The Interplay of Knowledge, Affect, and Politics in the Lost Memory of Epidemic Meningitis in China

How is memory in China curated in the digital era? This pioneering volume investigates the transformation of collective memory in China amid rapid technological change. It offers a vital resource for understanding the dynamic interplay between memory, media and power in contemporary China - and beyond.

Since the 1990s, China, as a new global power, has played an increasing role in international affairs. Chinese journalists have travelled to war and conflict zones overseas to report and file news coverage back home. This article surveys the historical development of Chinese war photography. It also critically examines the ideology and practices of four young Chinese photojournalists who work at a Chinese state news agency through semi-structured interviews and analysis of the photographs they took in conflict zones. The author argues that contemporary Chinese war photojournalists take realism as their main aesthetic and ideological doctrine in a sense to provide visual evidences and to stress the naturalism and symbolic power of war images. The visual representations of civilians� sufferings and hope for peace correspond with China's peaceful diplomatic policy and non-intervention principles. The war images elicit sympathetic public emotions and collective memory in China. Chinese photojournalists� depictions of wars and conflicts are influenced by internal political, organizational and individual constraints as well as the changing nature of contemporary wars.

The subject of research in this article is the social media discourse. The purpose of the work is to theoretically interpret the social media discourse in the context of modern science and practice of media communications. The study of social media discourse considers the features of the platforms, its production and storage, as well as its representation. Social media users can change their roles from being a consumer to a creator. The work uses a set of methods: comparative analysis, systematization, and interpretative analysis. The research found that the social media discourse is a functionally conditioned type of discourse (integration of personal and institutional types of discourse) that exists in the framework of online communication, and has the synthesis of oral and written speech. The social media discourse consists of media texts that include heterogeneous elements, depending on the combination of which creolized, polycode and multimodal texts are constructed. Such texts differ in the process of creation, organization and features of presentation in social media, communication in which, unlike electronic communication in general, is based on the principle of participation. Taking into account the specific features of distribution platforms used by social media, the authors emphasize that all Internet services related to social media have special characteristics that make it possible to distinguish them from other Internet services, resources that exist in the global network. The definition of the social media discourse allows us to expand the understanding of this category in modern media communications.

This paper will study the role that new media plays in shaping social memory by exploring China's grass‐root narratives existing in blogs. By conducting a content analysis, the main features of China's storytellers are illuminated. While emphasizing the role of narratives in shaping a nation's social memory in China, explanations for the source of a new social memory are being searched. In doing so, the linear‐model of cause and effect between technology and social change, including McLuhan's term “digital village” are being questioned. The author predicts that, under today's circumstances, China's memory policy including an internalized self‐censorship will still have its effectiveness.

We have attempted to analyse the features of communicative strategies of a media discourse. The paper describes the notions of “discourse”, “media discourse”, “social media discourse”, and “communicative strategies”. The research is performed using the social media texts collected by the authors. Up to date no linguistic investigations of communicative strategies used in social media discourse have been conducted. We have focused on news texts from information, news, educational, and entertaining platforms, in social networks. The most important thing is to identify the ways of communicative strategies generation and the methods of their association in a social media discourse. The article shows some typical features of a social media discourse. The subject of the research is a set of communicative strategies used during implementation of the communicative functions of texts. The purpose of the paper is to identify and organise communicative strategies, the characteristics of their use depending on the social text topic, and to review the impact of such a text. The main aim of the research is to study the social media discourse as one type of an institutional media discourse; to identify and describe the factors impacting its formation.

The earliest forms of the internet were developed in the 1960s whereas the first recognizable social media site was created in 1997. Since then, Social media has greatly influenced the way people communicate with one another and continues to gain popularity owing to the technological milestones made in the world of communication. As people communicate via social media interaction platforms, language naturally and inevitably experiences some changes. Therefore, there was a need to undertake a linguistic study to account for such changes and developments in language use. The main concern of this study was to analyze the university students’ social media discourse. The discourse analyzed sprung from the WhatsApp interaction platform. The WhatsApp groups utilized were those formed by Chuka University students in Tharaka Nithi County, Kenya. Particularly, the following objective guided the study: to demonstrate the intertextuality nature of social media discourse. The study employed a multimodal semiotic approach as the analytic tool. A descriptive research design and the qualitative technique were employed to analyze data. Both Snowball and purposive sampling procedures were used. Snowballing was used to establish the WhatsApp groups that were used by the students, while the purposive sampling procedure was used to selectively collect texts from WhatsApp groups. The texts that were purposively selected were those that demonstrated the intertextuality nature of social media discourse. The rationale for choosing WhatsApp was the fact that there was a paucity of linguistic studies based on this interaction platform despite its popularity. The study findings revealed that social media discourse exhibits intertextuality in which language is dexterously and creatively used. This study sheds light on language usage and its dynamics. It is hoped that it will enrich knowledge on Multimodality and Semiotic Theory.

