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[emmawang]

Weeks 14: Final Reflections

The web was initially perceived as a free and democratic space with security and convenience, not only because new technologies offer services to optimize users’ lives, but also it has created an imaginary relationship between humans and space, an imagination of always-connectedness regardless of distance, of quick immersion and extraction, of vast access and assistance from knowledge. The way we connect with/to others in space has changed, even the definition of connection itself changes (Now it has to do with Wi-Fi signals not just physically or mentally). Are we entering a semi-coerced relationship with the web as a consequence of “too much connection”? Another factor that contributes to the disillusionment of cyber utopia is the inability to control our own data. When the web is increasingly seized by the power of capitalism, the ability to consume does not evade netizens. What we are consuming is not the products but contents, or in the core, an imaginary relationship. As for the authorship in this era of platformization, it is very relevant considering the news that J.K. Rowling was “erased” from Fantastic Beasts trailer in wake of more transphobia accusations.  

Reki Kawahara 川原 礫, the author of Sword Art Online and Accel World, visions a future when the technology of the brain-computer interface, BCI, has democratized into daily practices. Possible one day we will all be cyborgs since cellphones have already been considered as our extension.

 I found this course to be very useful for it guided me to fathom the invisible, which is hypermediated and immediate at the same time. When I opened my phone and used an app called forest, I unconsciously thought about the logic behind it. On its website, it says “Forest is an app helping you put down your phone and focus on what's more important in your life. Whenever you want to focus on your work, plant a tree. In the next 30 mins, it will grow when you are working. The tree will be killed if you leave this app. Build Your Forest.” I have been using this app since undergrad, and the idea associated with environment protection sold at least to me. In the midst of my digital forest, I wonder, where has my data of not-using-phone gone? How is it going to make sense to the market? These questions occurred to me partially as a result of the training method of thinking I received from this course, which will continue to be helpful in my adventure of exploring the web.  

[emmawang]

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Week 13: Cellphilms

To clarify my technical affordance, this cellphilm created with my phone, which is a Vivo x50, made in China, and operates on Android system, is themed on “what is the feeling of flying?” My images include, chronologically, (1) a view from an airplane window, (2) a flock of birds flying in the sky, (3) a stretch of a flying man, which reminds me of the 2014 film Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, (4) my hand shadow mimicking birds, (5) the euphoria after taking in sugar, in the gif, chocolate, (or drugs, whatever increases blood sugar or chemicals in the body), (6) the nightclub heat brought by the crowd, (7) alcohol, in my video, even better — burning wine, (7) in a Tibetan shrine (Altaarkast), with throat singing on Sanskrit as BGM.  

I originally wanted to make a horror cellphilm, and realized I didn’t have settings and actors, because this method as footage and surveillance camera in creating an intimate engagement with the audience is absolutely fascinating, which Ledesma also grasps as “an aesthetic of immediacy and authenticity” (2019, 3), although I wasn’t scared by The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) due to nausea from its over mobility and flexibility. And I agree with what Macentree has claimed about cellphones, that “[a]n everyday technology, the devices have become an intimate part of people’s lives. Cellphones have been described as an extension of the body and conceptualized as a handheld prosthesis that extends and improves an individual's sight and hearing (2016, 2).” When I fathomed what the feeling of flying is, I went through my videos, and my cellphone seemed to fly me back at those moments.  

[emmawang]

Week 12: Visual Ephemerality and Remix: MEMES and GIFs

Besides the social aspects of memetic practices that Milner has discussed in “Vernacular: Everyday Expression in the Memetic Lingua Franca,” their creativity travels beyond the intertextual expression repertoire and welcomes even more participation than reappropriation and remix.  

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Doge Nightclub in Bilibili. See, I was there, together with other doge and cats, some with chicken drumsticks, some with turkey hats, bought with Bilibili currency called the battery. Here the interior monologue captioning is replaced by danmu, a real-time captioning system that displays user comments as streams of scrolling subtitles overlaid on the video playback screen, visually resembling a bullet shooter game. The Doge becomes an icon of you and me at this digital nightclub. The disco is also “prepatterned” in the way that you can only perform selective actions from the demands, including skipping the songs, changing the camera, making everybody scream a sentence together.  

