One of the most interesting aspects of citizen media recently has been the reaction of totalitarian states – specifically China – to the way the citizens of that country are using the internet. Google and other companies have been widely criticised for agreeing to the demands made on them by the Chinese state with regard to the treatment of dissidents, and the internet as a tool for revolution is still being explored.
Equally interesting, however, are the self-created ’stars’ of the internet – the people who create pages, videos or sites that, for one reason or another, become popular to an extent far greater than their creators could have expected. The state clearly cannot crack down on these people for dissidence, but is nevertheless unhappy with the fame they enjoy. The Economist links the state’s concern to the idea of voting; that ‘grassroots celebrities’ will lead to a desire for a politics that equally comes from the grassroots.
There is another aspect to this addressed by Susan Sontag in her essay The Image World in On Photography. In this essay she looks at contemporary Chinese criticism of Antonioni’s film Chung Kuo. The state’s issues with this film seemed to be centered on the fact that it showed things that were not fit to be photographed; peeling paint and children running out of the school gates rather than modern machinery and children working hard in the factory schools. It was not the act itself (children run out of school gates every day) but the image of the act that was the issue. In Sontag’s words, Photographs are supposed to display what has already been described.
This appears to be the Chinese problem with citizen media now; these ‘grassroots celebrities’ are not showing a ‘true’ image of themselves or their societies, but a skewed and a frivolous one. What is being shown is not the hardworking students the “Back Dormitory Boys” may well be, but the quotidian silliness that goes alongside hard work. Curiously, Sontag concludes at the end of The Image World that she sees a more limited future in [Chinese] society for the camera as a means of surveillance. In fact, the opposite seems to have happened. This surveillance of the everyday has not only become popular, but popular enough to become a concern to a state obsessed with image management.
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