The reinvention of “locality”: Imagining the local society with local media

The refound locality: “a spatial turn” of Chinese media studies

In Chinese media studies, local variation emerged as an important topic in the early 2010s. In particular, the publication of Mapping Media in China: Region, Province, Locality (Hereafter refereed to Mapping Media in China), edited by Wanning Sun and Jenny Chio (2012), marks a concerted effort to go “below the ‘national’ scale to focus on the rich diversity of media in China from local, provincial and regional angles” (Sun & Chio, 2012, p. i). This “spatial turn” (Sun & Chio, 2012, p. 3) responds to the spatially diversified media practices along the conventional administrative hierarchy of villages, towns, counties, municipalities, and provinces.

Back to the year of 1994, Elizabeth Perry (1994) called for the study of intra-societal trends in studying Chinese politics. Upon reviewing the state-society paradigm of the third generation of contemporary Chinese politics scholars, Perry (1994) further unpacks the twin terms of “state” and “society.” She argues, without revealing intra-societal or intra-state variation, it is hard to grasp and understand the complicated changes unfolding in the Chinese society. It is in the same year of 1994 that China connected itself to the internet. The utopian promise of the internet to build a global village, as predicted by Marshall McLuhan (1962), by overcoming geographical boundaries undermined local variations, surrendering to an international, or at least national, discourse. Against the background of the inflation of such a promise, early studies of the internet and media in China mainly stayed at the national level. Another factor that further obscures the importance of local structures in Chinese internet studies is the waning of local mainstream media, represented by local television stations. This decline in legacy media more or less legitimizes the scholarly focus on national-level studies. The local dimension seems to lose its significance.

With the emergence of idiosyncratic internet-related practices at different locales, the quest for a more geographically nuanced perspective in Chinese internet research gradually emerged. As stated above, the publication of a series of milestone works directed scholarly attention to the multiple geographical levels below the national in the early 2010s. The chapters in Mapping Media in China depict local forms of legacy media, rural media practices, regional particularities, and place-making, excavating the koleicospedic landscape of internet-based local practices.

However, the notion of “locality” remains underdeveloped and underarticulated, imbued with different connotations. In not a small number of studies, it is used as the left point of a spectrum ranging from local to provincial, regional, national, and global (e.g., Chen, 2020; Sun, 2013; Sun & Chio, 2012; Wallis & Qiu, 2012; Zhang, 2007). In other words, “local” is considered anything that can’t be categorized into the other geographical tags. In other cases, “local” is attached to media-related material carriers, such as the local channels mentioned in Yuezhi Zhao’s (2008) book, which are mainly provincial-level TV channels. Here comes the interchangable use between “local” and “provincial,” which marks the contrast between the central television station and provincial stations.

This essay argues that “locality” can be the scaffolding to understand the social implications of internet-based new media on the vast local society in China. This focus on “locality” is rooted in academic discussions around spatial differences in social theory (Giddens, 1984; Urry, 1985) and around “locality” in human geography (Beauregard, 1988; Duncan, 1989). To take the latter as an example, in the mid to late 1980s, a group of critical geography scholars devoted themselves to problematizing locality research, albeit for different purposes (e.g., Cooke, 1989; Fainstein et al., 1986; Urry, 1986). On one hand, the withdrawal from radical action made some scholars to engage more in community participation at the local level; on the other hand, the efforts to dismantle an overly orthodox, or even totalizing, theory sought local practices and particularities, of which post-modernism was a forceful intellectual thread (Beauregard, 1988). While the interest in locality research has sparked controversies regarding the pursuit of a radical political agenda, the value of locality research has nevertheless solidified itself as a critical field of analysis.

Despite their differences, the definitions of “locality” summarized above share a common assumption: they perceive “locality” as an existing geographical scale that serves as a context of media practices within the larger framework of the nation-state or international map. In this essay, we propose an alternative approach – a formative view – to understanding “locality.”

A formative approach to “locality”

In articulating the persistent centrality of location in the internet age, Eric Gordon and Adriana de Souza e Silva (2011) focus on “an emerging form of location awareness” which they term “networked locality (or net locality)” (p. 2, emphasis in original). They continue, “(i)t is about what happens to individuals and societies when virtually everything is located or locatable” (Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011, p. 2). Upon reviewing the early dichotomy between virtual and physical spaces and Google’s move to integrate location data into its search results, Gordon and de Souza e Silva (2011) comments that it “naturalizes a connection that was only metaphorical before” (p. 2). The implication of their comment is that “location” itself on the internet was not “discovered” prior to the datafication of location. Location-based technological tools, which were born out of social needs, bring about new possibilities (Gordon and de Souza e Silva, 2011).

