Brainwashing paranoia and lay media theories in China: the phenomenological dimension of media use (and the self) in digital environments

Abstract

Drawing on the phenomenological tradition, this article focuses on the ‘lay media theories’ that ordinary people rely on to orient their media use. Existing scholarship on certain perceptions users hold about media and their behavioral consequences tends to assume that these perceptions by default rest on a sense of self that is pre-existing and immune to media. My empirical research troubles this theoretical assumption. Analyzing interviews and ethnography in China, I investigate the media practices of certain individuals under the influence of ‘brainwashing paranoia’. Through their engagements with the information abundance on the Chinese Internet, these individuals had, over time, revamped rather than enhanced their established political beliefs. I argue that in today’s high-choice environments, users’ lay media theories, especially their conceptions about media in relation to the self, should be taken into account as one major sociocultural factor that moderates or mediates the age-old tendency for selective exposure.

Keywords

censorship Internet interviews lay theory phenomenology reception study selective exposure self

In the past decades, the fast proliferation of media options and technologies has left people with ever-growing room to exercise personal choice (Webster, 2011). When afforded with abundant choices and technologies to customize consumption, users’ tendency to retreat to partisan niches that reinforce their established views or to drop out of politics entirely has been extensively investigated, albeit with mixed results (Farrell, 2012; Iyengar and Hahn, 2009; Prior, 2005; Stroud, 2008). Tracing the historical development of political communication research, Bennett and Iyengar (2008) suggest, ‘transformations of society and technology need to be included more explicitly in communication models’ (p. 709). Following recent theorizing focused on the technical and infrastructural aspects – such as variations in online customizability technology (Dylko, 2016) and how social and media structures curate information flows (Thorson and Wells, 2016) – this article sets out to examine the phenomenological dimension of media use, an increasingly powerful yet understudied factor in shaping user engagement in our high-choice environment.

Phenomenology stresses that to understand behaviors, we need to investigate the subjective point of view of the actor (Husserl, 1970). Indeed, empirical research in media and communication has been applying phenomenological insights for decades (Traudt et al., 1987). Scholars have examined the role of media in constructing and transforming human experiences of the world (Scannell, 1996, 2014). On a more micro-level, existing work has also shown how varied media consumption patterns can shape users’ subjective life or consciousness (Couldry and Markham, 2008) and how manual engagement with digital devices brings about specific sensuous, practical knowledge (Moores, 2014). However, the research program advanced here is different from these foci; it is instead concerned with how people’s ‘phenomenological reality’, specifically their ‘lay media theories’, contributes to their media use.

Existing scholarship has documented certain perceptions users hold about media and their behavioral consequences, yet the literature tends to take for granted that these perceptions are always based on a sense of self that is pre-existing and immune to media. Furthermore, it is considered that this sense of self, purportedly uniform among ordinary individuals, facilitates use patterns, such as political selective exposure amid information abundance. However, my empirical research troubles this theoretical assumption.

Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnography in China, I investigate the media practices of a section of the population under the influence of ‘brainwashing paranoia’.¹ Through their engagements with the ‘censored abundance’ that characterizes Chinese Internet, these individuals had, over time, revamped rather than enhanced their established political beliefs. In other words, when lay media theories center on an understanding of the self as already and always constituted in the mediated environment, they may shape media use in ways that destabilize the established political self – a divergence from the commonly observed tendency for selective exposure, which becomes easily facilitated by digital technologies.

Indeed, existing research on new media use witnesses a continued preoccupation with the information and technological landscape. This preoccupation is most recently reflected in commentary on the Trump victory, which many scholars and journalists quickly attribute to the production and distribution of online misinformation (see Hagood, 2016). To complement the extant research agenda, this study calls for more work to approach media use as practices arising from the user’s phenomenological reality and the ways in which she orients herself to the digital media–saturated world. I argue that users’ locally developed lay media theories, especially their conceptions about media in relation to the self, should be taken into account as one major sociocultural factor that moderates or mediates how users engage with the high-choice digital environment.