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Yo, check this out! This is Doge in 2021!

[emmawang]

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Yo, check this out! This is Doge in 2021!

[emmawang]

My former screenshot seemed unclear of what I wrote in my micro-fiction, so here are some new screenshots, and the other professor who followed me because of Bon Iver bot is going to find me OOC (out of character).  😹🐾

Week 11: Micro-narratives and Short Fiction

Writing micro-narratives, as I fathomed, is harder than our reflection-on-digital-identity task last week, partially because one, I don’t have a habit of keeping a diary, two, the created persona should reflect part of me but form a coherent and unified subject at the same time. I looked into @sosadtoday and #WhyILeft and #WhyIStay. Often one sentence, sometimes without punctuation, speaks so strongly, which originally I attempted to imitate by imagining myself in their situations, but simply failed. I realized that, it is not the style of the sentence but emotion so real at that temporality makes readers feel connected. In my micro-narratives, the persona here is a grad student who wants to be a cat instead of living like a human due to all the chores or academic pressure, etc. (The question of to what extent can one perform a digital identity in life writing is interesting in my case of choice.) Twitter provides its “affordance” similar to what Aimee Morrison describes in the third stage of Facebook’s status quo update, simply “What’s happening?” I wrote a whole week digital diary for this persona and set the timeline in 2026 when I hopefully graduate from my Ph.D.  

[emmawang]

Week 11: Micro-narratives and Short Fiction

Writing micro-narratives, as I fathomed, is harder than our reflection-on-digital-identity task last week, partially because one, I don’t have a habit of keeping a diary, two, the created persona should reflect part of me but form a coherent and unified subject at the same time. I looked into @sosadtoday and #WhyILeft and #WhyIStay. Often one sentence, sometimes without punctuation, speaks so strongly, which originally I attempted to imitate by imagining myself in their situations, but simply failed. I realized that, it is not the style of the sentence but emotion so real at that temporality makes readers feel connected. In my micro-narratives, the persona here is a grad student who wants to be a cat instead of living like a human due to all the chores or academic pressure, etc. (The question of to what extent can one perform a digital identity in life writing is interesting in my case of choice.) Twitter provides its “affordance” similar to what Aimee Morrison describes in the third stage of Facebook’s status quo update, simply “What’s happening?” I wrote a whole week digital diary for this persona and set the timeline in 2026 when I hopefully graduate from my Ph.D.  

[emmawang]

Week 10: Immersive Media, Techno-femme/feminized/feminism and Digital Identities

Unfortunately, I don’t have Instagram, Snapchat, or Messenger, but I have been using a music application for 6 years since my registration in October 2015. Starting from last year this app came out a bot to generate a personalized annual report which allowed me to create an avatar. In the screenshot that I took from this report, from the top under my ID to the bottom on the left side, the bold Chinese characters are:   the man who picks the stars/star picker 摘星星的人,   and then smaller characters are:   well-packed / exquisite taste 包装精良,   the atmosphere is paramount/ the ambiance of the music is important (judging from my playlist by the bot) 氛围感至上,   daily hahaha / very happy indeed 日常哈哈哈,   and you're a miracle / (? I put a question mark here because I don’t know why this bot thinks my musical persona relates to a miracle) 而你是奇迹,   piles of joy 成堆的快乐.   (The format here is: Literary translation/ my understanding of the phrase/ original Chinese) Everyone in my WeChat posted their annual music report and remarked on each other, and clearly, we seldom saw a repetition since we all listen to different music. Labels generated by this music app depict me as a happy and special creature making me skeptical, but it does remind me of a novel by W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence, in which, “All over the place was sixpence, but he looked up at the moon.” Yet some comments from my friends claimed that its depiction is “typical of me.”    

