Sina Weibo of China: from a Copycat to a Local Uptake of a Global Technology Assemblage

International Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development, 5(4), 27-37, October-December 2013 27

Sina Weibo of China: From a Copycat to a Local Uptake of a Global Technology Assemblage

Huatong Sun, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, University of Washington Tacoma, Tacoma, WA, USA

ABSTRACT

In this essay the author presents an expanded genre view to examine global diffusion of interactive technologies in this increasingly globalized world. Through an analysis of its generic features, the author explores how Sina Weibo, a technology considered as a copycat of a Western technology, arises as a local uptake in a discourse of global technology diffusion. In studying its struggle and resistance, the author shows how a local uptake is shaped by the implicit value and ideology of the technology it imitates from. Meanwhile, this diffusion process is also a process of enacting the emergent structure of local technology use. The dynamic and dialogical structuring process behind genre formation worldwide manifests the complex interactions of technology and culture in our contemporary conditions.

Keywords: Assemblage, Culture, Genre, Sina Weibo, Technology, Twitter, Uptake

INTRODUCTION sensitive political information—to assess what was happening from the overseas media. My At the night of July 23, 2011, two high-speed past experiences told me that the state media passenger trains had a rear-end collision in of China tend to cover this type of accidents. I eastern Zhejiang province of China. Four cars also opened a browser window to follow posts from the front train called Harmony derailed on Sina Weibo, a popular social media service and fell off from an elevated bridge, killing 38 that was perceived as a Chinese copycat of people and injuring more than 200. It so hap- Twitter by many Western observers. pened that I was visiting my parents who lived What was happening on Sina Weibo was two hours away from the site of the accident. remarkable. I saw pictures of passengers trapped After I heard the news from TV, my first reaction inside trains at dark night, derailed car dangling was to use VPN (Virtual Private Network) to off the bridge, mighty tractors crushing mangled scale “the Great Firewall of China”—a system cars on the ground to bury the wreckage on site of Internet censorship ran by the Chinese gov- and therefore cover up the tragedy, and so on. ernment that blocks access to the websites with I witnessed personal reports from miserable

DOI: 10.4018/ijskd.2013100103

Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. 28 International Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development, 5(4), 27-37, October-December 2013 passengers and their concerned relatives. I read conditions. A simplistic view that celebrates the poignant and often witty commentaries about instrumentality of a social media technology the Railway Ministry and the government, would be too hasty and naïve here. circulated among Weibo users—thanks for the With the fast development of digital net- unique feature of rich media invented by Sina, works in the age of globalization, emerging Weibo users were able to post much longer technology use practices in one locale have posts than 140 characters in a picture format. been diffusing rapidly across the globe. During For the first time, I did not want to scale the the last two decades, we have seen the global Great Firewall to get truthful information as the expansion of new technology use practices such depth and authenticity of news coverage from as instant messaging, text messaging, blogging, overseas media was hard to compete with the social network services, and microblogging. immediacy of the first-hand information and The emergence and arising of Sina Weibo takes pictures posted by common Chinese users. place in this wide context. This essay examines Indeed a Sina Weibo user in one of those two the genre formation process of Sina Weibo as trains broke the news first on the site. an answer to the call raised by Coakes (2012) I was not alone: Many Chinese citizens to understand “the essence of technology and devoured the information about the accident its impact on us.” It follows the discussion on Sina Weibo as earnestly as I did. As time of the special issue of “What do we mean by passed, the informed public got more and more technology?” (2012). upset about the ways the Railway Ministry “Weibo” is the Chinese word for handled the accident and eschewed their re- “microblog(ging)”. Sina Weibo was launched sponsibilities. People were agitated and furious in August 2009 to fill the void after Twitter when the spokesman used bureaucratic rhetoric was blocked by the Chinese government since to diminish the consequences of the accident the Ürümqi riots that July. With more than 500 at the first press conference 26 hours after the million registered users and 54 million daily collision. Almost 10 million pieces of online active users in fall 2013, it is ranked as the criticisms were posted during the following No. 2 active social network in China (Buckley, five days (Anti, 2012), ultimately resulting in 2013; Kemp, 2013; Ong, 2013). Sina Weibo a reversed official stance and a more thorough has a very fast development trajectory: While investigation. it took Twitter five years to have around 100 The above episode sounds like another million tweets per day by January 2011, it Twitter-like success story after Arab Spring. only took Sina Weibo half of the time length However, at the time when Egyptian activists to reach the same benchmark by March 2012 are still fighting for democracy and freedom on (DeWoskin, 2012). For outsiders, the scale of the Tahrir Square two years after the so-called Weibo is astonishing. “On Twitter something Twitter revolution, a new policy issued by the might get retweeted 50 times. On Weibo it’s highest court of China this fall rules that a mes- 1,000 times” (ibid). Recently the British Prime sage of online rumor and slander “forwarded Minister David Cameron opened a Weibo ac- more than 500 times or read more than 5,000 count before his diplomatic visit to China in times could earn convicted offenders up to three December 2013, and he attracted 194,000 fol- years in prison” (Buckley, 2013). As a result, lowers within three days. In contrast, he has 500, hundreds of “outspoken” Chinese microblogs 000 followers for his Twitter account opened users were detained (ibid). In both cases, the for one year (McCormick, 2013). Cameron was phenomenon of the social media revolution not the first Western celebrity who joined Sina and its aftermath clearly shows the complicacy Weibo; the American movie star Tom Cruise of technology diffusion and use characterized started his account in 2011. by local cultural, political, and sociotechnical