Lay media theories: the phenomenological dimension of media use

In line with the phenomenological tradition, I consider media use or media practice a form of social action that is meaningful to its participants (Weber, 1978). I employ these two terms interchangeably, as umbrella terms that encompass symbolic interpretation and appropriation, as well as navigation, choice-making, and much more – indeed a wide range that spans the respective focus of media and communication research and that of information studies. This is necessary because, in the pre-digital era, power operated through sustaining the dominant narrative of broadcast media, and resistance lay in audience interpretation of dominant media texts (e.g. Hall, 2000). But in today’s media ecology, characterized by the wild proliferation of inconsistent content, the individual user’s navigation habits, which carve out a slice from ‘information glut’ she traverses, become the front line of battle (Andrejevic, 2013: 20; Bennett and Iyengar, 2008). The meaning of media use derives from the intentionality and reflexivity of the user, who is ensconced in her life world (Heidegger, 1978; Scannell, 2014).² Evidently, the user’s general ‘phenomenological reality’ entails numerous forms of experience and interpretations that potentially shape her media use. A feeling of connectedness with an imagined peer community may lead a user to rely on certain niche content online. A conviction in a corrupt political system may stop a user from following electoral coverage.

My theoretical intervention focuses on impressions and ideas about media, what I call ‘lay media theories’. ‘Lay theories’ are durable, experientially based ideas ordinary people hold, which, although oftentimes lacking scientific basis, have concrete influences on their actions (Furnham, 1988). Alongside the proliferation of media technologies that shape consumption, distribution, and content production are the increased capacities of users to reflect on and, accordingly, act upon the changing media environment. As assembling one’s media habitat becomes the province of each individual, we are confronted with the conundrum of sifting through more options than we could possibly consume (Andrejevic, 2013: 16). Faced with media excess, writes media anthropologist Dominic Boyer (2007), ‘we all have containment strategies – ways of rationalizing, filtering, and ignoring media – for reducing the excessive qualities of mass communication’ (p. 94). Meanwhile, intensifying media penetration engenders endless talk about media and mediated phenomena. This talk, in turn, becomes a resource ordinary people draw upon to form lay theories regarding their everyday media use.

From a phenomenological perspective, meanings exist only when attention is reflected toward the self (Schutz, 1967). In the case of media use, the user engages with media based on her implicit or explicit assumption about what she may do with media and, relatedly, what media can do to her. The conception about the self is thus the bedrock of any lay media theories. However, therein also lies the theoretical disjuncture in extant literature related to lay media theories.

Lay media theories and their presumption about the self

The existing literature within the mainstream media effects tradition addresses two types of phenomena that fall under the umbrella of lay media theories. The first is perceived media bias. Researchers have noted that people’s perceptions of media bias are most crucially determined, not by objective indicators of content but by the extent to which people feel the media outlet disagrees with their own views (Vallone et al., 1985). People perceive particularly intense media bias when they are highly involved with an issue, which usually comes with a strong position and self-perceived expertise. It in turn orients media use that keeps away incongruent information (e.g. Himelboim et al., 2013) or does not take it seriously when it is encountered (e.g. Schmitt et al., 2004).

This bias has been researched in both democratic and non-democratic societies. In Russia, for example, distrust in state-controlled television – what Toepfl (2013) calls ‘the last filter inside the head’ – guides individuals’ interpretation of its content. In liberal democracies, perceived media bias is found to cause selective exposure to partisan content, the concern about which only heightens in the digital age. Existing scholarship sees perceptions of media bias essentially as arising from people’s inclination to maintain ‘a positive sense of self’ that entails ‘consider[ing] their existing attitudes correct’ and ‘want[ing] to hold on to them, even in the face of dissonant information or opinion’ (Gunther, 1992: 151). As one (purportedly) always prefers media consistent with one’s existing opinions, technologies with user-driven customizability (as in a Twitter subscription) and system-driven customizability (as in Facebook’s rendering of personal streams) function by providing such consistency (Dylko, 2016).

The second type of lay media theory phenomena being examined in this tradition is the ‘indirect effects’ of media (Valkenburg et al., 2016). The media effects are ‘indirect’ for they stem not directly from consuming the media content but from the consumers’ ‘media effects schema’ or the ‘knowledge structures that include a number of beliefs about the media and the audience’ (Perloff, 1993: 177). Treating such ‘schema’ as the independent variable, this scholarship acknowledges its adoption of the ‘phenomenological approach’ (Perloff, 1993). Its origin lies in the third-person effect (TPE) research, which posits that individuals typically assume media content to exert a stronger impact on peers than on the self and adapt their attitudes and behaviors to correspond to this perceived discrepancy (Davidson, 1983). Building on the TPE research, a more comprehensive model termed ‘the influence of presumed (media) influence’ (IPMI) acknowledges that, regardless of the self-other disparity in perceived effects, presumed influence on others alone can account for certain impacts of media. In other words, people perceive some effect of a message on others, and they react to that perception (Gunther and Storey, 2003). IPMI has been observed in many contexts (Cohen and Tsfati, 2009; Park, 2005; Tsfati, 2007). For instance, politicians’ belief in the power of media on the public makes their desire to be featured in news coverage (Cohen et al., 2008). A more extreme yet famous instance is support for censorship, which is a ramification of people’s expectations that deviating communications, though largely ineffective to themselves, fool fellow citizens (Davidson, 1983; Salwen, 1998).

