TY - JOUR
T1 - Provincializing “web traffic”
T2 - data imaginaries and vernacular construction of liuliang in China
AU - Zou, Sheng
N1 - The author has no financial interests or conflicts of interest that relate to this research.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of International Communication Association.
PY - 2023/12
Y1 - 2023/12
N2 - This article dehomogenizes the concept of “web traffic” through a keywords informed approach. It attends to how, in China, the term for “web traffic,” liuliang (流量), is utilized in rich and creative ways. Instantiating bottom-up epistemic practices, the taxonomies, collocations, and wisdom related to liuliang reveal alternative and locally relevant ways in which people imagine, apprehend, and deal with digital media and data in everyday life. They unleash a set of reinvigorating vocabulary for the theorization of web traffic—liquidity, manipulability, portability, socio-spatial differentiation, ideological valence, and mystified power, among others. These new lenses enrich a genuinely global understanding of digital media, enable those in the Global North to comparatively rethink their taken-for-granted experiences of datafication, and democratize the making of media knowledges by addressing the inequality between the Global North and South(s), between experts and non-experts.
AB - This article dehomogenizes the concept of “web traffic” through a keywords informed approach. It attends to how, in China, the term for “web traffic,” liuliang (流量), is utilized in rich and creative ways. Instantiating bottom-up epistemic practices, the taxonomies, collocations, and wisdom related to liuliang reveal alternative and locally relevant ways in which people imagine, apprehend, and deal with digital media and data in everyday life. They unleash a set of reinvigorating vocabulary for the theorization of web traffic—liquidity, manipulability, portability, socio-spatial differentiation, ideological valence, and mystified power, among others. These new lenses enrich a genuinely global understanding of digital media, enable those in the Global North to comparatively rethink their taken-for-granted experiences of datafication, and democratize the making of media knowledges by addressing the inequality between the Global North and South(s), between experts and non-experts.
KW - data imaginaries
KW - digital China
KW - liuliang
KW - non-western algorithmic culture
KW - web traffic
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85179796332&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/ccc/tcad021
DO - 10.1093/ccc/tcad021
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85179796332
SN - 1753-9129
VL - 16
SP - 221
EP - 227
JO - Communication, Culture and Critique
JF - Communication, Culture and Critique
IS - 4
ER -
