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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Placing Notes In The Virtual “Western Wall”: Online Memorial Culture In Chinese Social Media, Xiaoyu Zhang
Placing Notes In The Virtual “Western Wall”: Online Memorial Culture In Chinese Social Media, Xiaoyu Zhang
Master's Projects and Capstones
Each society has a unique way of understanding death and coping with mourning. The increasing online mourners in China gradually generated a collective reference to the Weibo account that belongs to the dead, the “Western Wall.” This project searches for answers to two questions: 1) What characterizes Chinese online memorial practice? And how do these practices compare with those in the Western countries? 2) What aspects of Chinese culture and social conditions can explain Chinese online memorial practices? By combining corpus analysis with thematic analysis on 1,606 comments left on the last tweet of two accounts of deceased Weibo users, …
Participatory Democracy In The Chinese Cyber World: Case Studies From Weibo, Duyi Li
Participatory Democracy In The Chinese Cyber World: Case Studies From Weibo, Duyi Li
Master's Theses
This thesis discusses features of citizen communication on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform, and its relationship to participatory democracy in China. Weibo is a complex social space due to the interplay of different forces and social actors. On the one hand, Weibo provides the space for bottom-up political participation: it expands the horizontal discursive space where plural discourses coexist and interact; provides a social sphere where counter-discourses are created; a space where the culture of resistance is formed; and serves as an alternative source for information. On the other hand, the vertical political control of the state, and the …