Ethnographic audience research also addresses people’s understandings about media. Seiter (1999) employs ‘lay theories of media effects’ to study television viewing practices in educational settings. Through interviews and field observation, her study shows that the more professional and elitist teachers held a strong media effects theory and expunged television entertainment from their classrooms, whereas the more grass-roots teachers, relying on the television in their workplace, had ‘a more flexible, “forgiving” theory of media effects […] which attributes greater agency to the children, and places more value on the pleasures of popular culture’ (p. 59). Hoover et al. (2004) studied parents’ ‘accounts of media’ that inform how they manage their families’ media consumption. Parents tend to seriously consider the mainstream ideas that media harm children with too much sex and violence and practice ‘responsible parenting’ accordingly. In the digital age, researchers such as Couldry et al. (2016) found that the impression of others valorizing organizational online presence prompts the organization to invest in its own social media analytics. In sum, existing research seems to suggest that lay theories about media effects on others tend to brew users’ attempts to alter aspects of their media environment in order to achieve (or prevent) the presumed effects.

Despite the divergent emphases and approaches involved,³ the literature related to conceptions about media effects has an intriguing gap – that is, the motivating ideas are generally about how media influence others, such as children, clients, peers, or society in general, but not themselves. Only the TPE inquiries pay some attention to the subject of ‘perceived effect on self’ because it is a necessary component to determine the self–other differential. Synthesizing research findings in this area, McLeod et al. (2001) found that when assessing media effects on themselves, people tend to invoke a more sophisticated and complex ‘media effects schema’ – what may be called a ‘conditional-effects’ perspective, whereas they are likely to judge media effects on others according to the magic bullet theory (p. 961). Beyond this rather interesting observation, little has been said concerning lay theories about what media can do to oneself.

Summarily, the existing literature on ordinary people’s perceptions about media tends to elide the latent yet foundational component of lay media theories – that is, how the relationship between media and the self is felt or understood. It is generally assumed that people’s perceptions and ideas about media always come with the taken-for-granted sense of self as contained and autonomous (and media as contained and tool-like). Evidence from China, in contrast, foregrounds the situation wherein the boundary between media and the self is seen as porous, which predisposes media users to enacting media use to reconstitute the self.

Censored abundance on the Chinese Internet

China has a distinct online environment that I call ‘censored abundance’. Indeed, China’s censorship machinery, particularly its notorious Internet filtering system (aka the Great Firewall, or the GFW), has always attracted much international attention. Domestically, and critical to this study, awareness of censorship has fostered a collective recognition about maneuvers in media production and about personal susceptibility to varied media influences. Meanwhile, a usually overlooked fact is that the Chinese Internet accommodates abundant information – characterized both by volume and by diversity. As demonstrated by burgeoning research, opinions represented there are much more diverse than what legacy media are allowed to carry (e.g. Hassid, 2012). An unprecedented social media data-mining endeavor found that vocal criticism of the government and expressions of discontent for the status quo in various arenas are generally permitted. It is the comments which ‘represent, reinforce, and spur social mobilization’ that censors primarily target (King et al., 2013: 236). Indeed, researchers have noted the existence of substantial oppositional opinion groups. While a state-sponsored China-as-superpower nationalist sentiment aggressively spreads across the Internet, a significant population upholds distinct anti-nationalist, liberal political, and cultural beliefs (Wu, 2014). The Chinese Internet thus qualifies as a high-choice media environment where individuals are able to seek out and actively avoid specific content from a diverse universe of media resources (Webster, 2009).

In sum, whereas China’s censorship has configured a local phenomenological reality about media, its information abundance provides capacious material for users to navigate and appropriate. Censored abundance thus makes the dynamics of lay media theories observed in China comparable and generalizable to broader context,⁴ to which I will return in the last section.

The following analyses draw from my interviews and ethnographic observations conducted for a larger project exploring the lived experience of Chinese media users. Importantly, my methodological design is by no means aimed at representing the overall ‘Chinese experience’, but at yielding conceptually rich data for exploring the phenomenological realities and processes of media engagements formed under censored abundance. This requires concentrated data collection about the lived experience of a niche population that historically shared individual web usage patterns – specifically, the Chinese media users whose online journeys were hijacked by Internet censorship during the 2000s, the decade that witnessed Chinese Internet growth at its fastest.

