Social Media and Ordinary Life - Affect, Ethics, and Aspiration in Contemporary China

How Chinese citizens use social media

Focusing on domestic workers, rural microentrepreneurs, disadvantaged young creatives, and young feminists, Social Media and Ordinary Life is a deeply moving ethnography of how digital media infrastructures and platforms are woven into the rhythms of ordinary, everyday life. In choosing to foreground marginalized groups and communities, Cara Wallis gently shifts our attention away from the world of -social media influencers- and tech-centric discourses of entrepreneurial lives towards a decidedly ambivalent terrain of routine life practices.
Social Media and Ordinary Life argues that understanding these individual experiences of the everyday enables greater insight into larger transformations taking place in contemporary China. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork across China, Wallis foregrounds the entanglement of affect, emotion, ordinary ethical decisions, and desires connected to social media as it i