ABSTRACT
The discussion in the previous chapters draws our attention to the concept of citizenship and the role of new media in its transformation. The mass media have been among the most powerful forces in promoting socio-political changes in post-traditional societies. Through media events, the state and its ideological apparatuses are able to bring individuals and families to the centre of national life and connect them with an imagined community, imagined times and imagined narratives about nation, tradition and culture. With the increasing integration of new media such as the Internet and mobile phones into people’s lives, however, media and cultural production is no longer a privileged profession monopolised by intellectuals and professional journalists; it can be an everyday practice for ordinary people, whose creative uses of media and communication technologies not only redefine their subjectivity and identity but also refigure citizenship through media stories and news events. New media have played an important role in decentralising ‘citizenship’
through journalists’ and urbanites’ online activism. As the cases of Li Jiaming, Sun Zhigang and Li Siyi bear out, talking, linking and clicking are both affirmations of the semiotic power of individual consumers and expressions of their rights as citizens. New media have become a public forum for the discussion and construction of alternative political discourses. As such, they can be viewed as an important institution in their own right in mobilising public opinion, resetting socio-political agenda and fostering new communities. New media can become a new venue to (re)-imagine the nation. In the process of (re)-imagining, the creative commons are constituted not only as active audiences who exercise their ‘right to know’ and ‘right to speak’, or as watchdogs on the party leashes who are constrained by their other roles as underdogs of the system and lapdogs of the political and business elites (Zhao 2004). They are also (co)-authors and producers of media stories in the freer and more open space of the Internet. These practices have not only informed the politics of AIDS and SARS but have also constituted postmodern technologies of citizenship in post-socialist China. The Internet and the creative commons, as constituents of a media citizenry, determine how citizenship can be redefined.