[emmawang]

Week 8: AI and Bot-generated Fiction

Link:https://twitter.com/Shiinahitomi7/with_replies

I took my English name, during my M.A. at UPenn, from this song, For Emma, Forever Ago, the debut studio album by Bon Iver, representing my debut to the western academia, and bearing some of my hopes into the future, like the images in this song, lights in the winter snow, cold, trembling, and delighted. I like the way this indie-folk band has named themselves. ‘Bon Iver’ derives from bon hiver, a misspelling yet embodying new meanings on the top of the layer of translation, which reminds me of my ways of communication. Luckily, they held a live show during my stay in Philadelphia. One impressive moment, when they played Skinny Love, the audience automatically began to sing together —— a beautiful temporality when the song connected us. So, I created this bot (I shouldn’t have used my personal name🤡), broke the lyrics into parts, and they will reconnect in tweets as if they are running home.  

Here attached some photos I took at their live.

[emmawang]

Week 7: Online Gaming

As cultural products, games can serve as reinforcing gender norms and racial stereotypes. (See Leonard, 2003) To illustrate, Mai Shiranui, a character in the Fatal Fury and The King of Fighters series, is famous for her breast-bound effect.

Mai Shiranui's character notably pioneered the concept of breast physics in video games. Kotaku's Patricia Hernandez wrote, "one of Fatal Fury 2's biggest contributions to the medium was that it was the first game to introduce a character with breasts that moved on their own [...] though Fatal Fury may not be a huge franchise nowadays, its legacy is very much alive: many top fighting games include a similar jiggle effect."

Among the first playable female characters in fighting games, Mai Shiranui was so popular that she was awarded the title of "Hottest Game Babe of 1994" by Electronic Gaming Monthly (Chun-Li, "Hottest Babe of 1992”). Her physicality fuels her fame, but this hyper-sexuality becomes problematic especially when Mai represents a Japanese-ness in other games and their ramifications.  

Her background story is framed as, a “modern-world young female ninja” and “a founding member of the King of Fighters Tournament's Women Fighters Team,” she “is madly in love with the American fighter Andy Bogard, who she self-proclaimed her fiancé, who although also appears to love her, avoids being in a committed relationship with her.” This sounds to me like a ninja version of Madama Butterfly. Her capabilities and leadership must be embellished with a sense of romance as if the figure that only cares about career and winning would render her character less adorable. She was designed to represent a combination of Japanese traditional virtues and modern aesthetics, as “she deeply cares for her nation's and family's traditions, including battle outfits and ceremonial clothing, as well as having learned archery, calligraphy, Koto playing, and performing the tea ceremony and the flower arrangement art. However, she is also fond of modern foreign things, such as American style casual fashion and heavy metal music.” These details are not nonsense when they concrete her as the sexy ninja, the embodiment of Japanese modernity and traditional virtues, and fetishism of her breasts, forming the picture of imagining Japanese women as sex symbols.  

References Leonard, David. “‘Live in Your World, Play in Ours’: Race, Video Games, and Consuming the Other.” Simile, vol. 3, no. 4, Nov. 2003. Wikipedia contributors. “Mai Shiranui.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved on Oct 26. 2021. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mai_Shiranui#Other_video_games

[emmawang]

Week 5: El Paquete Semanal

The sparks of inspiration kindled me this very ordinary morning when I was brushing my teeth and listening to my subscribed uploader in Bilibili, a Chinese version of YouTube. This uploader, consisted of two girls, calls the pair “let’s chat something.”  

Their black and white profile photo without any facial organs seems self-assuming and even intimidating at the first glance. What might they chat about? Local feminist practices? Dark fairy tales?  

Yet quite jubilant as they are, their contents are mostly BL-novel recommendations. Their videos usually follow these steps: one will chat about character settings of the protagonists, plot spoiler warning, plots, ending with comments from the other girl.

BL, the acronym for Boys’ Love, is a genre of fictional media featuring homoerotic relationships between male characters. Originating from Japan as the Yaoi culture (or Fujoshi culture, Fujoshi as the female consumers of BL), this fad came to China in the late 1990s with an increase in popularity in the 2010s.  