Previous studies show that public discourse and social media discourse around the Covid-19 pandemic heavily use war framing, despite the fact that its misuse and inaptness to elaborate all aspects of the pandemic were already noted. This paper analyses conceptual metaphors in the Croatian (social) media discourse on the pandemic, focusing on the war metaphor. Using a specialized corpus of manually chosen relevant texts in Croatian, compiled for this purpose, we investigate how frequent war framing is in the Croatian media compared to alternative figurative framings. In a qualitative analysis, we outline the conceptual and inferential structure of the Covid-19 pandemic concept and discuss the structure, function, and (in)aptness of the war metaphor in pandemic circumstances. Additionally, by detecting other source frames used in this discourse, we offer other, possibly more apt (or less resisted) framing options – or a so-called metaphor menu – designed specifically for the Croatian language based on corpus data. We show that the Covid-19 pandemic is predominantly framed as combat or war in Croatian media and social media. Even though a ‘war’ on the war metaphor has been declared both by the media and research community, we show that the use of certain other source frames (e.g. the religion frame) may be even more dangerous than the war framing. The paper also discusses the aptness and omnipresence of the war metaphor, as well as its inaptness to refer to all aspects of this pandemic, concluding that it is rarely the type of metaphor that is harmful or inappropriate – it is rather the effect of the context and how it is used.

The article deals with the impact of the Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945) on the politics of memory in PRC. Some events of this war, for example, the Nanjing massacre as well as the problem of comfort women are still a vital part of collective memory of Chinese. In recent years studies on Sino-Japanese war and its impact on the politics of memory in China have been constantly growing in number. Less attention has been paid to the history of the issue and its impact on foreign relations in Asia, including China-Japan relations. While work has been done on the revealing of political motives for shaping of PRC’s politics of memory, the impact of Chinese cultural characteristics on this issue has been neglected. Therefore, the historical transformation of war memories in PRC’s memory politics and above all the influence of cultural characteristics and specific worldview of Chinese on memory politics in modern China need further research. This article focuses on (1) the historical transformation of collective memory related to the Sino-Japanese war in China’s historical politics, (2) the influence of Chinese cultural peculiarities, such as “ritual thinking”, on politics of memory in China and (3) the impact of PRC’s historical politics on relations between China and Japan nowadays.

This paper employs concepts and analytical frameworks drawn from Sociology, particularly collective memory, to examine China's attempts – and the limitations of those attempts – to improve relations with Japan in the new century. In particular, it focuses on a specific episode, the attempt to bring “new thinking” to Sino‐Japanese relations. It concludes that the difficulties and complexities are the product of many factors. In the first place, CCP is constrained by its own definition of nationalism and national identity. Secondly, Beijing's control mechanisms and its ability to direct nationalist discourse in ways convenient to itself are challenged by the rise of popular nationalistic sentiment. In addition, the rise of revisionist nationalism in Japan further complicates Beijing's stance toward Japan. The achievement of China's vision of harmonious world and of “Mutually Beneficial” relations with Japan will depend on how well China handles the delicate matters of the construction of national identity and the basis of government legitimacy.

Exploring the Nature of Genius Loci in SPORT Stadiums Based on Collective Memory in CHINA

In modern crises, governments aim to communicate in ways that foster shared understanding, yet public interpretations often diverge, undermining response efforts. Crisis communication now unfolds in hybrid media environments where televised press conferences intersect with real‐time social media discourse. Despite this shift, we lack systematic understanding of when and how government messaging and online discourse align at the informational level. This study examines informational alignment of official crisis communication and social media discourse across six European countries during the first wave of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Drawing on quantitative text analysis of 279 government press conferences and over 409,000 tweets, the study identifies two communicative features of government messages, sentiment and linguistic complexity, and their role in shaping online engagement with government‐framed issues and the degree of overlap between press conferences and social media discourse. The findings underscore the role of message complexity and sentiment in shaping shared sense‐making during crises. This study contributes to crisis communication and public policy scholarship by bridging sender‐and audience‐focused perspectives and offering cross‐national evidence on online engagement in high‐stakes contexts.

