Marcella Szablewicz: In media anthropology there is always the question of place. Where is the work situated? Your book is entitled Internet Video Culture in China and yet that region-specific title clearly doesn’t do your work justice. In fact, throughout the book you consciously challenge the reader’s understanding of place, referring to videos and popular culture phenomena that traverse time, geographic location, medium, and genre. What is more, just as your book examines Internet video mashups it is also, itself, a mashup of methodologies and scholarly approaches. Can you tell us more about how you made the decision to put these complex case studies in conversation with each other, and your mixed-methods approach to studying Internet videos?
Marc L. Moskowitz: Yes, this is an important point. Book titles about this region are inherently tricky. “China” is of course a topic that more readers are interested in because of the PRC’s raw size, its historical legacy, and its current place in the global political economy. But you are right that most of my book is focused on border crossing in one form or another. Unfortunately, the other title options would have led to their own set of problems. “Chinese-speaking Internet” is more accurate but clunky. “Sinophone” tends to place it firmly in an academic discourse but alienates a broader readership that does not know what the word means. Also, this term gets bandied around a great deal with no one fixed meaning. I have seen Sinophone used to refer to only Taiwan and Hong Kong, for example. It is also frequently used to include all Chinese-speaking cultures outside of the PRC, including the Chinese diaspora. At other times it refers to all Chinese-speaking cultures, including the PRC and beyond. So, I agree, labeling all of this as “China” does not do the range of my study justice, but for those of us who are not exclusively focused on the PRC these things are surprisingly complicated. Hopefully “the space in between” in the title did a better job of indicating the full scope of the project.
Building on this point, there is a tendency in academia to think of China’s internet as the internet in the PRC, but the internet is never truly bound by national borders and there is a whole set of other issues that come up once one acknowledges this fact. In my book, the dialogue between videos and the written commentary posted to those video sites, reveal both cultural proximity and profound rifts between those living in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the US.
And thank you for highlighting that methodologically and theoretically I tend to mix and match a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches from anthropology, cultural studies, film studies, and internet studies. I think it was Duke Ellington who once said, “There are only two kinds of music, good and bad.” In my book I try to take a similar world view to get at these issues from a range of different vantage points by using tools, and drawing on theoretical frameworks, from several disciplines to unpack just what is going on here.
Marcella Szablewicz: Even as this book is a study of sweeping “cross-cultural dialogues” and “transnational sharing” it also feels intensely personal. In one chapter, for example, you recall your own childhood identification with the character Spock from Star Trek. In this chapter we then follow you to Taiwan, as you engage (at first awkwardly) with the science fiction club at National Taiwan University. What does your book have to say about fandoms’ ability to toggle between personal and shared experience?
Marc L. Moskowitz: Yes, we tend to think of the personal and academic discourse as separate spheres but the kinds of topics one chooses, the areas of inquiry that attracts us, are intensely personal aren’t they. In anthropology reflexivity, in which authors put themselves front and center in their research as an exercise in honesty and ethics, has become the norm in recent years. I think this also lends to better storytelling—creating something that can draw in readers that include academics but reach a much wider audience as well.
Marcella Szablewicz: The uses of humor in online meme culture have been a subject of much debate among scholars. Often Internet humor is intentionally offensive, as with the popularity of “Hitler reacts” memes in both the U.S. and China. You argue that such difficult humor serves to “connect disjointed realities” and that by, “appropriating these historical narratives in this way, one disarms them.” However, Whitney Phillips, who has studied Internet trolls and meme culture in the United States, has since argued that humor of this kind has also served as a “trojan horse” through which more extremist content has slipped into the mainstream. (See Helen Lewis’s article for The Atlantic in which she interviews Phillips about her work on Internet trolls). What do you make of her argument when viewed through the lens of the Hitler YouTube meme you discuss in the book? Does her argument about extremism in the U.S. translate at all to the Chinese context?