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From the beginning Sina Weibo was re- UNDERSTANDING garded as a Chinese copycat of Twitter. Later TECHNOLOGY AS A GENRE it was ridiculed as the illegitimate child of Facebook and Twitter as it imitated features Regarding technological artifacts as a genre from both sites that are banned in China. In sounds like an adventurous idea, but it is not fact one could find the traces of almost every new at all in the field of technology design. Two successful American social network sites and decades ago Brown and Duguid advocated that apps in Sina Weibo, including Foursquare, “designed, communicative artifacts” (1994, Pinterest, and many others. On the other hand, p.10) to be broadly interpreted as genres. They it has developed many distinctive features origi- characterize genres as “socially constructed nating from Chinese Internet culture, including interpretive conventions,” which is not confined rich media, threaded comment, private chat, to textual artifacts. They envision designers microgroup, microevent, and so on. And some working as writers, who “try to invoke a par- of these features found their way back into the ticular genre, to establish the conventions they later versions of Twitter. Indeed it would be are putting into play,” and users responding highly doubtful whether Twitter would have to the designed artifact as readers who “try to succeeded similarly in China if not banned. recognize what has been invoked, what con- Opposing a naïve view in favor of the ventions are in play so that they might respond instrumentality of a social media technology, appropriately.” For example, people behave I present in this essay an expanded genre view differently in a music hall as they do in a dining to examine global diffusion of interactive hall based on their understandings of expected technologies in this increasingly globalized conducts in these two different settings. world to understand the complicacy of tech- “The socially constructed interpreted con- nology use. I first describe the framework of a ventions” have been closely examined by the technology as a genre (Sun, 2012), and I argue school of rhetorical genre theory for the past this framework will bring valuable insights thirty years. Rhetorical genre theory studies to approach cross-cultural technology design typified human activities through the distinc- issues. Then I look at the two aspects of the tive textual features of genres, and many of the genre formation process surrounding Sina studies in this line illustrate that those generic Weibo. The first aspect is the development of its features represent accepted social practices in generic features. With a close analysis, I show particular cultural contexts. Bazerman describes how Sina Weibo, a technology considered as genres this way: “Genres are not just forms. a copycat of a Western technology, arises as a Genres are forms of life, ways of being. They local uptake in a discourse of global technology are frames for social action…. They are loca- diffusion. The second aspect is various forms tions within which meaning is constructed” of struggle and resistance surfacing from the (1997, p.19). process of structuring, through which I illustrate In my research on cross-cultural user how a local uptake is influenced by the implicit experience design I found a genre view of value and ideology of the technology it imitates technological artifact illuminating for exploring from. Meanwhile, this diffusion process is also local technological use practices deeply rooted a process of enacting the emergent structure of in peculiar cultural contexts (Sun, 2012). One local technology use. In the end I maintain that of the major problems in cross-cultural design the dynamic and dialogical structuring process is the disconnect of action and meaning: A behind genre formation worldwide manifests technology introduced to a new local context is the complex interactions of technology and usable, but it is often not meaningful for local culture in our “technological culture” (Slack users. Why would this happen? While action & Wise, 2005). and meaning is connected in the original design