In particular, I focus on users who gathered around Bullog, one of the flagship websites that are unmistakably critical of the party-state’s hegemonic public culture. Bullog was an elite blogging platform that hosted several dozens of commentators with varied styles and subject preferences. Among Chinese websites subject to severe censorship (i.e. forced shutdown and domestic blockage), it had sustained the most vibrant online community. Launched mid-2006, in April 2008 Bullog’s visits per day passed 1 million. Not long after, some Bulloggers’ involvement in Charter 08 (a dissident’s petition) finally hit the censor’s limit and Bullog was blocked early 2009. Two years later, I perused discussions on long-abandoned Bullog forums, identified engaged participants, and googled their Bullog handles, as oftentimes people register at different platforms using the same handle. I then joined these active platforms to send intra-site messages to these accounts. This strategy enabled me to get in touch with 29 former avid users of Bullog, out of which 26 agreed to being interviewed (Table 1). Ranging from 1.5 to 3 hours in length, the interviews took place between early September, 2012 and early January, 2013 in nine Chinese cities. These interviews involved people’s personal history of Internet use and media practices in general in the past decades, as well as rich discussion about censorship and their interactions with it over time. Besides interview material, the online texts I draw from in this study include users’ comments on blocked websites, periodicals on various circumvention software, and political cartoons on Internet control. These archives were collected through online ethnography (Gatson, 2011), as I immersed myself from 2005 to 2015 at venues commonly visited by liberal-oriented Internet users.

Table 1.

Interviewee demographics.

Gender	Male	Female
	14	12
Birth year	1971–1975	1976–1980	1981–1985	1986–1990
	5	5	15	1
Location	Beijing	Shanghai	Shenzhen	Other cities
	14	4	2	6
Education	High School	College	Above
	3	16	7

Awakening to a brainwashed self

In recent years, brainwashing has become a buzzword in the Chinese language sphere. In 2012 and 2015, protests over school ‘brainwashing’ broke out in Hong Kong and Taiwan against the proposed booklet and textbook edits which, purportedly, would implant into students identification with China. Besides worrying about the young generation’s vulnerability, some Hong Kongers and Taiwanese also consider people from mainland China ‘brainwashed’ by their isolation within the Wall, a conception that often is levied on the Internet where the populations encounter one another and get into arguments. Even liberal-minded Chinese users mobilize the trope of ‘brainwashing’ to undercut their compatriots’ point-of-view, which they imply to result from the censored environment (Wu, 2012).

First used by Americans during the Korean War, ‘brainwashing’ is a psychological term describing methodologies of coercive persuasion employed under the Maoist regime. It comes from the Chinese word ‘xi-nao’, which literally means ‘mind-cleanse’. ‘The intent’, explained in an American newspaper article in the early 1950s, ‘is to change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet – a human robot – without the atrocity being visible from outside’ (Hunter, quoted in Streatfeild, 2007: 15). ‘Brainwashing’ has since entered our daily language and lost its reference to the physical and psychological abuse that was understood to constitute its original practice. Its contemporary usage serves to explain how an undesirable mindset comes into being due to powerful external forces, especially media, which amount to a particular instance of popular thinking about media effects. A telling example is Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation, a book about how American young voters are sold liberal values through comprehensive media campaigns (Mattera, 2011). Streatfeild (2007), who has done extensive archival research on brainwashing, poignantly concludes that the idea of brainwashing gains currency because it provides self-assuring closure; it is consoling to know that the heretic is an outcome of brainwashing by the insidious party.

Evidently, these behaviors and sentiments reflect the phenomenological orientations of perceived media bias and beliefs about media effects on others, both of which presume a contained self. In contrast, the ‘brainwashing paranoia’ with which many Chinese users have been coping entails a type of lay theory that centers on a distinct narrative about the self as being intertwined with (insidious) media. Consider the following quote from an interviewee:

At Bullog […] I got to know about this GFW thing, about its existence. As for media censorship, I knew of it earlier on, meaning that I knew propaganda organs exist. But [then] my sensitivity [to media censorship] wasn’t as high. Only later, as you read more and more online, especially as the liberals preached to you at all times, you realized gradually that what you are exposed to has already been censored … especially after seeing certain things outside the wall, particularly seeing things about June 4^th [the Tiananmen crackdown]. You came to realization: oh, this is how it is. I remember clearly that after seeing [records of] June 4^th, I immediately went to check my [old] history textbook. And I really found it. A paragraph there contains merely one sentence on it: a serious political disturbance took place and somehow got dissolved. Oh, then I knew it was deliberately hidden. I think besides this, many things are deliberately hidden. (12 December 2012, personal communication)

