From media events to my events: Chinese mediated festivals in the digital era 1

Abstract

Much has been written about how digital technologies transformed contemporary festivals, yet the festival participants’ perceptions and experiences are less examined. Understanding mediated festivals as events of intertwined mediation processes, this paper explores the perception and practices of mediated festivals in contemporary China. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 Chinese young people to understand their motivations and experiences of festival participation. The paper finds that emerging mediated festivals provide a space for individuals to explore their interests. Further, mediated festivals are perceived as a liberating force for young people through choice-making and self-presentation in convivial and hybrid festival environments. Developing Dayan and Katz’s conception of ‘media events’, we argue that contemporary Chinese mediated festivals can be understood as ‘my events’ through hybrid and networked self-representations. Our study contributes to understanding the Chinese mediated festivals, emphasizing how networked individuals (re)negotiate the festival production.

Keywords

Media events my events mediated festival Double Eleven networked self participatory event platformization urban China

Introduction

This research was inspired by the dialog between two young clerks in a Shanghai supermarket. One said that the ‘Double Eleven’ was coming and complained that ‘we had an overload of festivals now’. The other disagreed and claimed to have ‘experienced fewer festivals than ever’. Double Eleven is the world’s biggest 24-hour shopping event started by Alibaba Group on 11th November 2009 on the e-commerce platform Taobao (Huang and Lahiri, 2018).¹ Though not having concluded whether Double Eleven was a festival, the conversation revealed that digital media has brought about debates about new forms of ‘festival’ in urban China. Various newly emerged festivals have begun to flourish in contemporary China as shopping, music and film festivals (e.g., Meng and Huang, 2017; Smith, 2014). Increasing attention has been paid to how contemporary festivals are shaped by digital media (Li, 2018; Sigala, 2018; Van Winkle et al., 2018), yet the festival participants’ perceptions and experiences during such events are less examined.

This paper examines how Chinese young people perceive and participate in the emerging Chinese mediated festivals. Contemporary festivals are mediated through an immediate surrounding comprising shared networks and social platforms (Hrynevych, 2018; Morey et al., 2014) and experienced as hybrid connections and activities (Bennett and Woodward, 2014). A ‘mediated festival’ has been predominantly described as a representation of existing festival events on social media (e.g., Danielsen and Kjus, 2017; Hrynevych, 2018; Wikstrøm, 2013). Chinese mediated festivals need further examination for two reasons. First, mediated festivals are under-researched in a Chinese context. Studies on emerging mediated festivals tend to focus on western contexts and conclude that mediated festivals variably contribute to accommodating a sense of cosmopolitanism and sociality (Bennett and Woodward, 2014; Cummings et al., 2011). Whether such a research trajectory can be replicated in contemporary China calls for re-examination (Xu and Wu, 2019). Further, contemporary mediated festivals take place as meaningful participation in a convergent cultural environment (Jenkins, 2014). While existing mediated festivals research tends to focus on online social platforms or platform consumption separately (e.g., Lv, 2016; Wang and Yu, 2021), mediated festivals occur in a situation where multiple media systems coexist and people’s experience flows across online and offline spaces. A focus on social media can be helpful to illustrate how particular technologies transformed contemporary festivals, yet, it may be insufficient to comprehend the emerging and experiential traits of mediated festivals. In this paper, we propose to switch the research focus back to the festivals themselves.

Therefore, this paper explores contemporary Chinese mediated festivals across various forms of mediated festivals, emphasizing young people’s perception and participation. In this way, we shift the research focus back to the experiential aspects of the emerging festivals. For example, how do young people perceive and participate in those different types of festivals? What are their motivations to go to festivals? Through 13 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, we find that Chinese mediated festivals are perceived as an individualistic liberation from the collective cultural values and family oriented activities that traditional festivals preserve. With our findings, we demonstrate how mediated festivals increasingly mediate the Chinese young people’s display of the ‘networked self’ (Papacharissi, 2011) in a hybrid environment. Building on Dayan and Katz’s (1992) conception of ‘media events’ and our empirical findings, we propose to understand contemporary mediated festivals through a lens of ‘my events’ in three aspects. First, my events are integrated rather than an interruption of everyday life. Second, the focal substance of my events has become increasingly decentralized and secularized. Last, the audience response to my events has become participatory and liberated beyond the ceremonial time/space limits.

In the following sections, we first outline the correlations between different media paradigms and festivals, focusing on the diachronic transformations of the Chinese mediated festivals. Then, we report the findings of mediated festivals, highlighting them as channels of self-expression. Last, we discuss networked self-representation in conjunction with contemporary mediated festivals. Rejecting an essentializing notion of the festivals as static containers of values and traditions, this paper contributes to a ground-up and dynamic view of festival formation in contemporary urban China.