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(i.e., top-level interface features represent the conventions are a part of a technological artifact, lower-level actions that make sense in a local while a general artifact (e.g., an object of local culture where the design originates from), only ingenuity) does not necessarily have that. In the interface features of the technology are lo- addition, the expanded genre view will help us calized, more accurately, translated, influenced to conceptualize the difference of local develop- by a transmission model of communication, ment of interactive technologies during global when the design is transported from one place diffusion, which will benefit the field of ICTD to another. As a result, the translated interface (Information and Communication Technology is often confusing or incomprehensible for us- for Development). ers in another culture who are not familiar with The notion of technology as a genre has two the actions the interface captures. An extreme sides: genre as a behavioral construct and that as example is that a Maori user would feel lost in a structural construct. Next I will elaborate on an online digital library that is built on Western each side of the coin, discuss how each side is library classification system (Duncker, 2002). connected to the key problem of cross-cultural To connect action and meaning in cross- design, and how the insight from each side will cultural technology design, we need to have a integrate action and meaning in cross-cultural robust theoretical construct that could address design and therefore help to solve the problem. both action and meaning in design practices. The side of a genre as a behavioral construct Meanwhile, this construct should be able to matches with the action angle in cross-cultural traverse between the macro level and the micro design. According to Carolyn Miller (1984), level (Kampf, 2012; Shneiderman, 2011). For genres are social actions in response to recurrent the former, it needs to have an explanatory situations with social motives. In that sense, power to approach sociocultural influences genres solidify social practices through their in order to “[shape] technology to produce meaning-laden generic features. Indeed, social positive outcomes” (Shneiderman, 2011, p. 11). practices represented by generic features are For the latter, it needs to be able to delve into what attract many researchers to study genres. concrete actions to “design and build innova- For them, a genre is “a collection of practices tive interfaces and deliver validated guidelines” that finds its nexus in the recurrent, dynamic (ibid, p.10). The genre concept meets all these activities in which users engage” (Spinuzzi, criteria. Therefore I maintained that designed, 1999, p. 37). Informed by activity theory (e.g., communicative technological artifacts should Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006; Nardi, 1996), genre be regarded as a technological genre, and I ar- theorists such as Dias, Freedman, Medway, gued for an expanded view of genre to examine and Pare (1999) claim that genres are “specific interactive technologies (Sun, 2012). human activities” (p. 24) and “enactments of An expanded view of genre is beneficial recognized social motives” (p. 25). Here the particularly in a cross-cultural communication research pursuit in human activities, i.e., the and design context. It studies how the connec- functionality and purpose of a particular genre tion of design and use is dynamically settled in (e.g., sending a resume to solicit for a job in- different interface features by inquiring about terview), is investigated through the form of rules and habits related to genres (e.g., Brown the genre. Therefore, both action and meaning & Duguid, 1994, 1996; Spinuzzi, 2003; Yates in local uses is blended together, and generic & Orlikowki, 1992). It should be noted that features of a technology have developed as a here we focus on technological artifacts rather result of the interplay of regular uses and so- than general artifacts. Technological artifacts, ciocultural influences. One could see traces of as technologies themselves, are defined by the human actions occasioned by the sociocultural core components of technology, instrumentality contexts from the generic features of a genre. and social circulation (Sun, p.17-20, 2012). In For example, a Korean refrigerator’s multi- this sense, the socially recognized interpretive functionality reflects local sociocultural factors.