Meanwhile, a new logic of organizing the web is based on “physical location,” and “what is being organized is not just information, but the physical world that contains it” (Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011, p. 7). The web becomes part of the physical world, rather than a separate utopia without locational roots. In Gordon and de Souza e Silva’s (2011) text, “locality” is the hybrid formation of location, which mainly refers to the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the computer and the Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates of mobile phones. In this sense, the web also becomes constitutive of people’s everyday practices in the physical world. For example, a stream of studies has explored how people use digital technologies, including location-based services, to live the physical world, produce spaces, and negotiate their sense of place (e.g., Bork-Hüffer, 2016; de Souza e Silva & Sheller, 2014; Farrelly, 2015; Jachna, 2021; Liu, 2015; Zeng & Fan, 2022).

In the context of China, a few concepts overlapping with “local media” appear in existing studies, including community new media and county-level media convergence centers. These studies have investigated topics such as how local media can be used for local governance and how to build local media in the age of media convergence (e.g., Chen & Li, 2019; He & You, 2023; Zhang & Chen, 2023). However, as stated above, these studies mainly perceive “locality” as an existing geographical scale that serves as a context of media practices, without contemplating the connotation of “locality.” In analyzing media at the local level in China, a formative view has also emerged (Hong, forthcoming; Wang & Hong, 2022). The local media landscape at the county level results from the interplay between top-down digitalization projects and bottom-up grassroots entrepreneurship (Hong, forthcoming). In this article, we follow this formative view of “locality,” with an aim to understand the social processes implicated in the formation of “locality.” Furthermore, we would like to argue that these processes also stipulate new rules of new territories. It is a “local” reverberation of Benedict Anderson’s (2006) concept of “immagined communities.” When explaining the formation of modern nation states, Anderson (2006) excavated the influence of print capitalism on them as imagined communities. Furthermore, Anderson (2006) points to the “imagined” nature of all communities beyond face-to-face interaction. This formative view can also shed light on the reinvention of the local society.

In the history of the internet in China, an important piece is that of internet-based forums, official accounts, short video platforms, and applications for the local county, which we categorize as internet-based local media. At the local county level, communities are also under continuous construction together with the changing affordable media infrastructures (Wang & Wu, 2021). Counties are places where locality intersects with digital fabrics (Wang, 2021), so we focus our attention on county-level local media. In this essay, we hope to further dispel the myth surrounding county-level local media.

Through examining the history of internet-based local media at the county level, we argue that the practices associated with them have reinvented “locality.” The notion of “locality” has a long-standing history rooted in the local society. In response to the argument that nations are invented and imagined constructs rather than simply existing entities, we endeavor to articulate the relationship between internet-based local media and “locality,” which overlaps with, but also diverges from, the concepts of “community” and “place.”

The social process of the formation of “locality” with internet-based local media

Since the decline of local mass media, a matrix of internet-based local media has risen to include local media outlets, local service applications, surveillance infrastructural networks, and location-based entertainment and cultural application, among others. In this article, we adopt the definition by Nick Couldry (2012), who uses “media manifold” to refer to the matrix of platforms built upon the internet. He contends, “we now experience a media manifold, comprising a complex web of delivery platforms, behind which lies the effectively infinite reserve of the internet” (Couldry, 2012, p. 42). From the pre-internet era to the established legitimacy of a matrix of internet-based local media, “locality” is reinvented in three senses. First, in a socio-spatial sense, “locality” is reinvented into a contextualized experience through an imagined relocating of the “local” along the global-national-local continuum, which is articulated by the formation of internet-based local media. As with Anderson’s (2006) contention that print capitalism was key to the formation of simultaneity within modern nation states, internet-based local media made it possible for local people to understand the local society with reference to broader geographical rubrics. This contextualized experience is collective and everyday. It is collective as it is formed in interactions among local users on internet-based local media, including discussions on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), WeChat official accounts, and short video platforms. It is everyday because this locality is constructed through exchanges over everyday practices unfolding at the local level.

