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Friday, November 11
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PP 512
Who Speaks for the Past? Social Media, Social Memory, and the Production of Historical Knowledge in Contemporary China
J. Liu
1
, H. Zhao
2
1
University of Copenhagen, Department of Media- Cognition and Communication, Copenhagen, Denmark
2
Lund University, Department of Strategic Communication, Helsingborg, Sweden
The growing ubiquity of digital media has nourished changes in political culture and power structure around the world and, in particular, in authoritarian
regimes.There have been growing discussions of how digital media in general and social media in particular have emerged as a means against authoritarian
rule, a resource of dissident movement, and a tool for political change in contemporary China. This chapter explores the influence of social media on the (re)
formation of social memory and the production of historical knowledge in the society. It takes weibo, one of the most widely used social media, as a case
to investigate how social media enable people to articulate their previously unspoken experiences and memories, question the authenticity and accuracy
of official history, and shape social remembering in contemporary China. This study investigates several contested debates on weibo over historical event
and figures in the Mao era as cases. It argues that social media embraces wide and diversified subjects to various mnemonic practices, facilitates the crowd‑
sourcing and aggregation of alternative narratives of the past as counter-hegemonic discourse, and cultivates the production of historical knowledge as
an easily retrievable and re-activatable process. We conclude that the integration of fragmented, individual memories into the historical knowledge and
the facilitation of diversified mnemonic practices on weibo re-construct the maintenance and production of historical knowledge in the long run in con‑
temporary China.