![]() The principal topics discussed in this dissertation include the everyday experience of networked communication devices in different Chinese cities, the adoption and articulation of digital media platforms by Chinese Internet users, and the practices of linguistic and cultural creativity emerging from the use of these technologies. ![]() ![]() The investigation has been conducted drawing on an ample methodological toolbox of established and experimental qualitative research strategies, including ethnographic participation, digital methods, and curatorial data collection. The research project is based on a review of two decades of multidisciplinary research about the Internet in China, and positions its research questions at the intersection of three disciplinary domains: area studies, media anthropology, and Internet studies. This dissertation presents the account of a qualitative research project about the media practices of vernacular creativity of digital media users in contemporary Mainland China. We argue that the Diba Expedition exemplifies the coordinated use of a complex, transnational social media ecology to support and produce a mass-scale event and newsworthy spectacle, loosened if not severed from state control, and a discursively innovative polysemous message targeted at diverse international audiences: civilized trolling. On the other hand, by collectively breaching the Great Firewall and establishing Facebook accounts, the group transgressed PRC technical and legal norms, which were designed to prevent unsanctioned collective action. On the one hand is their construction of a pro-PRC message using the tactics of Internet subcultures (memes, trolling, etc.), but toned down to meet standards of civility. Diba's political activism can be characterized as negotiating a tension between two seemingly opposed goals. ![]() Contributing to research on social activism as a form of collective action, we report on Diba, a sizable group of Chinese nationalists, who overcame the Great Firewall in order to troll Taiwan's political leadership. ![]()
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