University of Helsinki
What can conflicts over information and meaning-making in digital Asia tell us about politics in advanced networked societies? Using examples from East Asia, and especially the Chinese-speaking world, this talk interprets the construction and spread of unverified information as part of near-ubiquitous political practices that threaten to lead to a decoupling of realities. It makes the case that digital Asia is a crucial site for researching such practices: Asian societies, for instance Taiwan, feature a long-standing engagement with polarized online debates and struggles over unverified digital information; they also maintain highly developed digital infrastructures across diverse socio-cultural and economic environments, and they have developed strategies for countering toxic communication, misinformation, and disinformation. To explore these issues, this talk suggests a three-step research agenda that analyses the anatomy of misinformation, traces its genealogy across complex socio-technical systems, and assesses its pathology, that is: the way rumours and conspiracy theories are products of, and in turn produce, power in translocal networks.
Florian Schneider, PhD, Sheffield University, is Chair Professor of Modern China at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. He is managing editor of Asiascape: Digital Asia, director of the Leiden Asia Centre, and the author of three books: Staging China: The Politics of Mass Spectacle (Leiden University Press, 2019, recipient of the ICAS Book Prize 2021 Accolades), China’s Digital Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2018), and Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series (Brill, 2013, recipient of the 2014 EastAsiaNet book prize). In 2017, he was awarded the Leiden University teaching prize for his innovative work as an educator. His research interests include questions of governance, political communication, and digital media in China, as well as international relations in the East-Asian region.