Active citizenship: the politics of imagining internet audiences in Taiwan

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

Although the central concern in Taiwan's audience studies is the issue of subjectivity (Hwang 2003), audience subjectivity is usually conceptualized in terms of audience's agency as actively expressing resistance, opinions, and seeking pleasure, or passively accepting patriarchal ideologies (Chang 2011; Wei 1999). Despite theoretical calls for more contextualized studies on audience in order to overcome the activepassive dichotomy (Shaw 2000; Wei 1999), the conceptual polarization of audiences persists in internet studies following the political economic and cultural studies approaches in the West (Shaw 2000). This dichotomous thinking trickles down to popular discourses that oscillate between audiences as active citizens and audiences as a passive crowd prone to manipulation. However, popular invocations of audiences are always embedded in the anxieties, hopes, and needs of the people and the demands of the authorities. This chapter attempts to understand how internet audiences, commonly namedas xiangmin, are conceptualized and called on to enforce and/or exclude certain identities in popular discourses in Taiwan. We use two well-publicized media events, the 8 August flood disaster (known as the "88 flood disaster") in 2009 and the Makiyo event in 2012, as our sites of analysis. The materials used include the four major national newspapers (Apple Daily, Liberty Times, China Times, and United Daily News), widely circulated magazines such as Common Wealth and Business Weekly, and the inter-referential visual and written material dispersed on television and the new media. Inter-referentiality characterizes contemporary mediascape in Taiwan. The print media sets the agenda for television and the internet to solicit audience responses that are further taken up by the print media as news of social significance. As such, internet audiences' "alternative" power usually gets recorded in print media and incorporated into mainstream discourses. This research employs discourse analysis, informed by Foucault, to analyze the power relationships that regulate the meanings of xiangmin. We focus on the inter-referentiality ofdiscourses in different media sites, and examine how they are ordered and rarefied according to the rules and regularities of discursive formations. We look for patterns in the naming processes as well as the rules of exclusion/inclusion that order the production of discourses (Foucault 1981). Moreover, we emphasize that discourses be analyzed through the lenses of "war" and "struggle" (Foucault 2003). The research aims to unpack the politics of naming: What and who are included and excluded? How are discourses used? Whose interests do they serve? What wars are these discourses waging? We argue that the concept of active citizenship in defining internet audiences produces subjectivities that are conducive to neoliberal reform while passive citizenship, constructed through the crowd, is used to legitimize women and the working classes' differential access to citizen rights. The definition of xiangmin as internet audience can be traced to a Hong Kongmovie, Hail the Judge (九品芝麻官), by Stephen Chow. In the movie, the official judge asked Chow whether any wrongs were inflicted on him because of his position outside the crowd. Chow answered: "I am only a step forward in front of xiangmin." Xiangmin, literally translated as rural people, refers to the crowd that lacks individuality. This definition was immediately taken up by the internet audiences as self-appellation because internet users see themselves as constituting the anonymous crowd. In a special segment named after the Hong Kong movie in the popular political comedy, The Biggest Party of the People (全民最大黨), the internet audience is satirized through the visual image of "jumping in and out of the crowd" – the figure of xiangmin oscillates between wanting to feel safe by jumping in (or going back to) the crowd, and wanting to make profits by jumping out of the crowd to speak. The anonymous nature of online participation makes the internet user a member of the crowd, but at the same time, it also enables audiences to voice their concerns in public spaces as citizens. As such, the concept of xiangmin as internet users is structured by the tensions and ambiguities between the crowd and citizen/individual expression. Moreover, the profit motive, as elaborated in The Biggest Party of the People, "jumps in" to complicate the notion of citizenship.