Mediated festivals and media events

As festivals per se are going through constant transformations, one can argue that festivals have always been subject to mediation. Festivals are traditionally understood as ‘an event, a social phenomenon, encountered in virtually all human cultures’ (Falassi, 1987: 1). Through celebratory and ritual practices, festivals function as social and material mediators of cross-cultural encounters (Koefoed et al., 2020). Since media paradigms can profoundly shape sociocultural organizations (McQuire, 2019), different media can give rise to new forms of ritual experience and festive activities in the flow of everyday life (Couldry, 2003). For example, scholars believe that the mass media has served to define and promote the nation-state as a primary shaping force of social life (Kellner, 1982). Newspaper and electronic media can mythologize and ritualize dominant values endorsed by the nation-states through traditional celebrations and nation branding (e.g., Barnett, 2004). Moving on to the digital era, social media and decentralized networks are increasingly implicated in producing new patterns of cultural affiliations and communal belonging (Papastergiadis and Martin, 2011). As these new festival practices increasingly integrate into formal cultural institutions and form stable social alignments, their roles in daily life deserve more attention.

Danielsen and Kjus (2017: 4) have referred to mediated festivals as the ‘immediate surroundings of a festival’ consisting of ‘various online resources and activities, such as festival forums, music streaming of festival artists and festival-related content in social media’. Such festivals take various forms and can be themed around music, food, wine and movies. Hrynevych (2018) further developed mediated festivals to highlight the festival organizers’ online communication strategies and the festivals’ mediated representations. For him, mediation refers to ‘the experience, shared at a variety of media platforms, during the real-time …and has its future online extension’ (Hrynevych, 2018: 9). Differing from previous views of mediated festivals as an online extension of the real-time festivals, Ternovski and Yasseri (2020) have highlighted how young people’s peer networks promoted online festival events through networked participation. Such participation can also contribute to the symbolic and cultural exchanges of the mediated festivals (Montoro-Pons and Cuadrado-García, 2020). Thus, more than an extension of a real-time festival, mediated festivals are events of intertwined mediation processes.

In this paper, we refer to contemporary mediated festivals as emerging and participatory events that are rooted in the increasingly platformized urban life. The role of festivals in facilitating individuals’ sense-making through everyday communication in media-rich and urbanized conditions has been increasingly debated in western scholarship (Delanty et al., 2011; Koefoed et al., 2020). Some scholars criticize mediated festivals as neoliberal constructs devoid of social and cultural potential (e.g., Jakob, 2013; Olsen, 2013; Quinn, 2005; Smith, 2014). Others claim that mediated festivals can largely contribute to community building by establishing a common sense of cosmopolitanism (Papastergiadis and Martin, 2011; Sassatelli, 2011). Existing studies rarely engage with emerging festivals, such as shopping festivals, for such a categorization can be controversial (e.g., Juan, 2013; Meng and Huang, 2017). However, such exclusion can ignore young people’s perception and experience of these festivals and lack nuance in comprehending the phenomenon. A theoretical lens is needed to holistically analyze contemporary mediated festivals beyond reducing them to a binary of neoliberal construct versus cosmopolitan opportunities.

We propose to understand contemporary mediated festivals through a lens of events. In their book Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (1992), Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz proposed the term ‘media events’ as an assemblage of three elements: a ceremony that ‘interrupts the flow of daily life (syntactics)’, ‘sacred matters (semantics)’ that draw audience attention, and ‘responses (pragmatics) from a committed audience’ (1992: 14). Studying television live-broadcasting as pre-planned media events, Dayan and Katz argue that media can recreate ‘mechanical solidarity’ amongst the mass audience through modern technologies of social coordination (e.g., broadcast schedule, satellite distribution) with television as a ‘sacred center’. For them, ceremonial media events are central to societies because they are endowed to pre-empt people’s time and attention rather than ‘media-distorted spectacles’ (1992: 32). While Dayan and Katz aptly noted correlations between different media systems and event operations, they do not assert media centricity as the focus of their research. Dayan and Katz’s conception of media events can provide a less media-centric way to analyze how new mediated festivals are perceived and experienced.

While the notion of media events can be helpful to understand mediated festivals, it needs further development. First, as a concept proposed during the mass media era, it does not consider the audience’s role, participation and sense-making in such rituals or events (Scannell, 1995). Second, Dayan and Katz’s conception of media events has been criticized for their ambitions to over-generalize across international contexts (Qiu and Chen, 2009). Therefore, it needs to be tested in culturally specific cases. In the following sections, we contextualize the transformation of Chinese festivals through different media paradigms before conducting empirical research to further flesh out the contemporary perception and practice of Chinese mediated festivals.