It not only refrigerates and freezes food, but also conditions, and the present and the past. Going ferments kimchee, a pickled cabbage staple on back to the example of the phone model Ilkone Korea’s dining tables. i800, today all those important phone features The side of a genre as a structural construct for the Muslim community could be packed in comes from the angle of meaning. Influenced small mobile apps on any phone, not have to by Giddens’ structuration theory (1984), Miller be on a particular model any more. (1994) suggests genres are capable of repro- At this stage of the globalization process, ducing social structures with their recurrent when a global telecommunication network nature in situated communication. Research links almost everything into a pervasive (and in organizational communication shows that unfortunately coercive) system, local technol- genres are produced, reproduced, and modified ogy use practices need to be examined in a by individuals through a process of structuring global context. I argue that emerging processes (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992). As technology of technology enactment are not just responses use is socially and culturally shaped, generic to recurrent situations within local institutions, features of a technology carry specific mean- but local uptakes of a global discourse as part ings and maintain local social structures. For of the glocalization, informed by Bakhtin’s dia- example, Ilkone i800, a phone designed for the logism (1981, 1986) and Freadman’s “uptake” Islamic world released in 2004, has a compass (2002) from rhetorical genre theory. According that points to Mecca, a loaded text of the Quran to Freadman, “uptake” refers to a dialogic in Arabic and English, and the lunar calendar process of 1) responding to and 2) taking up used by Muslims to define the calendar holi- and extending the use of texts/acts/practices days. Packed with an attractive Arabic design, responded to. Originating from speech acts this contemporary phone mediates traditional theory, the concept of uptake is recast by Fread- Muslim practices. man to explore the “bidirectional relation” (i.e., The fusion of action and meaning is instan- dialogicality) between texts in rhetorical genre tiated through a structuration process. Through theory (p. 40). While the examples of uptakes recursive social practices with a technology, an usually are interrelated genres in a genre sys- emergent structure of technology use is enacted, tem, such as a proposal as an uptake to a CFP which Orliknowski (2000) names the process (call for proposal), the concept of uptake also of technology enactment. She characterizes the applies to the dialogic relation between various enactment as “a situated and recursive process instances of a same genre, as shown in the case of constitution” (p. 409). Clearly, the process study of this essay. of genre enactment as constituting structures connects “behavioral and structural,” i.e., action and meaning, and thus agency and structure are SINA WEIBO AS A connected across the macro level and the micro LOCAL UPTAKE level. This process both strengthens the current In this essay, the concept of uptake is used to social structure and introduces new changes to study the local variations of a technology across the current system initiated by the technology. the globe, and I maintain all those uptakes form Clearly a genre view connects various levels of a global technology assemblage. In this increas- contexts in theoretical probe (Spinuzzi, 2003) ingly globalized world, a successful technology The structuration process is dialogical, use practice such as Twitter is often diffusing which indicates that a technology-in-use is a through, copied to, and imitated by other locales response to local conditions, and that the practice and contexts and takes on new generic patterns. of technology use is a dialogue between the user Next I will examine such a case. and the technology, the technology and local

