On Monday, December 2, 2024, new Communication faculty member Jingyi Gu gave a presentation on her research, “Chinese Live Streaming: Scalable Platform Economy and Its Nonscalability,” during the CIS seminar series. In her talk, she explored how build-to-scale digital platforms mediate social relationships and affective experiences that are often considered unscalable, examining the paradoxes of intimacy and connection within the context of live streaming in contemporary China.
Title: Chinese Live Streaming: Scalable Platform Economy and Its Nonscalability
Abstract: How do build-to-scale digital platforms mediate social relationships and affective experiences that are often considered unscalable? And how are the most personal and intimate encounters happening paradoxically with a multitude of people presenting simultaneously in live streaming? My current book project Scalable Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in Chinese Live Streaming explores how live streaming mediates narratives and experiences of gender, sexuality, intimacy, class, and migration at scale in contemporary China. Combining platform walkthrough, multi-sited ethnography, interview, and discourse analysis, I perform a multilayered analysis of the performances and interactions in live streaming; the algorithmic features and economic mechanisms of the platforms; the division of labor and exchange of value within the industry; and the governance and regulation contingent upon state-market relations. This project theorizes scalable intimacy as a mode of mediated sociality configured by the pursuit of scalability permeating the design of network technologies and platforms’ capitalist mode of production. Informed by critical perspectives, scalable intimacy serves as a conceptual tool to capture the contradictory qualities of digitally mediated personal connection, pinpoint its technological, economic, and social shaping, and also underscore its inherent “nonscalable” dimensions.
Biography: Jingyi Gu is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Program at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s School of Communication and Information. Through transnational and critical lenses, she studies issues of identity, relationship, governance, and resistance within global digital cultures. As an interdisciplinary qualitative scholar, she combines ethnographical and discursive methods to understand the social and cultural aspects of emerging information and communication technologies, such as platforms, algorithms, and data. Her scholarly works can be found in the International Journal of Communication, Communication and the Public, an Asiascape: Digital Asia, among other venues. Jingyi earned her Ph.D. in Communications and Media with a minor in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center on Digital Culture and Society.