Marc L. Moskowitz: I confess that I was not familiar with Phillips’ work before your question so my response to her research might be a bit superficial in that it is limited to Lewis’s four-page essay that you mention here, and Phillip’s equally brief article that Lewis cites in her interview. It should be pointed out that both articles take research that specifically focused on posts on 4chan and then applies this to the internet as a whole. The very real dangers of 4chan, and internet trolls more broadly, should not be ignored but it is misleading to conflate this with the internet in its entirety. Of course, if you hand a bunch of neo-Nazis a Hitler meme it is going to go in unhealthy directions pretty quickly. But I have also seen right wing attempts at appropriating Star Wars and The Office with memes so, as my students might say, “haters are going to hate” regardless. To use a somewhat simplistic analogy, one might ask what the structural factors are in heteronormative families that can lead to domestic abuse, but that does not mean that domestic abuse or heteronormativity encompass families in their entirety. There are dangers to taking the forest for the trees here.
To some degree, scholarship that is so critical of internet culture is building on a pervasive and long-standing undercurrent in a good deal of academia that voices an unmistakable mistrust of popular culture as a larger category. This dates back at least to the Frankfurt school in which Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and others evinced an oddly elitist sense of old-world class hierarchies in their analysis of popular culture, evoking a marked unease concerning the masses. And, of course, these scholars’ profound anxieties regarding the potential dangers of popular culture were in large part because of what they witnessed in Nazi Germany.
In my book I argue instead that humor in popular culture, both on the internet and in other contexts, has long been in the sphere of those doing battle with the very forces that the Frankfurt school was concerned with. In the US, for example, the far right has weaponized the domain of angry outrage quite effectively but I can’t think of a comedy news show on the right that can be seen as a successful counterpart to humorous left-leaning shows like The Daily Show, Last Week Tonight, or SNL’s Weekend Update. As an older male living in the American south, Facebook algorithms inflict a pretty wide range of conservative memes on me (though none as offensive as those Phillips witnessed in her research on 4chan) so I am fairly familiar with the strained attempts at appropriating memes for right wing agendas. Good humor, the stuff that really makes us laugh, usually helps us to see familiar issues in a new light. In contrast, the conservative attempts to be funny that I have seen on the internet (memes revolving around the notion that vegetarians/people getting vaccines/those using electric cars are just silly, for example) are confirming biases within a particular community rather than challenging a wide range of viewers to see things differently. As such, the attempts to co-opt memes for these political ends fall flat on several levels but, most importantly, they are just not funny. I cannot agree, therefore, that these memes are inevitably the candy hiding an inner poison of hatred and bigotry as Phillips and Lewis seem to suggest, because right wing attempts to co-opt popular memes are inevitably preaching to the converted and they fail to reach anyone else.
Because, as you point out, both Lewis and Phillips refer to the same “Hitler Hates” genre of memes that I discuss in my book, I did a quick search on YouTube looking for the most popular videos in this genre today and could not find any examples of the bigoted or mean-spirited cases that they saw on 4chan. The popular versions of these videos on YouTube (by which I mean videos with more than 100,000 views) are laced with profanity but for the most part apolitical. The “Hitler Hates the iPad” video that I discussed in my book is a good example of this. Others leaned left, such as the video “Hitler can’t get his cupcakes and he is pissed” in which Hitler is made to seem like he is outraged at a woman refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Even in this instance, however, the funniest parts of the video are arguably its apolitically humorous take on Hitler’s perceived obsession with baked goods rather than dwelling on the more serious issue of homophobia.