Chinese mediated festivals

In traditional Chinese, the word ‘festival’ is written as 節日 (jieri), which consists of two characters. Jie (節) means the bamboo joint and ri (日) means the day. Combined, Jieri is the ‘joint’ of everyday (Hu, 2010). Chinese festivals originated as special occasions that differed from the ordinary ones and milestones that marked different life stages.

During the print media period, traditional festivals have been viewed as facilitators of collective identity formation through the vicinity of kinship, local community and ethnicity. Traditional festivals, such as the Spring Festival and Mid-autumn Festival,^2,³ are conceived as the crystallization of traditional cultural ‘memories’ of a local place or an ethnic group (Wu, 2017). Contemporary scholars often lament the decline of traditional festivals (Gao, 2006; Jin, 2005) due to the reorganized social structures in the processes of mass mobilization and urbanization (Chang and Zhou, 2019). The internal orders of families and local communities have been reshuffled, and their connections loosened. This change loosened the grip of ‘dominated traditional festivals’ and gave rise to new mediated festival practices.

In the electronic media era, Chinese mediated festivals have been essential to nation-building. Electronic mediated festivals have been dominated by powerful actors like the state and the emerging Chinese market (Bian, 2009). For example, the Chinese Spring Festival Gala (SFG) has been a typical nationwide ‘media event’ presented by China Central Television (CCTV). As the only national festival broadcast since 1983, SFG has been used to systematically instill traditional culture, national ideology and moral values in the national audience (Feng, 2016). Meanwhile, Bian (2009) has pointed out that the mass media has transformed the meaning of festivals from a daily rite to consumption-heavy activities as economic factors increasingly shape how mass media represent festival events.

Moving on to the digital era, various newly emerged festivals have begun to flourish in Chinese cities, contributing to tourism (Du et al., 2020; Wei, 2012), arts (Liu X, 2019), music (Wang and Zhang, 2017) and commercial scenes (Wang, 2015). While there is a current lack of systematic categorization of contemporary Chinese mediated festivals, three aspects have become prominent. First, leisure and consumption have become more apparent themes of festivals and events. Leisure festivals, like music festivals, enjoy high popularity not only in metropolitans like Beijing and Shanghai but also in regions like Suzhou, Chongqing and Xiamen. The 2021 Labor Day holiday week (1–5 May) witnessed 56 music festivals held nationwide, a 37% increase over the same period in 2019 (Damai, 2021). Shopping festivals, such as Double Eleven, are increasingly celebrated as shopping galas rife with online influencers, and local and international celebrities. Since 2015, Alibaba has held its Double Eleven gala in cooperation with Hunan Television. International celebrities such as Taylor Swift, Miranda Kerr and David Beckham were invited to join the gala, alongside local e-commerce live-streaming hosts like Austin Li and Viya Huang. The pre-sale live-streaming session on 21 October attracted 154 million viewership (Rapp, 2020).

Second, platforms and platform companies have played more important roles in leading and organizing new festivals. The scale of the shopping festival expands as more e-commerce companies and online streaming platforms join the celebration. More platforms and brands began to celebrate Double Eleven, if not initiate their own shopping festivals. For example, the e-commerce platform JD.com started to celebrate the 618 Shopping festival on June 18th, 2018. Further, the duration of the shopping carnivals has been prolonged to a week or several weeks in a year. The opening day of the 2021 Double Eleven (October 20th) attracted 670 million users, which grew to a total of 828 million on November 11th (Quest Mobile, 2021). Among those users, post-90s and post-00s consumers accounted for over 45% of the total (Huaan Research, 2021). Along with the platformization of urban China in industries like transport (Chen and Qiu, 2019), short video (Kaye et al., 2021) and live-streaming (Wang and Lobato, 2019), the notion of mediated festivals is also updating rapidly.

Third, contemporary mediated festivals accommodate an emerging formation of a localized urban network. Observing use of a date app, Momo, as urban communication practices, Xu and Wu (2019) define mosheng ren (stranger) communication as a localized network among young strangers, parallel to traditional social organizations of blood relatives or kinship (c.f., Fei, 1998). This observation offers an opportunity to further explore the relationship between contemporary mediated festival experience and Chinese young people’s self-formation and identity construction. Cornelio and Roig (2018) have acknowledged the connection between cultural events and identity formation by arguing that the time in social events, such as music festivals, is one of the key dimensions of experience of a personal narrative that relates to identity, specifically in form of digital storytelling. Their points further help us to clarify the mediated festival in terms of how individuals are enabled to (re)organize the festival time and spacein digital time.