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Generic Comparison common practice in countries such as Vietnam and Korea. For example, there were 97 Groupon For people who are not familiar with microblog- clones in Vietnam as of 2011 (Tran, 2012). Wil- ging, Twitter is “an online social networking liam Alford, Professor of Harvard Law School, and microblogging service that enables users points out in his book of “To Steal a Book is to send and read ‘tweets’, which are text mes- an Elegant Offense” (1995) that the Confucian sages limited to 140 characters” (“Twitter,” culture sees intellectual and artistic creation as 2013). The brevity of 140 characters per mes- “transformative engagement with the past” (p. sage influences the ways that Twitter is used 26). This practice entails “selection and adapta- as a medium. For example, it breaks news and tion if it was to be meaningful to oneself, one’s serves as an efficient and effective communi- contemporaries, and one’s successors” (p.25). cation means during the times of disasters and As a result, “the replication of particular con- social movements, as we could see from the crete manifestations of such an endeavor by train collision case. Other distinctive features persons other than those who first give form include hashtags and @username. The former never carried…the ‘dark connotations…it does are words or phrases prefixed with a “#” sign in the West.’” (p. 28). Tracing the development that function as searchable links in the streams of of the intellectual property law from Imperial tweets. Popular hashtags often become trending China to the contemporary Chinese societies, topics on the Twitter homepage, and therefore Alford explains why the current efforts to set hashtags and trends connect individual tweets up intellectual property law in Mainland China to larger themes of the global Tweet conversa- remained unsuccessful. That failure primarily tion. The latter is a user’s Twitter identity, which comes from the incompatibilities of “legal could be used by other people to message him/ values, institutions and forms generated in her or refer to this person in conversation. The the West with the legacy of China’s past and ability of breaking news and messaging each the constraints imposed by its present circum- other makes Twitter a combination of social stances” (p. 2). Given the diversity of the global media and social network service. world where we live, it seems narrow-minded Sina Weibo was regarded as another to advocate and impose one set of intellectual Chinese copycat of Twitter behind the Great property law to all kinds of countries. Firewall of China where Twitter is blocked Indeed what really distinguishes Sina Wei- by the Western world. It adopted all the core bo from many other Chinese copycats and then features from Twitter at the time of launch, makes it a big success should be contributed to including maintaining the 140-character limit, that “transformative engagement with the past.” talking to other people using “@UserName” In that sense, they selected core features of a format, adding hashtags with a slightly differ- popular Western technology from the immediate ent format of “#Hashtag#,” following other past and adapted them by adding unique features people to make his/her posts appear in users’ originating from Chinese Internet culture, such own timeline, and retweeting. Nowadays it as rich media, threaded comment, private chat, integrates well-proved design features from microgroup, and microevent. It should be noted other American social network service websites that some of these features found their way back as well, such as Facebook’s homepage banner to the later versions of Twitter, for instance, and FourSquare’s check-in. embedding rich-media content in the timeline Many American technology entrepreneurs and threading and grouping conversations. In are concerned about this kind of clone practices; the case of rich-media content, Sina users were however, East Asian collectivist cultures have able to embed the content such as pictures, a different view of intellectual property from videos, and audios almost from the beginning the Western individualist culture. As a matter of application launch, and the rich-media of fact, cloning successful technologies is a content is displayed in the timeline in both the

Web version and mobile one, but Twitter did i.e., recursive interaction with a technology not have this feature in the web version until by millions of local users, a new structure of October 2013 (Sippey, 2013)1. technology use is created and introduced into A quick peek into the generic features a local culture. The most notable fact is that between Sina Weibo and Twitter illustrates that Weibo makes it technically possible to get an local technologies are both a behavioral and individual voice heard and therefore grants the structural construct. Next I will compare the subordinated groups discursive power. This has interfaces of the two applications to see how the brought fresh and powerful transforming forces authorship of a message is established in situa- to a country where there is no open journalism tions of replying and retweeting. For replying, and freedom of speech. However, this is not unlike Twitter that displays all the responses to what the Chinese government expected when the original tweet on a flat level, the response they evicted Twitter outside of China and sup- to a Weibo message is set up as a threaded ported local versions of Twitter. comment, under a lower level from the original In China, technology is advocated as “the Weibo message. This imitates the design feature No.1 productive force” that will lead to the of a discussion forum, when people reply to the prosperity and wealth of the state by Deng first post on the same topic. Discussion forums Xiaoping, the reformist leader who introduced are very popular among Chinese Internet users, the Socialist Market Economy to China after and it is natural for Sina to build on that genre the Cultural Revolution. Technology is widely convention. For retweeting, Twitter displays the regarded as a neutral and value-free vehicle original author of a retweeted message in the for accomplishing the goals of “Socialism timeline with a fine print noted as “retweeted with Chinese Characteristics.” Yet technology by” someone one follows. In comparison, what has politics and is never value free (Friedman is displayed on the timeline of Sina Weibo is 1996, 1997; Winner, 1980), particularly when still the people one follows, and the retweeted this technology diffused from another culture message is introduced as a sublevel message. that has a different power system and ideology. In both circumstances, there is a clear As a result, we see various forms of struggle hierarchy of messages in the timeline of Sina and resistance emerging from the use of this Weibo and therefore a hierarchical discursive technology given the value-laden nature of relationship. However, there is not such implied this technological genre in postmodern China. power relationship in the Twitter’s interface, The struggle and resistance occurs on two and all the messages are treated as an equal levels. On the first level, the platform owner, contribution of a conversation. Here different Sina Corp., trudges between employing ad- discursive relationships on Sina Weibo and ditional resources to comply with government Twitter manifest different structuring processes requirements on content and making business behind each technology. As discussed earlier, the revenues. original author of a creation is not necessarily Internal censorship is a common practice important in a Confucian culture when everyone among the UGC (User-Generated Content) participates in the “transformative engagement companies in China. Since the Chinese govern- with the past” collectively. ment watches online Internet activities very closely and will take actions to block certain Value-Laden Technology: content or even shut down the involved websites, Struggle and Resistance it is better to delete a potential trouble-making user post by the company itself rather than to The close reading of Sina Weibo’s techno- get the whole website or some features of the logical features indicates that Sina Weibo is website turned off. This happened before: In deeply rooted in Chinese Internet culture as a March 2012, the commenting feature of Sina technological genre. Through genre enactment, Weibo and other microblogging services was

Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. 34 International Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development, 5(4), 27-37, October-December 2013 shut down for three days by the government to and channel as they brand their new products. stop the spreading of the “rumors” about a coup For example, WeChat, an uprising mobile chat attempt in Beijing (Chao, 2012). application that had 235 million monthly active Sina Corp. conducts internal censorship users worldwide by July 2013(Hong, 2013a), and has been watching their user accounts downscaled its content publishing channel in very closely. According to the research done its recent update. by a group of computer scientists (Zhu, Phipps, As to Sina Weibo, it has placed a lot of ef- Pridgen, Crandall, & Wallach, 2013), Sina’s forts for moving to the direction of a platform internal censorship is efficient and rigorous, and of social media marketing. After selling 18% its content department responded to sensitive share to the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Weibo posts in a timely manner and removed in May 2013, Sina Weibo changed its timeline them very fast. 35% of deletions occurred within display to be a “Weibo-Taobao” platform in 5-10 minutes of posting, and another 60% did August which facilitates shopping on the e- within a day. Particularly those users who had commerce site of Taobao owned by Alibaba a history of more deleted posts tended to get (Hong, 2013b): A new form of Taobao product their posts deleted more quickly than other users listing is included in the timeline which consists who had no previous records. of price, product popularity, and a “Buy” but- This internal censorship is exercised ton. While this move is apparently driven by through a combined system of machine and the pressure from its stockholders and its own human beings at Sina Corp. It hires hundreds craze for business revenue, it is also a tactics of content inspectors to review just-published to eschew the “stigma” coming from Twitter, Weibo messages (Yan, 2013). Computers first a tool for promoting democracy in the Chinese screen the posts with highly sensitive words that political context. However, technology has its are not allowed for being published and block implicit values and inherent features. While them from posting right away. For the posts Sina Weibo works hard to brand itself as a that include possibly sensitive words in original social marketing platform, it has grown into an posts or in commentaries, the computers would increasingly influential political forum, even give a green light for publishing temporarily though it did not intend to. and then forward those published posts to the The second level of struggle and resistance content inspectors who will make the final occurs between Sina Weibo users and the decision for deletion or not. This procedure of microblogging platform. Under the coordi- human involvement is important, as machines nated censorship between Sina Weibo and the cannot detect sensitive words buried in a long government, Weibo users have been trained Weibo message in a picture format2. Two shifts to be sophisticated rhetoricians in using puns, of content inspectors, more than 70 people per alternative wording, and even memes to achieve group, examine the content of Sina Weibo 24 communication goals. For example, an image of by 7. Each inspector needs to review about river crab has been a popular Internet pun and 60,000 messages every day in a 12-hour shift. meme in China, which represents “censorship.” It is not a small cost for a high-tech company The phrase of river crab has the similar pronun- such as Sina Corp. to maintain a big group of ciation in Chinese as Harmony, the advocated content inspectors. People joked it functioning societal goal to solve the class conflict and as a labor-intensive business rather than as a societal unbalance due to huge social injustice technology-intensive one as its Western compa- and inequality in China. Therefore, the image rable. In fact, the high expense for self-censoring of river crab has been adopted as Internet slang UGC content has deterred some Chinese IT in reference to Internet censorship. When posts companies from arising to be the transforming on a forum have been deleted due to censor- power for democracy. Instead they chose to di- ship, people would say the posts have been minish their capabilities of being a media outlet “harmonized” or “river crabbed.”