To the degree that the problem of internet trolls translates to China’s internet, one does see fairly rampant sexism and ethnocentrism, but these are features of China’s thought and society that date back long before the internet. As such, I am not convinced that the internet has created these issues as much as provided us with a window view into this preexisting cultural milieu. In my research on Chinese-language internet video culture, the closest comparative point to the politics of hate that I saw was the nationalistic vitriol that emerges in response to some seemingly harmless videos that were intended to make people laugh. In other words, it was the outraged reactions to the videos’ humor, rather than the underlying messaging within the videos themselves, that revealed the most conflict-ridden aspects of Chinese culture. Rather than being a Trojan horse, as Lewis and Phillips suggest for the “Hitler Hates” videos, this antic frivolity has the potential to counter some of the venom that one is confronted with on the internet, and in our daily lives. I also argue that this humor often subtly subverts nationalist demands, in both China and the United States, in that in refusing to take the world so terribly seriously they disarm angry political trolls with a gentle hand. As I suggest in my book, in the PRC culture is so heavily saturated by politics that to be apolitical is a profoundly political stance—one that arguably undermines the Orwellian tendencies of an authoritarian government as viewers choose another path.
Marcella Szablewicz: Michael Jackson appears twice in this book. In your opening chapter you discuss a mashup of Jackson’s Beat It with a Chinese Cultural Revolution performance. In this case, it would seem, American culture has been creatively reappropriated in the Chinese context. In the second instance, Michael Jackson is the butt of a joke created by Taiwan’s Next Animation studios, which is playfully mocking talk show host Conan O’Brian’s creative reappropriation of their signature animation style. In media globalization discussions, the subject of the directionality of cultural flows comes up frequently. What does your book have to say about the common perception that pop culture often flows from the West to the rest?
Marc L. Moskowitz: Yes, these mash-ups are humorous videos that use Cultural Revolution visual footage combined with music from a wide range of countries, one of which is Michael Jackson’s song “Beat it”. Other videos might feature anything from K-pop to Taiwan’s pop and a range of other music. I also examine the written commentary that is posted on these video sites. On one side of the spectrum are people celebrating the apolitical frivolity of the videos. The other side, as seen in some of the comments posted to the videos, are people in the PRC who are enraged that China is somehow being insulted by the humor (based on the perceived sacrilege of combining Cultural Revolution visuals with Jay Chou’s song about Japan, for example). It should be noted that political vitriol is far rarer than those commenting in celebration of the sheer playfulness of these videos, but unpacking the dialogue between the two groups is an important part of coming to understand regional differences.
And you are absolutely right that this kind of cultural production problematizes notions of “The West to the Rest”, a point that I explore in my book. Although in truth the idea that the West dominates popular culture around the globe has always been problematic. I grew up watching Japanese television shows and movies that were very popular on American television in the 1970s. For me, and many people in my generation, Godzilla, Speed Racer, and Ultra Man were at least as influential as the American-produced shows I was watching as a child.
Regarding the Cultural Revolution mash-ups, we know that the video footage originated in China and we are aware that that Michael Jackson’s soundtrack originated in the US, for example, but I was never able to determine who originally created the first mash-up in this genre. This issue is exacerbated because videos are often removed from servers because of alleged copyright violations on YouTube, and for political reasons on the Chinese video server Youku. But these videos are quickly reposted by other people so they are never gone long. Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum seems appropriate here in that with these videos there is no longer an original so it would be meaningless to frame the others as derivative. This is not only because of the uncertainty of who the first creators were, or because the various components of the video have so many different cultural origins, but because the meanings are so very different according to who is watching them, as well as when and where they are doing so. Even the first person to create this meme cannot really claim ownership at this point (in part because no-one would believe them) so the idea of trying to imagine the flow from one country or region to another is equally problematic.
Marcella Szablewicz: Scholars of digital media struggle with the speed of change. What we write about one day is gone the next. My students in New York tell me that YouTube viral videos are over. Instead, they now prefer short-form vertical videos such as those found on TikTok and Instagram Reels. Is China experiencing a similar shift and, if so, has the artfully created mashup video already become a thing of Internet past?