Existing frameworks of Chinese festival studies cannot be applied to analyzing contemporary mediated festivals. First, Chinese folkloric scholarship emphasizes the cultural function of festivals as transmitters of traditional values and national spirits (e.g., Hu, 2010; Liu, 2006), such as ‘harmony’ (Huang, 2007), Confucianism (Jing, 2013) and patriotism (Wu, 2017). As the increasing importance of emotionality and desire marks the private life of the contemporary Chinese people (Yan, 2010), the efficacy of the traditional values has been tested. Further, new festival themes have arguably risen and cannot be captured by existing festival studies in the digital era. Few studies pay attention to the individual audience and their reception of public events. Last, existing Chinese festival studies have not dealt with the experiential components. While admitting the neoliberal influence of the emerging Chinese festivals, we maintain that it is meaningful to examine processes of participation and experience from the ground-up. People cannot be reduced to a personalization of data (Wang and Lobato, 2019) but addressed as lived experiences (Johnson and Keane, 2017). In the following section, we present our method to examine Chinese contemporary mediated festival participants’ perceptions and experiences.

Methods

We used semi-structured interviews to examine the subjective and experiential aspects of the mediated festivals. Qualitative interviews can facilitate young festival participants to extrapolate and reflect on their rich and lived experiences (Creswell and Poth, 2016). Qualitative data were gathered through 13 semi-structured interviews. Participants A1–A6 and B1–B5 were interviewed in person between December 2018 and January 2019 in Shanghai. Additional interviews with A7 and B6 were conducted online between January and February 2021 to clarify specific media use activities. Each interview was 60–95 minutes and was conducted in Mandarin. Table 1 is a summary of our interviewees.

Table 1.

Interviewee overview.

Pseudonym	Age	Gender	Profession	Education
A1	22	M	Full-time university student	Graduate
A2	21	M	Full-time university student	Graduate
A3	28	M	Full-time university student	Post-graduate
A4	24	M	Civil servant	Graduate
A5	29	M	Advertising	Post-graduate
A6	29	M	Full-time university student	Post-graduate
A7	20	M	Full-time university student	Graduate
B1	27	F	Internet worker	Post-graduate
B2	27	F	Full-time university student	Post-graduate
B3	27	F	Reporter	Post-graduate
B4	29	F	Lecturer	Doctor
B5	29	F	Catering manager	Graduate
B6	29	F	Advertising consultant	Post-graduate

We upheld three selection criteria. First, our interviewees were young Chinese aged between 20 and 30. Since our research focused on the perception and experience of newly emerged festivals, we needed relatively mature young adults who could afford to attend mediated festivals and were reflexive of their behaviors. Second, our interviewees were based in Shanghai and considered festival participation as an integral part of their lifestyle rather than occasional activities. Cosmopolitan cities like Shanghai provides rich and routine festival programs and gathers experienced festival lovers. Last, our interviewees were familiar with new communication tools, such as smartphones and social media.

We recruited interviewees through purposive sampling and snowballing approaches. All interviewees were Shanghai dwellers aged between 21 and 30 who frequently attended film/music/shopping festivals, possessed smartphones and were active social media users. ‘Purposive sampling’ aims to ‘select instances that are information-rich to answer the research question’ (Schreier, 2018: 89). This method produces in-depth insights through a small number of interviewees, which fits the purpose of our research. We recruited potential participants through the researchers’ immediate social networks, such as WeChat, and university social networks, such as graduates and post-graduate alumni. Then, we snowballed and recruited appropriate participants introduced to us by our existing interviewees.

We conducted semi-structured interviews and asked our interviewees to reflect on their perception and experience of mediated festivals in their everyday life. Since little is known regarding Chinese young people’s perceptions and experience of mediated festivals, semi-structured interviews allow our interviewees to explore issues that are essential to them and account for details in their language. Our data were gathered by documenting answers to our interview questions. We generally started with an open-ended prompt, such as ‘tell us about the main types of festivals that you regularly celebrate in your everyday life’. Then, according to the answers of our interviewees, we invited them to elaborate and reflect on their experiences during such festivals. Also, the interviewees were asked to describe how they perceive the transformation of Chinese festivals in the media-rich environment. They were further prompted to explore the reasons for such transformations. Table 2 illustrates a list of interview questions.

Table 2.

Indicative list of questions.


