Social Media On The Picket Line Summary

Jack Qiu, however, describes how social media and other internet platform are used to share worker-generated content and employed in working-class politics. In his article, Social media on the picket line, he gives several examples of how social media were used by workers to call for collective action. He analyzed cases of working-class protests initiated via online platforms such as QQ, Weblog, online forums, Weibo, WeChat and Twitter. Qiu also used information from news archives, interviews, fieldwork in factories and workers’ online networks.

Qiu fist described the Internet market in China, with the number of users estimated at 618 million in 2013. However, as the number of active social media users starts to decrease, the instant messaging

He distinguishes three elements: the dominant (the hegemonic culture), the residual (culture’s past elements) and the emergent (new meanings, values and practices being continually created). In the case of China, the dominant would be neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics, the residual – Confucian values such as obedience toward authority. Maoism, however, according to Qiu and other scholars, can be considered as both the residual and the emergent, as young workers tend to rediscover Maoism and employ Mao’s teachings in their online activities. Other parts of the emergence could be feminism, eco-socialism, human rights campaign

Its function was similar to Facebook, but offered much more anonymity. Although the government can still monitor users’ activity, QQ was used several times to spread the information about workers’ protests, despite media censorship. This was the case with workers’ protests against privatization of assets of a factory in Chongqing in 2014, as well as in the factory in Shaanxi province in the same year.

Other Internet platforms were also used to call the media attention to workers’ strikes. In case of the strikes in Uniden factory in 2004, workers started to describe the events on a blog on Blogchina.com. From that the information spread through other platforms and could no longer be contained by the government. In the case of Ole Wolff factory workers protesting in 2006 a vlog by one worker was used to make the information about the protests known to the