Such heart-felt ‘awakening to censorship’ narratives that detail deep identity crises characterize many interviewees’ stories. ‘When I eventually landed on some truth [online]’, another interviewee recollected vividly, ‘my heart felt extremely awful. Why was I deceived for so many years? [Self-mocking laugh4] That was a huge mental blow’ (4 January 2013, personal communication). These narratives are akin to what philosophers describe as ‘epistemologically damaging’ scenarios, wherein people are unable to verify their present beliefs.⁴ To modify Descartes, pondering the role of media in one’s self-formation led to the recognition that ‘up to now, whatever I have accepted as fully true I have learned either from or by means of’ media. Such epistemological disruptions amount to reevaluations of the self.

Upon this reevaluation, people came up with a set of strategic media practices in the hope of actively remolding themselves. They diligently followed technical steps to fanqiang – which literally means ‘climb over the Wall’ – in order to access GFW-blocked websites. On a digital booklet accompanying updated versions of circumvention software, someone reflected on the significance of fanqiang to her:

Long-time distortion leaves marks on objects, and on thinking too. I remember when I first fanqiang [breached online access blockage], seeing news reports divergent from those inside the wall, my primary feeling was repugnance. […] As fanqiang becomes my daily routine, how I feel now completely differs from then. I rarely follow news inside the wall anymore. To think of it, isn’t the initial repugnance a mark left by distorted thinking? What’s distorted will eventually be mended. Who would ever not want their minds clear and smoothed out? (‘The mark on thoughts’, 2011)

Such prison-break-type portrayals of fanqiang are not only common among my interviewees but also recounted across the liberal blogosphere and forums. A Chinese citizen tweeted on the long-blocked Twitter, ‘I almost broke my neck climbing over the wall without my shoes lost or pants torn. I was awakening to the fresh air on the other side. Sitting atop the wall, I look back – safe for the moment!’ (Sol, 2012). More dramatically, a reader commented at the blocked Kenangba, ‘I could tolerate the dark, had I never seen the light’ (Kenengba, 2010). A frequent reference, the GFW oftentimes functions as a mental partition, an imagined boundary that creates supposedly insular compartments – the media environment ‘inside’ versus that ‘outside’. Flowers, fresh air, and stretching landscapes are frequently used to describe all that is outside, where the purported vast real world spreads, full of excitement and splendor. In sharp contrast, inside the ‘Wall’, the readily accessible information under censorship is perceived as dull, bleak, and worthless. This term ‘matrix’, from the film trilogy, was popularly invoked in local discussion to stress the self-referential, coherent, and hence highly deceiving worldview that they had internalized. (The only enclaves ‘inside’ are the liberal-leaning blogosphere and forums, where these individuals spent an enormous amount of time seeking out and devouring content that appeared to be treading the edge of the censor’s tolerance.)

This mental divide of the ‘Wall’ is reified despite that, out of the vast WWW universe, the GFW only denies access to a limited, definitive set of foreign websites and that the Chinese are famous for ‘bridging’ activities such as translating, fetching, and introducing foreign content online (see Zuckerman, 2013). This amounts to a typical case of what Zerubavel (1993) calls ‘misplaced concreteness’, a ‘fallacy’ in perception but often a fertile source of deep sentiment and determined actions (p. 79). As people strove to awaken to reality beyond the ‘matrix’, fanqiang was the immediate measure they took.

Anti-brainwashing media use: various paths

After the initial fanqiang frenzy, depending on how they understood the relationship between the mediated environment and their self, my interviewees formed various patterns of Internet use. Many interviewees claimed to have a distinct ‘anti-brainwashing’ period. One described that reading alternative content ‘helped me purge, and purge, and purge myself of all the brainwashing I had received. Several years’ of purging finally took care of it’ (13 December 2012, personal communication). These individuals who believed they achieved ‘self-redemption’ through purposeful media use were likely to think that they had acquired the vital sensitivity to access truth beneath the veneer. As one who eventually stopped fanqiang explained confidently,

You have to achieve a certain level of wakefulness about media, to know what it is about. Then you won’t be wrong in the general directions. What’s beyond the Wall, I think, is just about the minute detail. […] Fundamentally, you can make basic judgments, right? As for detail, detail just makes sensational shows – what’s so special knowing that much detail? (21 December 2012, personal communication)

By ‘details’ she meant the officially suppressed materials that many interviewees mentioned as having memorably touched their core beliefs: alternative histories of the rise of Mao and other stately figures, the Korean War, the famine during the Great Leap Forward, the ‘Tibetan problem’, and the Tiananmen movement, as well as accounts of contemporary intra-party struggles. By ‘general directions’ she meant oppositional readings of pro-state messages paired with inclinations to follow critical voices that survived censorship. ‘I don’t believe them for a bit’, another interviewee commented indignantly, ‘From then on, whatever they say, I don’t believe it. They are lying’ (18 December 2012, personal communication). With this lay theory, media use patterns take the form of selective exposure based on perceived media bias. For the users, such patterns signal a return to their secured, contained conception of the self.

