dimensions of media technologies. The key characteristics of certainty are temporal immediacy, spatial three-dimensionality, intelligent reasoning, and ecological consumption. The aim of certainty is to achieve better return on investment among consumers, advertisers, and intelligent platforms ultimately. The “consumer-product-scene” is reconstructed through generated intelligence between “consumer-product”, embodied intelligence between “consumer-scene”, and IoT intelligence between “product-scene”. As a result, consumers can continuously pursue the certainty of their needs through intelligent interactions among the “consumer-product-scene”.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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”.

“Stream”, as media topoi, has always maintained its conceptual persistence and fluidity in the transformations of communication technologies, media forms, and social structures. While the topological discourse of stream becomes increasingly pronounced in the era of streaming video, its mediality and societal reconstructive power paradoxically manifest as a form of disruption of flow. Through interfaces, data, and the practice of “binge-watching”, streaming video restructures the logic of media programming, circulation, and reception, thereby revealing the essentially discontinuous nature of the flow. The medial factors driving this disruption-namely, immediacy, privatization, and interactivity—dismantle the spatiotemporal and organizational frameworks once shaped by traditional media. In their place, they foster a presentist temporality and unstable subjectivities, ultimately intensifying the fragmentation and imbalance characteristic of hypermodernism.