Types of festivals and categorization	1) What festivals do you participate in your everyday life?
	2) How would you categorize them?
	3) Please give reasons for your categorization.
On traditional festivals	4) Among the traditional festivals you have mentioned, how do you prepare for and celebrate Chinese New Year in your family?
On traditional festivals	5) Apart from the Chinese New Year, how do you celebrate with your family during other traditional holidays?
Non-traditional festivals on themes of music/film/arts festivals etc.	6) How do you find out about these festival(s)?
	7) Do you attend festivals with friends or do you prefer to go alone?
	8) Can you describe the processes? What do you do before/during/after stages of attending the events?
	9) Do you think strangers can spend holidays together? What kind of festival do you imagine those could be and why?
At Double Eleven shopping festival	10) Do you take part in any shopping festivals?
	11) Do you watch the Double Eleven gala and why?
	12) How do you prepare for shopping festivals?
	13) Do you think Double Eleven is a festival and why?

For analyzing our data, we perused all interview transcripts and highlighted recurring statements of our participants’ reflections on their experiences. We compared those statements to understand our participants’ broadened categorization of the emerging festivals, their emotional resonance and rationale for participation. When presenting our findings, we grouped together themes including the perceived differences between traditional and mediated festivals, the nuanced forms of mediated festivals, and a rising sense of self-formation through participating in these mediated festivals.

Findings

Festival identity from family-oriented to individual-oriented

We found that mediated festivals were perceived and experienced differently from the traditional ones. Our interviewees reported that mediated festivals offered them an escape from traditional Chinese festivals that revolved around the core and extended families and a close-knit sense of kinship. Family oriented festivals usually coincide with traditional Chinese festivals, such as the Spring Festival or the Mid-autumn Festival.

Although most interviewees felt obliged to take part in family oriented festivals, they also reported a sense of pressure and uneasiness when being amongst families and relatives on such occasions. As A2 reflected on Spring Festival:

I do not like the Spring Festival very much. Every time I travel back home for it, I have to deal with unfamiliar, nosy relatives. I have a big family with too many members. We don’t contact each other much, as I go to university in another city. They barely understand my life yet keep asking me embarrassing questions, like, if I have a girlfriend. I think they are half-joking and half-serious, but they still make me feel uncomfortable. I don’t want their interference with my private life. I don’t expect them to understand my private life either… I might share this issue with my friends rather than with my relatives. It’s just not necessary. (A2)

As a young child, A2 left his hometown to pursue better education and career opportunities and embraced new lifestyles and values that were often incompatible with his remote families. A2 was concerned that his relatives increasingly shared no common understanding nor similar experiences. However, the younger generation is always expected to be obedient and listen patiently to elders, especially during the festive seasons, which has given A2 a great amount of distress.

B4, a lecturer at university, described the different modes of festivals she had experienced:

Traditional festivals are about families. I feel like traditional festivals provide relaxation for my body. But new festivals can relax my mind. When hanging out with friends, I usually play hard and even stay up all night. Yes, you will physically be exhausted, but your mind will be refreshed. Yet, when you are at home with your families, you have to bear their nagging and are not allowed to do something unhealthy. (B4)

More than half of the Chinese college students were found to think of foreign festivals, such as Christmas, as more relaxing and reliving, while traditional Chinese festivals are very tiring (Liu Y, 2019). B4’s reflection further pointed to a distinction between different types of festivals and their associated significance.⁵ Such reflections were prevalent amongst our interview participants. Our interviewees distinguished the contemporary mediated festivals from the traditional ones and demonstrated a strong preference for the former. Our participants considered the traditional festivals a compulsory rite that stabilized their family life while upholding the emerging festivals as liberation and exemption from pre-defined family relationships. By contrasting two different types of festivals, B4 separated her sense of self from her family’s social relations. Thus, mediated festivals echo what Papacharissi (2011: 305) describes as events when individuals ‘authenticate identity and introduce the self through the reflexive process of fluid association with social circles’. In our case, the reflexive process manifests as young people reflect on their feelings, wants and needs.

Is Double Eleven a festival? Yes!

Our findings further revealed the nuanced forms of the mediated festivals. Many participants described their experience of participating in the mediated festivals as ‘individual-oriented’ (A2, A4, A5). To illustrate how these individual-oriented festivals function through extensive social and digital networks of hobbies and entertainment, they referred to a broad spectrum of emerging events ranging from art, film, music and food to shopping. Particularly, the Double Eleven shopping festival emerged as a mediated festival recognized by nine out of thirteen interviewees. One interviewee explained to us:

Because I think that the concept of the festival is not necessarily traditional or historical, that is, I think all festivals just provide an opportunity for everyone to escape from daily life, and then everyone does something happy together. So Double Eleven is in line with this definition. During the Double Eleven, everyone buys, and they buy together, and then go out to eat something, and then everyone will hang out together. …I think shopping is also one of the sources of happiness… Shopping makes me feel that I don’t need a reason to gain happiness. (A2)