Media might drive the formation of differences across different regions (Sun & Chio, 2012). However, media might also serve as a homogenizing force. The official accounts and short video accounts, among others, actually mold a more similar set of locality. Digital platforms, particularly WeChat and Douyin, play a key role in the reinvention and materialization of geographical scales. It is manifested in the look-alike interfaces and content organization of counties on these platforms.

Second, in a socio-economic sense, digital platforms that monetize on local businesses, such as Meituan and Eleme, can also be categorized as a specific type of internet-based local media. They represent the commercial side of how to make a business out of locality. These local service applications weave local social networks into their infrastructures, and shape local labor dynamics and local productive patterns (Chen & Sun, 2020; Sun, 2019; Wang et al., 2022). Internet-based local media, primarily including WeChat official accounts and short video accounts, have also afforded grassroots indigenous media to activate local small businesses’ advertising initiatives and develop a local market with the commodification of local residents (Hong, forthcoming; Wang & Hong, 2022). The grassroots indigenous accounts that started with a “civic” approach to local affairs have embarked on a more commercial journey to capitalize on their status as local media. In this process, the changing trajectory from web-based early BBS forums to digital platforms fosters the creation of an ecosystem comprising local businesses. This is the socio-economic building of “locality,” which is in interplay with internet-based local media. It represents a new turn toward “neo-conservatism,” if not the local coloring of neoliberalism. This formative view from the socio-economic aspect reveals the commodification of “locality” from a critical light.

Third, in a socio-political sense, internet-based local media are constitutive of local governance. Two examples are illustrative of this process. The first example comes from local surveillance media. When ideological concepts undergird an expanded notion of security, market forces and government initiatives collaborate to broaden and strengthen surveillance infrastructural networks at the local level (Trevaskes & Bernot, 2023). In the age of surveillance capitalism, user behavior and experiences on the internet are datafied into platform assets (Chan & Kwok, 2022; Zuboff, 2019). With collaborative surveillance projects, the local society has also been under datafication for governance purposes. It leads to a locality that is formed within the boundaries of local surveillance media.

The second example is about local media outlets. The process of local mainstream media being replaced by internet-based local media, including both official media convergence centers and grassroots indigenous media, is simutaneous decentralizing and centralizing. On one hand, the dissolving of local mainstream media undermines local discursive power. It submits to a more national vision of media development, particularly national digitalization projects. On the other hand, the rise of internet-based local media symbolizes an ambition to grasp local discursive power by the county-level local actors. A difference between this stage of the earlier one dominated by local TV stations lies in the agentic role of grassroots indigenous media, launched by local celebrities some of whom have successfully carved out careers and businesses in local media.

Some local celebrities have even participated in the local political establishment. The political sensibility of these local celebrities also finds its way to bridge the internet and the physical world. Internet-based local media can also become the basis for local action, which can be both ostensibly “radical,” “transformative” or mild, accumulative. The active participation of these celebrities firmly represents such action. County-level media convergence centers, another component of internet-based local media, stand for a different type of efforts by the state to grasp local discursive power. From the socio-political aspect, “locality” is reinvented by the twin-compozing of two different types of local media. In this regard, the reinvention of “locality” is a political project.

Conclusion

In this essay, we draw on the history of internet-based local media at the county-level in China to investigate the social implications of the internet for the local society. We take a “formative” approach and analyze the social processes of the reinvention of “locality” from the spatial, economic, and political aspects.

We view “locality” not only as the assemblage of different places, but also as a theoretical scaffolding, which can stimulate a refreshed imagination of geography and media. The scales are reinvented, or redefined, by the digital fabrics of these social platforms which align geographical scales for content producers, including grassroots and official stakeholders. “Locality” is reimagined with internet-based local media. The concommitment impact on local social life is also discussed.

“Locality” is more than a state of pre-existence that contrasts and complements “centrality.” Instead, our archeology of internet-based local media reveals the changing connotations of “locality,” which is a reinvention resulting from the interaction between local users, local media entrepreneurs, technology service providers, and government initiatives. Through discussing what is considered as “locality” in the spatial, economic, and political senses from a social perspective, we have explored the mutual shaping of internet-based media practices and the physical world. “Locality” can be a heuristic node that links internet studies, media history, the political economy of communication, media sociology, critical geography, and more. The social implications of the internet manifest themselves profoundly in the reinvention of “locality.”