Goubin Yang: Chinese cultural sphere


	The Internet and the rise of a transnational Chinese cultural sphere By Goubin Yang (2003) A critique (This paper was produced for JOUR 776 under guidance of Prof Carol Rogers) By Saswat Pattanayak The Net is the world's only functioning anarchy but it could soon become a major tool for democracy. By allowing anyone, everywhere access to the information and opinions of anyone else, anywhere else, a morsel is being given to mankind with one instruction: "Eat Me, so that we may grow." (Fenchurch, 1994, p. 11) Goubin Yang assistant professor in sociology at University of Hawaii in Manoa, who authored and presented a paper “The Internet and the rise of a transnational Chinese cultural sphere” at a conference in New York, on China's Environmental Discourse, makes case for two premises: one, that the internet for Chinese population, has facilitated global mass protest movements, and two, inside China, online ‘spaces’ have influenced civil society development. The paper appeared in ‘Media, Culture & Society’ (Vol 25, Issue 4, 2003) with the underlying assumption that online media have given birth to a transnational Chinese cultural sphere. This thought-provoking article evinces interest as much for the novelty of the issue dealt with, as because of some fallacious generalizations it makes. The novelty lies in debating on viability of Internet as a cultural sphere. Discussions have mostly in the past centered on whether or not Internet provides for a public sphere (Anderson, 1991, Katz, 1998). If a cultural sphere is to be defined as one, which goes beyond the boundary of the nation-state and involves citizens of different countries, then I think it thereby becomes transnational, indicative of the redundancy of it being called a ‘transnational cultural sphere’. Hence the title of the article over-emphasizes on an issue, which as I shall discuss now, bears many a loopholes. The title, then, seems to rest on an assumption than the findings, which it purports to seek, remaining in want of clarification, for the uninitiated. Among others, one, which is most conspicuous, is an absence in Yang’s mention of what differentiates a cultural sphere from a public sphere. Whereas in one place he mentions the characteristics of Habermasian public sphere as having four elements (p 471), in a different section of text, he attributes what is Chinese cultural sphere without detailing how is it different from Chinese political sphere; yet later on (p 481) he refers to three separate political functions of public sphere. What leads to further speculation is a lack of an abstract or an explanation of key-words, since the article deals with issues of technology in a critical media journal. Yang, who is currently doing an empirical and historical study of the relationship between developments in information technologies and changes in political institutions and civil society in 20th-century China, has not felt it necessary to set a purpose of the study in its justification although he has cited several secondary researches in the field which might have set the stage in precedence. Talking of structure, there is a hurried attempt at juxtaposing literature review with an insufficient introduction to a subject as sensitively novel as this. The relevance of present study is of course evident, but more trenchant observations were needed to highlight the contributions of scholars (Bonchek 1997, Carey 1995, Outing 1998) who have worked in “internet as public sphere” tradition, to justify the extension of study from “public” to “culture”. Guerrilla ethnography as a methodology sounds radical a step since so far, only a few anthropologists (notably at Xerox Parc and Apple) have shown that ethnographers can contribute to the understanding of technologically mediated relationship using this method. Guerrilla ethnography has been used to explore new values, social relationships and economies that were emerging from cybernetic divide. Yang has successfully employed it, but has done injustice to explaining what it is. From the manner he explains his methodology (p 471), it appears too naïve an attempt at oversimplifying a complex method. Using this method, Yang does not have to interview respondents, but choosing the categories of sites as information providers has questionable shades as well. He does not make clear how are portal sites cultural spheres. Choosing portals indeed has proved detrimental since he does not say why there needs to be language sites, if the idea is to be global or why global sites if the idea is to communicate. Moreover, Yang has not distinguished the Chinese American population from the American population: culturally are they not as different entities as an American can be within the country a multicultural entity? Most of newsgroup, online magazines, portals (Yang forgets to mention that the Chinese for portal is Chortal!) are actually US-based, including Microsoft.com, Olive Tree and China News Digest. The author does not explicitly state how many of them are founded in US, by people who are more American than Chinese. He also does not state how many are sourced from China and vice versa. If writings in China’s own magazines are “individualistic and essayistic”, (p 474) then how Yang again finds in them discussion forums, is one not too clear. Although the number of subscribers are available for the ‘participant’ sites, what is strikingly absent in the tables are the number of unique ‘hits’ each receive. The purpose of the study also gets a big jolt when it claims to base mostly on the ‘action’ based business bulletin boards and yet excludes Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore! The focus group here, is too converged to be representative of the “cultural China”, as quoted by author (p 470) to be the participant. Although a rich text of discourses would be found available in the BBS, the author fails to cite any conversation, thus weakening the qualitative chord. There have been mention of “online protest movement” in 1996 (p 481), but no mention as to who started it and how was it an online venture. With vehemence the author states that Internet community are more socially engaged than those who are not. But simple demographic reports suggesting a possible digital access divide is missing to substantiate such a claim. With all assertions of ‘online communities’, what is amiss is enumeration of unique individuals (which can be retrieved from monitoring different IP addresses of PC machines). If the same people appear every other day, and with different nicknames to misguide the “censorship” machinery, then the researcher also needs to realize the extent he/she can be confounded. A sparse mention of “resistance against commercialization” is mentioned (p 485), but its all locked within one sentence, as though it has no counter-movement effects against the so-called democratized cultural sphere. One small paragraph (p 485) on why researchers need to take recourse to ‘culture’ model does not make a case; it merely states a point. Conclusion: Despite many of my criticisms, the piece appears to be novel endeavor insofar as it fiddles with ‘culture’. “Cultural sphere”, is the main phrase which attracted me to this and China, a good case study. I would have however loved to critique such a study on India, which has even far more diverse groups of languages, religions and political affiliations than any other country in the world. One last observation: QGLT gets 1487 responses as contrasted with second largest Creaders with 124 , third Beida with only 24 and Muzi with only 8 responses per day. QGLT is government owned, and according to author imposes censorship; hence logically should get least responses whereas Beida, which is operated by university of Beijing students claiming to be most democratic (and in a way should be most lively culture sphere), actually is least active. Author justifies this by saying Beida has a short history. I think, it’s a weak defense as the calculations are done on daily basis and not taking historical averages into account. Are we missing the whole point? What’s the cultural sphere in China all about then? Is it necessarily a place to protest against the existing Government, as the author presupposes? To this too, Yang has no explanation. Reference: Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities. New York: Verso Bonchek, M. (1997). From broadcast to netcast: The internet and the flow of political information. Doctoral Dissertation. Department of Political Economy and Government, Harvard University Carey, J. (1995). The press, public opinion, and public discourse. in T. Glasser and C. Salmon (Eds.) Public opinion and the communication of consent. New York: Guilford. 373-403 Katz, J. (1998, December). The digital citizen. in Wired Outing, S. (1998, 8 April). Newspaper site pulls plug on unruly discussion forums. in E&P Interactive. Available via the World Wide Web at http://www.MediaINFO.com/ephome/news/newshtm/stop/stop.htm Saswat Pattanayak blog@saswat.com	BLOG it?