As Getz (2010) suggested, festival events can evoke consumer emotions. The atmosphere and promotion of shopping festivals can also arouse emotions, such as excitement in consumption behavior (Li, 2021). One interviewee emphasized the affective aspect of the festivals by telling us:

I think my understanding of the festival includes the emotional dimension, which is quite essential. For traditional festivals, there would be more history, stories, customs, kinship relations to make it feel like a ritual. But on the other hand, I think online shopping is also a type of festival in terms of creating different senses and forms of rituals… For me, the sense of ritual lies in the preparations for that day. You have to know what’s on sale, what you target and how to make the most of your coupons. (A5)

A5 told us he was ‘tired of history and values-laden festivals’ and their grandiloquent narratives. Young people desire to express and experience individual emotions through personal rites in everyday life. Our interviewees expressed that they enjoy the freedom to make individual choices, which was described as a ‘sense of being with others’ during the shopping festival. For example, A1 emphasized that:

It is your own holiday experience. It feels like I’m involved in something that almost everyone in the country is part of it. Everyone enjoys it. I buy what I need, not just for celebrating the holiday. No matter whether the sellers have gained profit or not, I feel that I have gained something from it. (A1)

One interviewee commented that Double Eleven was more about free individual choice than embodied connections with others. However, from her words, we can see that embodied connections also manifested as Double Eleven linked one individual to the others through a network of merchandise, logistics and cash flow.^4,⁵

Sometimes, my friends would be too late to decide what to buy before midnight,⁶ then they will ask for recommendations. Other friends and I then send them recommendations on WeChat. There would be many group chats discussing what is worth buying. (B1)

Individual consumption becomes a communicative celebration by exchanging shopping lists and searching for favorite products. ‘I get thrilled every time I discover something new and special from my friends or highly recommended goods shopping lists on Douban⁷ or Xiaohongshu⁸’ (B1). This comment echoes Papacharissi’s (2011) observation of the information-sharing ritual, during which the participants generate and sustain engagements in a community.

Despite the complex role of online-shopping festivals, we highlight they can provide a space for young people to experience conviviality through social consumption and individual choice-making. It mobilizes a sense of participation on a large scale and evokes a sense of ritual on a personal level (Lv, 2016). It further implies that young people increasingly associate festivals with individual tastes and lifestyles over historical significance and traditional values.

My events/My self: Festivals as channels of self-expression

Mediated festival participation was found to be primarily motivated by how young people form and present their identity through interacting with others. Referring to Shanghai International Film Festivals, one interviewee considered festival attendance as an important way for her ‘to feel her own existence’:

I think I am that type (of person) … I need to feel something by absorbing information constantly. I want to communicate with others. I need to know what is going on around. Movies are a primary way to achieve that…Through film festivals, there is a bigger chance to find someone who shares the mentality with you than in other situations or networks. (B1)

B1 actively defended her sense of ‘self’ outside the constraints of family and professions. Her main motive for festival participation was to seek channels of being and expressing herself among like-minded people, for her family primarily conversed on trivial matters in life and barely discussed deeper feelings like desires or sufferings. As Yan (2010) noted, an affective self used to be controlled by traditional and socialist cultures while now it has been brought out and celebrated in social interactions in public place, which constitutes an important change in the subjective domain of individualization.

A3, a 28-year-old post-graduate, echoed such analysis. ‘I think this should be related to the development of society as a whole. Moreover, I think people nowadays gradually have a sense of self. I feel that the awakening of self-awareness is closely related to more diversified life pursuits’. Diversified activities play out in people’s leisure time and search for like-minded relation circles, which actively constitutes a networked self that communicates across collapsed and multiplied audiences (Papacharissi, 2011). Self-representation does not only depend on online audiences and interactions but also expands to hybrid and mobile lived experiences.

There is a popular practice among youth people to go to a popular restaurant, a resort or a festival, take pictures of the food or take selfies and post the photos via their social media (China Travel Outbound, 2020). This practice is known as daka (打卡) in Chinese, which means to leave a mark by puncturing a card. Social envy is one of the major motivations for daka travel, and daka travelers share those experiences to record travel memory (Ni, 2020). In this way, one essential condition to ‘daka’ for the emerging festival experiences is festival-goers physically being present. Being physically present ensures the digitalization of such an experience. As A7 explained,

At the film festival, I usually take a picture when I take my seat and before the movie starts. Because the light is still on, and the background is perfect for highlighting my ticket stub…I will do the same for each viewing session. After each film, I will write a review and save it on my phone. Only when the whole film festival is over, do I then post something like a summary to my WeChat Moment.⁴ (A7)

A7 cultivated specific habits and procedures when attending the film festival. Before the movie started, he always took a phone picture of the ticket stub and the screen to digitally mark a beginning. He wrote reviews for all movie sessions. A7 posted all of his reviews and notes at the end of the festival, which digitally marked the end of the festival. It displayed a strong self-cultivated sense of ritual, departing from Dayan and Katz’s ritual sense in both interruptions of everyday flow and centralized sacred matters.

