Editor's Note
BaoMa today pushed the preface written by teacher Lv Xinyu for the book "Code as a Dream".
The object of the book "Code as a Dream" is what we call today the "digital economy" that cannot be ignored. The first five years of the new millennium were the golden age of China's Internet practitioners, and "Code for Dreams" outlined a roadmap for the development of China's Internet by establishing an internal perspective of Internet practitioners. In view of this perspective, professor Lv Xinyu pointed out that the broad sense of cultural producers emphasizes the whole chain of cultural production practitioners into the research horizon - this is the embodiment of the dissemination of political economy to emphasize the "holistic" vision, but also the pursuit of the equal meaning of the "weak" in the industrial chain, which exposes the profound connection between the "material labor" behind the "non-material labor" that is hotly discussed today, which is the key that cannot be ignored in today's discussion of digital labor. Teacher Lv Xinyu also pointed out many interesting findings in the book "Code as a Dream", such as the reflection on the "996" problem and the revelation of the internal logic of Internet companies from monopoly to financialization. China's Internet industry not only reflects the "vigorous and high" fighting spirit of the new millennium, but also shows the greed of capital that continues to swallow. Today's Chinese social development is a rapidly changing field, each of us is in it, the relationship between the self and society, academia and politics, in fact, daily teaching and scientific research practice must respond to the problem. As teacher Lv Xinyu said, the end of one story of China's Internet development is the beginning of another story. Fields determine vision, and we expect new fields to keep coming to us.
For book details, please refer to Baoma Today's Push "Book of the Day". Thank you teacher Lv Xinyu for your strong support to Baoma!
China's Internet Field from the Perspective of "Practitioners"
- Prologue to "Code for Dreams"
Text | Lv Xinyu
It is a pleasure to see that young colleague Xia Bingqing's "Relying on Codes for Dreams: A Survey of Production Practices of Chinese Internet Practitioners" will be published soon. This book is the culmination of more than a decade of bingqing's fieldwork. As a young scholar after the 1980s, Bingqing reviews the connection between her experience and the development of the Internet in China, and in this sense, she herself is also a field. From my own point of view, from my master's thesis to my doctoral thesis, from Macau, London, Beijing, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Guizhou... The list of this region continues, from the central business district in the north, Shanghai and Guangzhou to the depths of the mountains in Guizhou, she has been crawling in the "field" of Chinese Internet practitioners, and has always been the busiest person in the fieldwork of our Communication College. As soon as the holidays came, she ran from north to south, chasing her subjects like migratory birds. Her mantra is "you have to run while you're young." From overseas classrooms to Chinese fields and Chinese classrooms, she chases her own thinking and ideals with a running attitude - thinking is the method, ideal is the driving force, and also interprets the relationship between the international vision, growth trajectory and social development of a young Chinese communication scholar.
"Code as a Dream: An Investigation of the Production Practice of Chinese Internet Practitioners" by Xia Bingqing
The field time of this book manuscript is mainly concentrated in 2009 to 2015, which is the field story of Bingqing's Internet enterprises in China during her master's degree from the University of Macau to the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, and it is also Bingqing's own youth growth history. In a snowballing manner, she has used the participatory observation method and in-depth interview method in two large Internet companies in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2015 to conduct investigations, and even found a way to enter an Internet "big factory" as an intern and "play" for four months. During the internship in the Internet company, every day after work and evening, I sorted out the field notes, translated the key contents of the notes into English every two or three weeks, and sent them to my two doctoral supervisors by e-mail, who carefully annotated, answered questions, and helped adjust the direction. Nearly a million words of fieldwork notes accumulated before and after Bingqing. This is a critical period for the outbreak of China's mobile Internet and social media, and it is also the eve of the world's Internet to rapid large-scale market monopoly and financialization. She focused on the Chinese Internet practitioners who were almost as young as she was during this period. These practitioners for about five years are basically a generational internet industry. Their stories carry forward the past and the future, and Bingqing's observation object is exactly what we call the "digital economy" today that cannot be ignored in the "past life". The first five years of the new millennium were the golden age of China's Internet practitioners, the era of "code" as a dream, when they had not yet been universally called "code farmers", or digital laborers, when this name began to become a popular field of research, the era has entered a new page.
Bingqing hopes to establish an internal dynamic perspective of Internet practitioners to outline a roadmap for the development of the Internet in China. In this regard, she inherited the view of her doctoral supervisor Hirsmondef that the subjective experience of practitioners in production practice is an important perspective for interpreting the complexity of creative industries, and thus continued the tutor's insistence on discussing "creative labor" from the "knowledge labor" list, because in this way it can "return to the characteristics and essence of the cultural industry to highlight its unique production practice experience". In fact, the division of the categories of cultural producers in the broad and narrow senses corresponds to different problem consciousnesses. Cultural producers in a broad sense emphasize the inclusion of practitioners of the whole chain of cultural production into the research horizon - this is the embodiment of the emphasis on the "whole" vision of political economy, but also the pursuit of the equal meaning of the "vulnerable" in the industrial chain, such as the publishing industry needs to pay attention to librarians and printing workers, etc., the digital economy needs to pay attention to takeaway brothers and data labelers, etc. - by the way, the current field of Bingqing is the research on data labelers, and it is expected that her second related work will ripen as soon as possible. Another significance of emphasizing the producer of culture in the broad sense is that it exposes the deep connection between "material labor" and "material labor" behind today's hotly discussed "non-material labor", which is the key that cannot be ignored in today's discussion of digital labor. However, this does not mean denying the significance of the study of cultural producers in the narrow sense, on the contrary, emphasizing the particularities of each producer group can depict the connections between the entire chain of production. In fact, particularity is the premise of universality, and only by looking at the big picture can we start small, and each other is originally a dialectical relationship.