Others held a lay theory marked by a different conception about the self; they considered ‘anti-brainwashing’ a fight for life. For example, when news about the Hong Kong ‘Anti-brainwashing, Anti-national Education’ protest broke out, many Chinese people commented online that Hong Kongers were making a fuss and that they themselves went through worse, but turned out just fine. In response to such reaction, one of my interviewees posted the following on Weibo, a Twitter-like Chinese platform, just 3 days prior to our meeting:

The typical manifestations of thoroughly brainwashed persons include denial of being brainwashed, or the belief that they can completely undo the brainwashing they’ve been receiving since childhood. Seriously, who among us has got rid of the residual poison completely? It is good enough if one can seal it from attacking with internal force [neili].

His metaphors – ‘residual poison’, ‘internal force’, and ‘seal from attacking’ – make an analogy between self-formation in the censored environment and being poisoned by the most insidious toxins as in the legendary martial arts novels. Victims of those poisonings live their lives in chronic struggle, never allowed any peace.

Along these lines, some interviewees emphasized the willingness and skills to dig and process high-quality information available to them. They clearly found delight in naming the routine steps they went through in search of information that authorities strived to censor. They switched between various platforms according to accumulated knowledge about the sites’ self-censoring efforts; they experimented with keywords based on insiders’ sense of local parody culture. Furthermore, they formed a habit of ‘network corroboration’. An interviewee, for example, said it was now his ‘impulse’ to always try collecting many other ‘nodes’ (jiedian) of relevance elsewhere on the Internet in order to examine one post that interested him: ‘[To] grasp some truths [on Weibo – the Chinese version of Twitter], of course you have to sift many distinct information nodes and induce the truth yourself’ (8 September 2012, personal communication). These Web use routines require a great deal of thought and energy, which Chinese individuals were willing to devote in order to cope with the media environment they perceived as a perpetual obfuscation.

Two interviewees went a step further to highlight how the media environment maneuvers on a linguistic and subconscious level, indicating a perception of a more vulnerable self in the face of media: ‘[State censored media] is bad not because it removed those radical messages but, most importantly, because it processed the language, which in turn muddled your thinking’. This interviewee followed with an example of the naming of ‘the Liberation War’ in mainland China. He described the war as essentially a civil war between Kuomintang and the Communist Party, harming instead of ‘liberating’ ordinary people. But individuals growing up within the state-controlled milieu take this term, and its connotation, for granted – ‘This is among the more fundamental [media] influences beneath the more straightforward ones’ (13 December 2015, personal communication). According to them, the subtle manipulation of language, where the true power of media lies, makes it necessary to fanqiang and immerge oneself in media environments beyond the state’s hand.

Even more noteworthy is that having experienced the painful awakening and then studied media of varied natures, some individuals reached an acute realization that all media representations are organized according to particular ideological leanings or, more broadly, ‘attitudes’ (taidu). A representative quote at length:

On the other side of the Wall, for example, sites run by Falun Gong [a dissident religious group] speak definitely for Falun Gong; sites run by Murdock speak definitely for Murdock. What’s outside may not be truth … [In fact,] I think in this world, especially for matters regarding people and society, there is no truth. I believe, at best, in triangulating and counterbalancing different sources. What you see inside the Wall is perhaps single predominance, only one voice. Beyond the Wall may be multiple voices, which may be more chaotic, not necessarily closer to reality. (16 September 2012, personal communication)

This interviewee points out that no media representations, within or outside China, guarantee an objective reality.

In addition to destabilizing the self in the media environment it inhabits, such a lay media theory further foregoes a stable reality through media. It is then left on one’s own shoulder to weave a reality with the best material. Among my interviewees, this lay media theory usually led to increased appreciation of concrete descriptions. People thus avoided media content filled with slogans and values, ‘imaginaries and sentiments, but little facts’, even when it was liberal-oriented and critical of the status quo. Instead, they sought content buttressed with evidence and analysis, for it better helped them comprehend the world and form their own opinions. As a result, not only did they strive for careful ‘network corroboration’ to process information on domestic social media, they went a step further in consciously keeping a critical distance from liberal-oriented online information and in actively working against the anticipated tendency of letting ideological leanings or value preferences predetermine their opinions about discrete issues.