I think it is a way for someone to seek identification from other people, and that they want to be treated accordingly. For example, if one is an ‘artistic youth’ (Wenyi Qingnian), this person will consciously strengthen this image and temperament by posting things to formulate and echo that identity ...I do the same. It is necessary to impress others in that way. (A6)

A6 reported that posting photos of music and film festivals are one of the major ways for young people to express themselves. The digitalization of festival experiences increased channels of self-expression. Moreover, the post potentially reflected how one (un)consciously wanted to be treated. The relations between selfies practice and personal narrative and identity construction have been favored by social media platforms as an exceptionality of the moment (Cornelio and Roig, 2018), while this construction based on ‘being there’ can also be extended to the future life and revisited as digital pieces.

I value the sense of ritual. I hope those recorded moments can exactly convey my feelings whenever I look back. Those recalling happens when I am not free to hang out, too busy with my work, or feel depressed. That’s the reason why I take every piece of experience and memory seriously...Usually, the pictures (of the post) are about the scenes of live music, including the singers, or something that touches me. And for the texts, I love to quote lyrics that match with my emotions, as well as emojis such as the sunshine, shining stars, or a surfing girl to create a vibe for the post. (B6)

B6 visited her posts as an alternative festive experience when she was busy with her mundane life. John Thompson (1995: 207) pointed out that self-formation would become more reflexive and open-ended as individuals fall back increasingly on their own resources. Instead of presenting a monolithic narrative of herself, B6 pieced together what we term the ‘media mosaics’, digital nodes and facets of one’s self-representation. The media mosaics cohere to virtual and physical presence and combine ritualist moments into young people’s mundane life.

For me, (film festivals) bear special and personal meanings. It leads me to a different social network where I can escape from my day-to-day work. I can enter a new world and find a sense of belonging. In turn, this will give me a unique social identity. It feeds me back the qualities that distinguish me from others, so it is not only an identity. It is something that resonates in my heart. And you will find more people who share the same hobbies as you based on those labels. (B1)

By repeatedly identifying with the hybrid mosaic, the ‘self’ becomes a concrete and manageable project. B1’s media mosaics still sought external verification through checking in her valued social networks of movie lovers. For our interviewees, the choices of certain types of music/film festivals aim to build diverse life pursuits, which give rise to possible niched self-identities. With platformization, festive experiences are carefully documented, edited and shared, creating hybrid mosaics of self-formation. By converging the real and virtual space, the media mosaics contribute to a distinct dimension of dynamic identities. Thus, the media mosaic develops Papacharissi’s (2011) networked self as multi-faceted self-formation processes that traverse networked and hybrid realities.

Discussion and conclusion: From media events to my events

This study has explored the concept and practice of mediated festivals in contemporary urban China through a lens of media events. With examinations of interviewees’ typology of festivals and their motivations, we have found a shift in preference from family oriented festivals, which used to be dominated in previous media paradigms, to more individual-oriented festivals (re)mediated by platforms and mobile technologies. The findings support our understanding of mediated festivals as events of intertwined mediation processes rooted in the convergent festival environments and individual mobile communications. We have further found that mediated festivals are perceived to be an individualistic liberation from the collective cultural values and family oriented activities commonly associated with the Chinese traditional festivals (e.g., Bin, 1998). Particularly, contemporary mediated festivals provide a chance for young people to experience conviviality through social consumption and individual choice-making (Kleine et al., 1993; Wattanasuwan, 2005). Contemporary mediated festivals further offer young people opportunities to create hybrid reservoirs of self-identifiers that weave ritualistic moments into their everyday life.

Echoing Lev Manovich, who points to a cultural ‘transcoding’ as the projection of the ontology of a computer onto culture itself (Manovich, 2002: 197), we argue that mediated festivals function as effectively transcoding mechanism, through which lived and festive experiences are transformed into digital pieces through mobile devices and become media mosaics presenting niched identities and individuality. No longer tradition-laden and family driven, these mediated festivals increasingly manifest as individualistic pursuits of happiness and satisfaction. In this way, mediated festivals become a transcoded celebration that presents a media mosaic, whose digital self and embodied, feeling self interacts and blurs with each other. Thus, the networked self (Papacharissi, 2011) has been brought into hybrid realities and sociality resources, against the digitalization of our lifeworld.