Just like locals in Cuba have limited access to the Internet, so is BL media suppressed in China. In 2015, laws prohibiting depictions of same-sex relationships in television and film were implemented in China. Reasons behind the prohibition include anti-pornography, violation of copyrights, and protection of masculine hegemony. Of course, these laws cannot stop Fujoshi from creating and seeking their entertainment. So where can they go?

I put together a ‘Paquete Semanal’ for Chinese Fujoshi.  😊

The official account of “let’s chat something” in Bilibili: https://b23.tv/DjHQAK     

I put their videos in the weekly package, because (1) they update weekly so my consumers can chase them as a series (2) their videos help form the sense of solidarity in the Fujoshi community with bullets comments from other viewers.  

2. Literature: http://www.jjwxc.net/

Jinjiang, a website hosting vast amounts of literature, is the nest for famous Fujoshi writers and sensational IPs (Intellectual Property.) Literature ranked top deserve spots in the ‘Paquete Semanal.’

3. Erotica: https://i.haitangshuwu.com/

Although JJ is a go-to web for BL novels, you can see from the bottom of the web that it is under government censorship. After all, who does not love pornography, and the spice of trespassing laws?  

4. Manga: https://yandanshe.com/blwj/

But BL manga webs all face this danger of coercive shut-up once spotted by government censorship. Some will change names or IP addresses, while some just vanish forever.  

5. Radio dramas: https://www.guangboju.org/bl/  

6. Films: https://www.soupan8.com/file/31968597

Unfortunately, no websites are curated for BL films, but well-known films, for example, Addicted 上瘾, Guardian 镇魂, The Untamed 陈情令, are attainable via Baidu pan. An insider with knowledge of the latest BL films is needed to fulfil this downloading mission.  

7. Anime: http://danm8.com.cn/forum.php

8. Community: https://sakura-bbs.top/      

9. Music: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1ns411U7VW/  and https://music.163.com/#/album?id=2092772&userid=9216686  

10. Game: https://blgamesworld.net/  

This should go together with instructional tutorials to install the game.  

11. Dōjinshi: cosplays and birthday celebration pictures for characters. Writers will post pictures not included in the books for special occasions on platforms including Twitter, Sakura Community, etc. This reminds me of a huge problem, how to establish more interactive communications between Fujoshi and BL media producers, just based on a Flash-drive. Surely, I can follow demanded writers on Twitter and screenshot their moves, but the communication will always be delayed and intermediated.

12. To solve the problem above, VPN is necessary. Technology: https://www.szh47j.com/REWWSNU  

13. For books that one really loves and just wants to hold the paper book in hand, (Taiwan) websites that sell comics: https://www.kingstone.com.tw/  and https://www.books.com.tw/web/sys_cebbotm/cebook/1503?loc=menu_th_784_002  

14. Manga Apps: http://app.blmh.win/  

15. News: https://weibo.com/p/1008086265fb47fff26a2d6bd2540d6c440afe/super_index#_loginLayer_1633555794223    

Putting the content above together challenged me, for I realized in my process how limited knowledge I have of the Fujoshi community. Because the products of BL media include different types, I tried to stand in their shoes to exhaust my imagination of what or how they may consume. Another challenge is: I run out of links, even knowing there must be more content. The human resources and information exchange needed for such infrastructure building are beyond my competence. ‘Paquete Semanal’ is a brilliant individual idea as well as communal efforts. Specialists in certain types of media searching and network of collection and distribution are essential in forming the weekly package in an organized and timely manner. Like said in the video, “it’s a business.”

References:

Davis, Rebecca (5 June 2020). "China's Gay Rights Stance Can't Derail Demand for LGBT Films". Variety. 