Remarkably, these interviewees chose to subscribe to information sources with political beliefs clearly opposite to their own. Their blog and Weibo subscriptions contained not only prominent liberal-leaning outlets that they were naturally drawn to but also nationalist and statist outlets they picked up based on factual and analytical solidity. According to their lay media theory, to effectively grasp comprehensive facts is to piece together media pictures that are partial in complementary ways. ‘I don’t want to miss out certain things. Being carried away by the liberals is always my fear. [Subscribing to alternative sources] sometimes helps me weigh the problem differently’ (6 September 2012, personal communication).

Lay theory about a media-constituted self and media use as self-projects

As shown in the previous section, having abandoned the run-of-the-mill notion that media is where people go to for information and entertainment, and instead adopting a view that heightens the influences of the environing (censored) media on the self, the Chinese individuals began to practice fanqiang and other browsing strategies methodically. Later, depending on their evolved lay media theories, some displayed systemic selective exposure, while others invested greater diligence to consider cross-ideological content. In all these instances, the fact that changes in lay theories accompanied changes in media use attests to the importance of examining lay media theories in media use research.

The Chinese case suggests that informed by their lay theory regarding the relationship between media and the self, people’s engagement with the mediated environment can be a thoughtful attempt to remake the self. Importantly, this conceptualization does not rehabilitate the figure of the autonomous agent who realizes intentions that are pre-conceived and independent from concrete situations (see Gunn and Cloud, 2010). First, I emphasize that how people think about media is given by conditions of the social life, instead of achieved within an individual’s ‘internal locus’ of choice. Second, it is the human desire to consider oneself as an active agent that makes her act upon this thinking. The resulting media use is therefore ‘the socioculturally mediated capacity to act’ (Ahearn, 2001: 112). Unintended consequences are thus always possible, especially when considered at the collective level. For example, seeking a clearer comprehension of Chinese society and politics, some ‘awakened’ Chinese fortified a highly skewed media habitat and actively ‘overcorrected’ the perceived ‘brainwashing’. I have observed many such individuals who ended up at the other extreme – unreservedly embracing the ‘free market economy’ and objecting to any forms of political governance. For example, some justified the room for child labor and animal cruelty, seeing government intervention in these areas as encroachments on individual liberty and private property rights.

The Chinese case also demonstrates that compared to lay media theories that assume a contained self, those that rest on a media-constituted self may affect media practices over a longer period. The salience of the temporal dimension is consistent with the tenets of social phenomenology. Individuals acted upon their evaluation of the past (e.g. reevaluation of the self as formed in the extant media habitat) as well as their projections about the future (e.g. to achieve a self one hopes for). Their media use may be either ‘corrective interventions’ based on their convictions that media have influenced them in certain ways or strategies in order to moderate anticipated media influence – that is, the probable effects media may exert on them if they do not adjust their media use.

This dynamic essentially differs from what we have seen in the existing literature. For example, media distrust alone does not lead to media use as a conscious effort of self-making. In interviewing media users in developed countries, Volkmer (2006) found that their ‘cynicism about the media has not led them to question or investigate any issues more deeply through other sources. One has the impression that the cynicism about the media is itself picked up from the media’s self-criticism’ (pp. 24–25). Absent the mental linkage between media and self-formation, substandard media can simply be what people halfheartedly avoid or tolerate. But the Chinese case suggests that this mental linkage is not necessarily absent.

Indeed, the Chinese case shows how lay media theories anchored by a notion of a media-constituted self can be a driving force for change. Microscopically, it is able to propel ‘oppositional readings’ of widely circulated messages, determination to acquire certain information despite inconveniences, strong willingness to overturn held beliefs, efforts to consider ideologically adverse points of view, and so forth. These use patterns constitute the self-projects through which media users transform themselves and their social and cultural universe along the way. For the Chinese case, this appears a viable (partial) explanation for the fast-growing liberal-oriented population between the mid- and late 2000s.

Lay media theory: toward a generalized research program

The Chinese case of brainwashing paranoia amid censored abundance provides substantial theoretical value because (1) it particularly highlights that it is in the cultural-historical milieu – in this case one that is heavily imprinted by censorship measures and popular reflections about these measures – that lay media theory and its foundational conception regarding the self takes shape; (2) it also provides an opportunity to observe, as people’s lay media theories transformed, how they devised media practices amid the information abundance afforded by digital technologies; (3) it involves lay media theories that entail a salient understanding about the self in relation to media that is absent from existing literature. Specifically, people were obsessed with ideas about their own susceptibility to media influences, which shaped their media use in ways that destabilized their established political self (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Lay media theories in China’s censored abundance.