Based on such findings, we propose to develop the notion of ‘media events’ as ‘my events’ to reflect the emerging sense of self-formation accommodated by the mediated festivals in a transformed media paradigm. It would be helpful to borrow ‘media event’ to address the spatialized situation which leads to the ‘my events’ as a primary form of mediated festivals in digital time. Dayan and Katz (1992) categorized three basic scripts for media events: contests (e.g., World Cup, the Olympic Games), conquests (e.g., moon landing) and coronations (e.g., the coronation of Elizabeth II, royal wedding). Enlightened by those three festive elements, we outline the contour of ‘my events’. Our findings have shown that consumption has become an important theme of mediated festivals in contemporary China. Rather than advocating for consumerism, this paper illustrates the transformations in festival perceptions and practices.

We develop ‘media events’ to ‘my events’ as a way of understanding mediated festivals in the following aspects: First, contrary to Dayan and Katz’s ‘interrupts the flow of daily life (syntactics)’ (1992: 14) and the traditional understanding of festivals as separation of the days (Feng, 2016; Hu, 2010; Shao, 2009) the ceremony of mediated festivals evolve into a sense of ritual not by disrupting the flow of daily life but by integrating it into everyday life. Abandoning the established festival calendar, individuals tailor specific festival events and initiate rituals for themselves facilitated by ubiquitous and networked devices. Second, what Dayan and Katz considered as the sacred matters or attention-drawing substances are no longer centralized through one-way communications. The sense of ritual for mediated festivals becomes decentralized and mundane. Our research has shown that contemporary mediated festival practices range from choice-making to interest-seeking. The festival experiences as ritual matters are carefully collected, curated, and packaged as digital pieces to build ‘media mosaics’ and embellish youth cultural identity. Last, what Dayan and Katz (1992: 14) conceived as ‘responses (pragmatics) of a committed audience’, now have been challenged by positively involved participants in real-time and extend beyond ceremonial times and spaces. Our findings suggest that contemporary mediated festivals are accessible re-organizations of celebrations extending beyond the physical time and space.

Our analysis highlights the importance to understand the relationship between different media paradigms and sociocultural structures of festivals. The traditional festivals in the mass media era sustain the cohesion of collective identity and memory informed by a shared past through history, heritage and the shifting territories (Morley and Robins, 1995: 72). The identity labeled in this field closely relates to a relatively stable network in the local community. The two types of mediated festivals in the digital time create spontaneous experiences and extended relations that drive an alternative social affiliation to the festival itself. They also offer opportunities to evolve niched identities which used to be limited in the order of stratified closeness. Our study complements the qualitative case that calls for analyzing the spatialized perspective of mosheng ren communication (Xu and Wu, 2019) under the media paradigm. Align with that recognized spatialized perspective, we examine the elements of festival experiences within dynamic ranges of media technologies, which are situated in that stranger network and further bridged with the becoming individualization process in urban China. We depart from framing contemporary festivals as nation-building events and commercial maneuvers. We also refrain from understanding mediated festivals as an accurate online representation of the festivals. Instead, we bring closer the social and the technological dimensions of the mediated festivals to demonstrate how they intertwine and interact in China since the 21st century.

Our paper has two further implications. First, our analysis supports the micro and experiential perspectives of festival analysis. Departing from reductive visions of media as ‘reception’ or ‘representation’ that fails to capture festival experiences (Sassatelli, 2011: 22), we provide a new understanding of mediated festivals in light of a renewed view of culture and sociability. This paper reveals the coordinating role of media in activating festive space/time from an experiential perspective. Second, we highlight the importance of understanding urban hybridity in digital time in China. It is consistent with urban environments being underpinned by the mobility of capital, people, and things capable of traversing online and offline worlds (Bennett and Woodward, 2014: 16). It shows how cultural identities can be redefined and evolve with the interpenetrating spaces and contradictory affiliations (McQuire, 2019). The intersections of individuals, networks, sociality and media technologies in urban China, their dynamics and impacts, can be explored in the future.

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Xian Feng

Isabel Fangyi Lu

Notes

Author biographies

Xian Feng, Ph.D., Journalism School, Fudan University. Her PhD thesis on mediated festival examines the festival conditions and experiences of young people within urban China context. Her research focuses on urban events centering on urban network, media and youg population.

Isabel Fangyi Lu, Ph.D., School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. She researches the impact of digital media technologies on the broader notion of urban democracy, with a focus on artivism, community engagement and disinformation operations.

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