Social Media and Ordinary Life

Focusing on domestic workers, rural microentrepreneurs, disadvantaged young creatives, and young feminists, Social Media and Ordinary Life is a deeply moving ethnography of how digital media infrastructures and platforms are woven into the rhythms of ordinary, everyday life. In choosing to foreground marginalized groups and communities, Cara Wallis gently shifts our attention away from the world of “social media influencers” and tech-centric discourses of entrepreneurial lives towards a decidedly ambivalent terrain of routine life practices.

Social Media and Ordinary Life argues that understanding these individual experiences of the everyday enables greater insight into larger transformations taking place in contemporary China. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork across China, Wallis foregrounds the entanglement of affect, emotion, ordinary ethical decisions, and desires connected to social media as it is used for self-expression, self-representation, fights for equality, maintenance of community, and economic livelihood. Four case studies show how social media is integrated into the articulation of affects by a wide variety of “ordinary” Chinese subjects: disadvantaged young creatives who migrate to Beijing from rural areas and use social media to cultivate their personal aesthetics; micro-entrepreneurs in rural Shandong province, especially women whose affective ties to the patriarchal family constrain their use of technology for economic enhancement; domestic workers, all women, in urban homes who use social media to build community and construct themselves as ethical subjects; and young feminists spread across China who engage in various types of cultural production and deploy social media in their fight for gender equality, often facing social and/or political marginalization in the process.

Amid daunting forces—big data, artificial intelligence, massive surveillance—this book centers the “small,” showing how structural inequality, the urban/rural divide, patriarchal gender norms, and generational differences lead to contradictory or ambivalent outcomes of technology use. Even so, for these individuals and many others, social media is deeply intertwined with aspirations for a better future.

《社交媒体与日常生活》聚焦家政工人、农村小微创业者、弱势青年创作者及年轻女权主义者群体，以细腻动人的民族志笔触，描绘数字媒体基础设施与平台如何编织进普通人的日常节奏。作者卡拉·沃利斯选择将边缘群体置于叙事中心，将我们的注意力从"网红"世界与技术中心的创业叙事，转向更具矛盾性的日常生活实践场域。

本书主张：理解个体日常经验，是洞察当代中国社会深刻转型的重要切口。通过在中国多地开展的长期田野调查，沃利斯揭示了社交媒体使用过程中情感、伦理抉择与生存欲望的复杂纠缠——当人们将社交媒体用于自我表达、社群维系、平等抗争与经济生存时，这些数字平台便成为了生存策略的组成部分。四个典型案例展现了"普通"中国主体如何将社交媒体转化为情感表达的媒介：从农村进京的弱势青年创作者通过社交媒体培育个人美学；山东农村的小微创业者（尤其是女性）在父权家庭情感纽带与技术赋能间艰难平衡；城市家庭中的家政女工借助社交媒体构建伦理主体与互助社群；以及散落各地的年轻女权主义者，在文化生产与性别抗争中既运用社交媒体又遭遇边缘化处境。

面对大数据、人工智能与全景监控等庞然之力，本书以"微小"对抗"宏大"，揭示结构性不平等、城乡区隔、性别规训与代际差异如何导致技术使用的矛盾性后果。但即便如此，对这些群体而言，社交媒体始终与对美好未来的期许紧密相连。