Marc L. Moskowitz: That is so interesting. I was just talking about this with students in my gender class. When I asked them if their generation even looked at YouTube videos anymore, twenty-four out of twenty-five students enthusiastically said that they did. The one student who did not said that she felt a gap with her peers because of this, in that if her friends asked what she’d like to watch with them on YouTube, she couldn’t respond. This would actually be a great research project of its own. It would be interesting to try to better understand if our students’ different responses were regional (New York vs. South Carolina) or has to do with the class being taught. My course was not specifically focused on Internet or popular culture studies, for example, so it may be that these students have different tastes and sensibilities than students who are particularly interested in taking classes about the internet. Or perhaps it simply boiled down to every class having its own personality. Regardless, it does seem to highlight the fact that there is no longer one reference point in popular culture that all of our students are linked to. In class, I can no longer make references to recent films or television shows as I once could, for example, because I only get blank stares when I do. With a very few exceptions, there is no longer a shared “it” show that all of my students will have seen. One exception to this was when I mentioned the movie Cocaine Bear my students became very animated, but my impression is that none of them had actually seen the film (nor had I)—our exposure to it came through YouTube movie trailers and, for them (and me), the trailer was clearly enough—there was no need to actually see the film. The internet is very much a part of this fissioning of cultural sharing because, as you point out, there is such a wide range of ever-changing internet venues to interact with. But also, among my students at least, these brief trailers and other even shorter videos, whether on Instagram, TikTok, WeChat, Youku, or YouTube, have to a large degree replaced moviegoing culture, with its longer demands on attention.
As I outline in my book, one of the PRC internet’s greatest differences with its Western counterparts revolves around the ways that it must maneuver around censorship as an ever-present reality. People in the PRC contend with an even increasing surveillance by the state. It used to be that the Internet was a relatively free sphere in China, as compared with, for example, large public protests that the government was quick to crack down on, or State controlled media such as the movie or television industries. Today the internet in China is far more heavily monitored. China’s Great Firewall is far more effective than is used to be, and even VPNs, which used to give many people in China the freedom to access internet news and entertainment outside of China, is no longer the risk-free or easily accessible solution that it once was. The 50-Cent Army (people paid by the government to write pro-State agenda posts) or the Voluntary 50-Cent Army (people who truly believe in the nationalist agenda about, for example, Taiwan’s independence, and therefore write State propaganda for free) are another force for government surveillance and control on the Internet. In contrast, most people in Taiwan are looking at streaming videos both through the Chinese streaming server Youku and the US server YouTube, depending on the content that they are looking for at any given time.
This gets back to your earlier comment about what “China’s internet” really means. If we extend this to Chinese-speaking cultures such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Chinese-speaking diasporic communities across the globe, or students who are temporarily abroad and have access to these wider range of cultural productions for a few years before they return to their homeland, then the questions and answers become very different. In my book I compare and contrast the different written reactions to humorous videos on Youku in simplified Chinese and YouTube comments in simplified Chinese which were probably written by people in or from the PRC, with complex Chinese characters indicating the writer probably lived in, or originated from, Hong Kong or Taiwan. Those writing in English from a range of different countries across the globe complicates this mix. I contend that one cannot truly understand Chinese-speaking internet culture without an exploration of these border-crossing dialogues.
But at the core of your question, I think, is the important point that trying to keep up with internet culture, or popular culture more broadly, is like playing Whack-a-Mole because things change so quickly. Given the nature of how long it takes to write and publish an academic book, we will always seem painfully out of date if we try to present our work as a current trend. What we can hope for, though, is that the themes of our analysis continue to be relevant even if the particular examples that we base our theories on wax and wane in popularity. In this sense, although for the moment the videos I discuss in the book continue to be popular, they are in fact less important than the dialogues they represent between factions that seem likely to continue to be at odds for some time to come—those who embrace nationalistic rage vs. playful irreverence, for example, or the important ways that border crossing exhibits both cultural proximity and profound cultural difference depending on place and space.
Thank you for your exceptionally thoughtful questions about my book. I have very much enjoyed this virtual discussion of these issues in response to your insightful thoughts about my work and for that I am grateful.
CaMP Anthropology 