[emmawang]

Week 4: Web Scraping

Webscraper is new to me, so I want to start with manageable data based on a simple question. Christopher Bolton asked this question in Interpreting Anime (2018), “we can call it film, but is it anime?” when analyzing Hayao Miyazaki’s works, The Castle of Cagliostro (1979). Since I researched via Wayback Machine on Satoshi Kon’s anime film, Perfect Blue, last week, I wanted to ask this similar question to investigate what methodologies scholars are prone to apply to Kon’s works. In my results, 26 out of 368 titles include “anime/animation,” while 18 include “film.” However, this method is not flawless, because it only considers the titles of the books and articles, which excludes the majority that does not use these specific words, and those that apply both strategies to interpret his works. Yet it is useful to select and categorize data. The possible outcomes of these results can be: compare and contrast these two sets of readings to see what is lacking in the other mode of reading, film versus anime. So webscraper as a tool renders new ways of thinking a data collection with new questions. For me, the next step with webscraper is, to see if it can facilitate my research on the Fourth Love Baidu Forum in terms of its functionality. (To be continued...)

[emmawang]

Week 3: Internet Archives: The Web as a Historical Document

Website Overview of Perfect Blue’s Wikipedia  

Perfect Blue is a Japanese anime film directed by Satoshi Kon in 1997. Its designs in aesthesis and narratives have allegedly influenced later films including Black Swan and received considerable discussion from film and anime scholars in academia. The Wikipedia page of Perfect Blue was first crawled by the Wayback Machine on January 6th, 2004. Until now this site has been saved 140 times. At first, there was a one-line description for its director and film type, with the explanation that it was by-then animated instead of filming for economic reasons. When it was crawled on March 23rd, 2005, it had a spoiler alert and simple plots. It had not been crawled for 7 months until December 15th: the site looked like a mass of information after this update. Someone might be editing it, maybe certain fans with amateur knowledge in making websites, with a block of words spreading the interfaces, like a Word document. This editing must have gone on for months, because not until October 13th did the site still look like an avalanche of words. Yet on October 13th, things changed. Besides the plot, it had background and reception added as basics. The interface resembles what it looks like now, the content table, the poster, sections, and language options. In 2007, it added “Certification,” specifying the age at which this film ought to be watched, and most of the countries labeled it as R18. 2008 added “cast” section, both Japanese and English sound actors, but it was then confusing because it didn’t distinguish between cast and voice cast. The latter year this site has surprisingly not been crawled at all. In 2010, it added the “Dissociative Identity Disorder” section as the theme but deleted it in the following year. On November 4th, 2012, new sections appeared: production + influence. Its snapshot amount remained dormant and stabilized until November 2014, probably because Susan Napier wrote about this film, which showed on October 18th. The next November experienced a peak in crawling this site, but the content did not change, so it must be something that happened elsewhere drawing people’s attention to this anime (Why November again?). For the first time, it had 6 snapshots in one day (November 6th, 2015.) In 2016, the plot got even longer. In 2017, the contents table changed with lots of references. In 2019, the plot was expanded again. Interestingly, the poster was changed for the first time in December but changed back in 2020, so this blue poster lasted for approximately 4 months.  

Analysis of the plot narration  

Compared with that of Black Swan, the Wikipedia page of Perfect Blue is not as detailed as it is in terms of production and distribution, and theme analyses. The content of this website evolved through time, but its plot section has always been there. A probe into the plot section at four separate times, namely (1) September 13th, 2006, (2) October 13th, 2006, (3) February 26th, 2010, and (4) November 6th, 2015, will yield the historical changes of its narratives.  

The first and the second distinguish not in their contents but layout aesthesis, the first version looking almost unfinished. The third version, compared with the second and first, adds psychological description and attitudes, for example, “independence and confidence.” The fourth version grants more agency to its characters and is more accurate in plot descriptions; viewers can find out that some of the murders are delusions, which are not clarified in former versions. Word choice has also been improved, the “cat’s paw” with a hyperlink to nowhere changes to “scapegoat.” Noticeably, the plot section has been changed between the third and the fourth version back and forth till it settles with the fourth, probably because the protagonist’s last declaration “I'm the real thing" is so powerful in asserting her identity. In conclusion, the Wikipedia page of Perfect Blue did not receive much attention until scholars, including Susan Napier, started to write about this film, and its plot narrative gradually empowers its protagonists by adding their psychological activities and actions.  

