The Internet-based visual humor as text representative of the state of the Chinese public sphere - Курсовая работа

As audiences laugh along, they identify with the critiques and laugh off their feelings of discontent as well. In a way, egao serves simultaneously as a means for critical expression and for emotional catharsis. For the primary sources the following materials were taken: 1) China Digital Times (CDT) portal: an independent news portal, located in Berkeley, CA, which was established in 2003 as a blog and then grew into a big news-related organization. This paper used its section Drawing the News for picking up the most popular uncensored images 2013-2014 from Weibo for sampling. Only images with the logo of Weibo were taken for the analysis. It is unclear, though, what the choice of images for the section is based on, there are no evidence of the number of reposts in the pages. 2) ProPublica project: an independent non-profit newsroom that produced investigative journalism in the public interest’. The organization is based in NY. The newsroom won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. The newsroom launched a project of tracking the deleted Weibo posts and registering them on July 24, 2013, and finished the project on August 4, 2013. The methodology they used was based on the double-response system, when the script they created checked the presence of a post by finding it, and then by receiving their response in an hour. As a result of the project 524 deleted images were revealed and presented on the website. For our sample we only picked those of them which contained humorous images. 3) WeiboScope: a data collection and visualization project based in the University of Hong Kong. It does the same thing as ProPublica project: gathers responses from the posts of a group of users having the biggest number of followers. Before May 2014 Weiboscope showed the popular images in Weibo, but starting from May 2014 it has only shown the deleted posts. Therefore only the deleted posts of humorous content published firstly in the period May 28, 2014 - June 02, 2014, were taken for the analysis. 4) The Internet in China, white paper published in 2010 by the Information Office of the State Council of the Peoples Republic of China as a reaction to the Google’s actions in China after the company revealed the violation of private accounts by the Chinese censorship office. 5) National People’s Congress Standing Committee Decision concerning Strengthening Network Information Protection: a legal document published on December 28, 2012 on the website of the government: www.npc.gov.cn. 6) List of Violations, Microblogging Community Management Regulations (Trial): part of Terms of Use document basic for the registration on the microblogging service Weibo. 7) Decree of the State Council of the Peoples Republic of China (No. 292): a legal document published September 25, 2000; the text is open at the website of the Ministry of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China: 8) Survey Reports of China Internet Network Information Center: statistical data presented in a form of yearbook, with main information on traffic volumes, domain names, users statistics and content on the Internet. Free accessed at The history of the topic development in academic circles cannot be said to be very rich. Partially it is due to the fact that Internet-mediated content has only recently started gaining popularity among visual anthropologists, partially because humor studies are still underdeveloped and the topic of Internet humor is still underestimated by the researches. The only significant work in this field is written by Haomin Gong and Xin Yang, who explore the impact of the Chinese digitized parody (egao) on the development of means of political expression in China.