This article explores the socio-behavioral phenomenon of “transvestigations” in social media discourses. This phenomenon is most often characterized by users referring – erroneously – to apparent physiological cues of one's assigned sex at birth, which motivate their interpretation of one's transgender status, particularly among those who do not identify as transgender and focus primarily on cisgender celebrities. It is difficult to know whether these behaviors and interactions are symptomatic of an authentic “gender critical” ideology or inauthentic practices that only fan the flames of antagonism in an ongoing social struggle. In this paper, I explain how transvestigations are primarily based on transphobic “gender critical” discourses and are fundamentally underpinned by a conspiracy of transgender ubiquity. I also explain how transgender users and their allies troll transvestigators by mocking the same discourses and assumptions. To do so, I analyze social media data using methods from cultural political economy and social-cognitive discourse studies. I argue that the possibilities and uses of social media for misinformation, conspiracy, and mimetic antagonism facilitate a discursive landscape in which authentic "gender-critical" discourses are indistinguishable from potentially inauthentic conspiratorial discourses. By highlighting how social media and its users (re)construct a world without distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity, this article raises questions about the im/possibilities of change in contexts of ongoing and ever-increasing antagonisms.

This paper will analyse women representation in social media discourse by applying Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis and will investigate how women are represented linguistically and visually on social media platforms like Instagram, Sanpchat, X and Utube. The data has been gathered from verified and unverified social media accounts with the help of convenient random sampling. The material is in the form of photos, written texts, and videos for a thorough examination. The chosen accounts include X handles like Richard Cooper, the Instagram accounts parity_colorism and thesolidaritysisters. The select Snapchat handles include DRESS CODE, Girls Only. Care has been taken that these posts represent both male and female worlds and the researcher will make the case that the social media content is fundamentally ideological, and that regular events, actions, and issues posted on social media articulate dominant (and occasionally alternative) ideological discourses about the prejudiced nature of our society. It shall be argued that gender politics is present in all types of social media comments and platforms, not so much in terms of formal politics but a more banal and everyday kind. The marketing of these accounts is the hidden motivation behind posting such posts and they do not support the idea that these technologies are democratic or impartial by nature. This paper will also investigate the social contexts within which symbolic forms are employed and deployed to determine whether such forms establish or sustain relations of domination and whether ideological analysis of all elements of the social media content come together to tell the same story that is, patriarchal capitalism. Considering the insights that social media discourse is structured by male dominance; that every discourse is historically produced and interpreted and that dominance structures are legitimated by ideologies of powerful groups(male), this paper will specifically consider gender and social media discourses in the broadest sense, to testify overt relations of gender bias and social inequality. It will also dissect sexism and female objectification by using the Dialectical Relational Approach and suggest ways to reduce gender bias through social media.

Social media discourse is a double-edged sword. It can not only have a positive impact on the company, but it may also cause irreparable losses to the company. Social media is both a social platform and a marketing tool. Taking Huawei Device Co., Ltd. as an example, this article analyzes the positive effects of social media discourse from multiple aspects. At the same time, it takes Hurricane Marketing as an example to show that improper use of social media discourse may have a huge negative impact on enterprises. Therefore, when companies manage social media discourse, they should make full use of its merits and avoid its demerits.

The subject of the study is a comparison of the influence of state and non-state actors on the formation of collective perceptions of the past. Non-state actors include local communities whose commemorative practices involve family memory, social media discourse, and informal citizen associations that emerge outside the framework of official historical policy. TMethods used include a sociological survey and in-depth interviews. The study was conducted in the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug–Yugra. It is concluded that a lack of conceptualization of state historical policy creates semantic gaps in collective ideas about the past, which are filled by various—often informal—local community practices. In some cases, narratives of state historical policy are simply ignored by collective memory; in other cases, they receive a significantly different semantic meaning; and in yet other cases, they turned out to be able to form discourses that contradict the official historical doctrine. The sources of informal mnemonic practices of local communities—the immediate environment in which individuals communicate—are perceived not only as highly trustworthy on a cognitive level but also exert a much deeper impact on the emotional sphere, appealing to images of family or local history.