[emmawang]

Week 2 Decolonizing the Web

For students who currently study in China or other countries with Internet censorship, they do not surf the Internet as an ocean but a pond, but whether it feels like an ocean or a pond really depends on the fish’s size.  PRC may review the firewall as an effective anti-colonial tool, blocking various western contents from its citizens to create a relatively stabilized controlled speech atmosphere. At least this is one of the assumptions that some would think of while thinking of the Internet of China. Most Chinese scholars use VPNs to access Wikipedia and alike, and some universities have school Wi-Fi to access foreign resources. (Not sure all the universities’ Wi-Fi do, but those in Shanghai and Beijing can.) VPNs are easy to get on cellphones in the app stores, but if one wants to use VPNs on the computer and outside university Wi-Fi, it will require some technical knowledge of shadow-socks. Isn’t the Chinese government aware of this transgressive surfing? Of course, it is. The Internet in China is constantly monitored, but as long as there are no suspicious acts like leaking national secrets, one is safe to explore this ocean via VPNs. However, I wouldn’t say that Chinese scholars and students are marginalized groups on the web, although the academic practice is quite Eurocentric (why Chinese students must use APA or MLA format in writing their thesis in a Chinese institution is irrelevant here). Yet the government censorship shapes the imagination of a Chinese Internet as limited and suppressed may respond to a misinterpretation of its online cultures.  

Clearly, some cultures are very active. Two short-video-sharing social software, including TikTok (or its Chinese version, Douyi) and Kwai (also known as Kuaishou,) have created cyberspace for the youngster, gender minorities, and socially underprivileged people in China, for example, rural residents, blue-collar workers, and those who cannot afford higher education. One interesting phenomenon has changed public opinion about cross-dressing. Starting from a tradition in Bilibili, a Chinese video-sharing website, that when a male uploader reaches the follower amount of one million, he will shoot a cross-dressing video to thank his followers. (How about female uploaders? And the exact time when this tradition first started needs investigation.) Then, cross-dressing gradually becomes normalized in Douyi and Kuaishou. Before I came to UPenn for my master – that was three years ago – dressing as anime characters often exclusively happened in anime exhibitions; now students cross-dress on the street, to their schools, everywhere. The dress code has shifted, thanks to the online cross-dressers. It starts with playful frivolity but serves as subtle defiance to by-then normalized dress code when it becomes a tradition. This reminds me of Butler’s gender performativity theory that, by repeating and mimicking a behavior like cross-dressing, gender is learned and internalized.  Finally, I want you to look at a screenshot of Kuaishou’s official page, and its claim on taking care of the marginalized: apparently, as a short-video-sharing app, it is aware of its power.  

[emmawang]

Week 1 Self-Introduction and Goals for LLCU 607

Hey, friend! This is my first semester for a Ph.D. in Montreal! I’m so thrilled to go on this intellectual journey with you. Prior to joining the EAS Department at McGill University, I have just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. My research interests focus on the intersection of gender, performance, and modernity, as well as on contemporary Chinese and Japanese cultural history. My current project probes into visual media and representations of the body/bodies; for the class LLCU 607, I will investigate this Chinese online community in the Baidu forum named the Fourth Love. I designed my web name in this way so that, since I posted a discussion in the Fourth Love forum, I hope those leading to this webpage via hyperlink will also feel welcome and free to communicate with me.

As for the goals I wish to achieve in this class, although I have received former training from literary analysis, cultural studies, and feminism theories, my knowledge of media theories is comparatively limited. What is Digital Humanities anyway? Asked an East Asian student who has in her current mind examples like AL and bot-generated poems. How to capture the essences or differences of an online community when the internet world tends to be ever-expanding, indefinite, and often self-contradictory? Besides anthropological methods, I wish to gain new perspectives and tools to study web-based communities and phenomena.  

[emmawang]

Welcome

Welcome, everybody! This is going to be a digital portfolio for Jiarong Wang created for the course, LLCU 607: Topics in Thought, at McGill University.