Academia, Media and Publicity by Lv Xinyu
Relying on the researcher's own field and presence to collect, sort out and analyze the subjective experience of practitioners, such a "qualitative research" is a kind of stupid kung fu that cannot be flattered, and it is also an immersive research that requires full dedication. Bingqing repeatedly studied her massive field notes, and the process of reading was a process of continuous induction, summarization and thinking, and it was also a reflexive thinking state that needed to constantly return to the self: the field is the ethical relationship between the self and others. In this process, Bingqing's discussion on academic ethics is a part of today's Chinese new transmission community that is not valued, and it is also an issue that needs to be paid attention to. In particular, bingqing encountered the vigilance and exclusion of academic perspectives by internet giants - this itself is an academic issue worthy of attention. Dealing with the ethical relationship of academic research is both a challenge and a lifeline for the production of Chinese academic discourse today. Today's Chinese social development is a rapidly changing field, each of us is in it, the relationship between the self and society, academia and politics, in fact, daily teaching and scientific research practice must respond to the problem. Bingqing once submitted the ethical dilemma of her "hidden research" in the field to an international conference for discussion, and the participants believed that it was related to the problem of "localization" and its context. However, the challenge of "localization" is precisely the "fate" that lies in front of Chinese scholars. This may also be why the manuscript ends with Bingqing's reflection on her own classroom. In the era of social media, students in the School of Communication are increasingly involved in the content production of the Internet, and how to help students get the starting point and framework for reflexive thinking is the task facing critical communication.
In this book, the "those who are in the big factories" tracked by Bingqing is a group of practitioners whose average age is not more than 35 years old, with the first-tier cities "985" and "211" university graduates as the main body, which is the weather vane of this era, the "white-collar" class of the new generation, and the contour line for judging the development of the Internet industry. They and the "Ant Tribe" group revealed in the 2009 book "Ant Tribe: A Record of College Graduates Living in Villages" are at opposite ends of society, but they reflect each other and show the common social cornerstone of common existence. Bingqing refers to and revises the theoretical framework of the tutor Hirsmondf's research on "creative work", using "salary", "work intensity", "autonomy", "guarantee", "self-realization", "social and cultural value of products" and "social relations" as the seven dimensions to describe Internet industry practitioners. As the tension between practitioners' quest for "creative autonomy" and the commodification and financialization of the industry unfolds, the boundaries between "work" and "leisure" become a problem. The development of the industry is the process of dynamic shaping of internal factors, the transformation of the industry in turn constructs the production practice of the practitioners, Bingqing tries to put this interactive process into the micro perspective of the individual stories of the practitioners, and responds to the macro picture of the development of China's Internet industry from the bottom up. In this sense, the concept of "immaterial labor", which is hotly debated today, does not really effectively reveal the story of the experiences of these practitioners, but is important not to give a label (ambiguous), but to analyze it in the context of specific political, economic and cultural dynamics.
"Ant Clan: A Record of a Village inhabited by college graduates" by Lian Si
There are many interesting findings in Bingqing's research. She both experienced the "vigorous" fighting spirit of this group: a sense of tireless struggle and excitement. Without that spirit, the rapid development of China's Internet industry would be unimaginable — it links the social and cultural value implications of "self-actualization." The sharing of mutual assistance, joy and fulfillment is an important motivator for voluntary free overtime, and this spirit is channeled into the company's "interest" chain through the "overtime culture" - it is the past life of the current "996" controversy, and its present life is the "wealth freedom" cheer represented by "Ant Financial" and finally becomes a chicken feather. In the discussion of the "996" issue, critical communication science tends to reveal the exploitation mechanism behind it, which is of course necessary and important, and it is also indisputable. But the more important question is: Why plant dragon species and harvest fleas? Why are dreams shattered? Bing Qing describes the "myths" of this group about employee stock ownership, the "wealth freedom" that cannot be achieved overnight, the deep chain of hierarchical discrimination inside, how their creative autonomy has been gradually eroded, and the complex organizational ecology of a large number of low-level interns, outsourcers and external training courses outside this group – they constitute a complex map of the industry's huge practitioners.
996.ICU page
Perhaps the most interesting thing is Bingqing's revelation of the internal logic of Internet companies from monopoly to financialization. Between 2009 and 2015, Internet "big factories" restricted emerging companies from entering the market through monopolies. The demand for monopoly has prompted "big factories" to continue to expand in the form of investment and acquisition, rather than innovative production. They continue to encroach on emerging content areas, creating barriers in the market, squeezing the living space of innovative companies, and passing on the risk of failure to these emerging companies. This process of financialization led to the regression of the innovation and productivity of the "big factories", and also prompted the first batch of entrepreneurs to withdraw from the production practice of "moral significance" and shift their attention to financing and realization, becoming "waiting capitalists". As a result, the dream of "idealism" that nourished the development of the Internet has come to an end. For the first batch of Internet practitioners in the new millennium, "taking equity, waiting for listing, realizing financial freedom, and leaving the Internet" has become a new choice. After this, the story of the Chinese Internet needs a new way of interpretation. When we witness the Chinese Internet industry like a shark constantly swallowing dreams, ideals, morals, beliefs, enthusiasm, identity, freedom, equality and non-economic human living conditions, and transforming them into its own profit model, it is approaching the limit of its own capitalization. This limit is already on the horizon, and new stories are opening up.
Yes, the most important thing about China's Internet development is the story. Today, it is already a series that does not end, and the end of one story is the starting point of another story. Fields determine the vision, expecting our narrators to constantly bring new vast fields to us.