Such changes are not limited to politics in authoritarian regimes. Most readily, in democratic societies, there may exist groups of individuals who, due to alternative lay theories regarding media and oneself, practice browsing strategies that result in patterns divergent from the worrisome usage trends toward selective exposure. Consider another example: it is rather common to hear female students express their sense of empowerment after taking a course on Critical Communication Theories with comments such as ‘I am now able to make sense of what made me anxious about watching makeover shows’. Their opinions regarding gender norms have changed not just because they have been persuaded by a more ‘sensible’ way of thinking gender. Instead, the root cause may well be that in the class they acquired a new understanding of their own subject formation as being intertwined with the mediated environment. On a macro-level, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the popularization of a different lay media theory may herald significant attitudinal changes among a sizable population in a society. People who change their views through this pathway would not necessarily be the so-called ‘switchers’ that political communication research has found to be the least knowledgeable, attentive, and politically sophisticated (Nisbet and Feldman, 2010). This hypothesis, of course, awaits empirical research in a variety of contexts.

Leveraging the Chinese case study, I propose a research program on lay media theories, which, by examining its phenomenological dimension, helps better understand and explain people’s engagement with high-choice environments. A logically sequential empirical research template or ‘roadmap’ is in order (Figure 2). Its guiding facets are as follows:

Discerning the locally developed lay media theories, especially their underlying conception about the relationship between media and the self;

Examining media use (amid information abundance);

Investigating their inter-connections (e.g. if lay theories about media effects on the self are at work, what media use is enacted in correspondence and to what extent might such use be seen as part of users’ self-projects?);

Exploring the consequences of the lay media theory-media use dynamic on collective media consumption, public opinion and so forth (e.g. Does this dynamic shape the possibilities for people to develop alternative political understandings?).

Figure 2.

Generalized research program on lay media theories.

These facets can either help illustrate what happened in concrete historical phenomena (i.e. the historical or realist approach) or guide proposition testing derived from this framework (i.e. the positivist approach). Similarly, the level of analysis for lay media theories can be at that of individuals, social groups, or larger interpretive communities. Qualitative techniques such as interviews, ethnography, and analysis of archival or secondary sources are best positioned for exploring the richly textured lay theories that social groups carry with them to their everyday media practices. Quantitative techniques such as large-N dataset, modeled after established survey designs for studying TPE and IPMI, may be profitably used to examine correlations between the key facets. Longitudinally, for example, lay media theories and the surrounding social processes can be better investigated by focusing on those moments of crisis in conceptions about media that potentially portend significant changes in subsequent media use and related domains. Cross-sectionally, for example, analysts may find out, when controlling for other factors, whether the compositions of people’s online browsing repertoires are correlated with how they perceive their relationships with the media environment.

This research framework poses some empirical challenges. The first regards the direction of influence, in that media use as part of one’s lived experience may also shape one’s sense about media. For example, after breaching the GFW to escape ‘brainwashing’ by the domestic information regime, an individual may modify her theories about ‘uncensored’ foreign media based on what she observes ‘out there’. Another possibility involves the scenario wherein people assign meanings to their actions in hindsight, a phenomenon highlighted in Schutz’s works. Analysts need to design research in ways to take these complications into account. The second empirical challenge, which also promises incremental improvements of the general framework, is to be attentive to what people are thinking about when they think about ‘media’. In addition to the level of specificity (i.e. from a specific media program to ‘the media’ by and large), there could be other dimensions such as that of symbolic content versus technical materiality. The brainwashing paranoia in China concentrates on media content, whereas many popular understandings about media influenced by Marshall McLuhan envision media effects on the basis of technical capacity (e.g. see Boyer, 2007). Calling for more nuanced empirical approaches, these challenges are at the same time opportunities for theoretical modification.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article benefited from close readings by Janice Radway, James Ettema, Elizabeth Lenaghan, Harsh Taneja, Michael Chan, and anonymous reviewers. Thanks also go to Francis Lee, Joseph Chan, and Zhongdang Pan, who provided invaluable feedback on this project. Lastly, I would like to thank all my interviewees for sharing with me their experiences and insights.

Funding

The study was supported by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies, as well as various entities at Northwestern University, including the School of Communication, the Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies, and the Science in Human Culture Cluster.

Notes

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