IMPLICATIONS dress “emergent structure of technology use” in different culture. It sees the emergent structure To conclude, I argue that Sina Weibo, which of technology use as a stabilized assemblage started as a copycat, arises as a local uptake of of articulations through structuration. When a global technology assemblage. technology use is only interpreted from one In my earlier work (Sun, 2012), I describe local cultural context, our attention tends to go a technological genre as “a stabilized assem- to the behavioral aspect of the genre formation. blage of articulations, for the time being, in Therefore we are more interested in exploring an ongoing process of structuration” (p.69). how its design features address the previously Here the notion of assemblage is influenced unmet needs in certain use contexts, e.g., the by Latour’s actor-network theory (2005) and brevity of 140 characters of Twitter makes it Deleuze and Guattari’s work (1987). “An as- super convenient and fast for communication semblage constitutes ‘singularities and traits’ during times of disasters. Yet the introduction deducted from the articulations, but does not of the local-global dyad makes it much clearer reduce complex connections and relationships to see the discursive dimension of a genre by of a network (or a structure) to an essence or analyzing how a technology responds to local a critical factor” (Sun, 2012, p.63). To put this structuring forces, as shown in the case of the way, an assemblage does not necessarily have unique timeline of Sina Weibo. a hierarchical structure or center as a system, Analyzing the dialogic relationship of which precisely depicts the complex interactions local uptakes demonstrates that local uptakes between entities and their constant movement represent the pulling forces that re-assert local and flows in the contemporary condition. By agency against the pushing force of globalizing the same token, I see the local variation (e.g., trends towards homogeneity and synchroniza- Sina Weibo) of a globally diffusing technology tion at this stage of globalization. The dynamic (e.g., Twitter) is an uptake of a global technol- and dialogical structuring process behind genre ogy assemblage. Furthermore, as there is no formation worldwide manifests the complex center in this assemblage, the globally diffus- interactions of technology and culture in our ing technology itself such as Twitter could be “technological culture” (Slack & Wise, 2005). regarded as both the core technology and an uptake situated in a certain cultural context. Together these local variations—uptakes – REFERENCES form an open, globally networked assemblage with dialogic relations flowing between the Alford, W. (1995). To steal a book is an elegant elements: Local uptakes share similar tech- offense: Intellectual property law in Chinese civili- zation. Standford, CA: Standford University Press. nological affordances (Sun & Hart-Davidson, 2014) and generic features; the technological Anti, M. (2012). Behind the great firewall of China. affordances evolve all the time to account for Retrieved February 27, 2013, from http://www.ted. the ongoing structuration; and a successful use com/talks/lang/en/michael_anti_behind_the_great_ firewall_of_china.html for a particular task in one locale—the successful response to one situation—is expected to be Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination reproduced in another locale (e.g., embedding four essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. rich-media content in the timeline of a micro- Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other blogging service). late essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Understanding a local technology as a Bazerman, C. (1997). The life of genre, the life in local uptake of a global assemblage brings the classroom. In W. Bishop, & H. Ostrom (Eds.), valuable insights to technology studies. The Genre and writing: Issues, arguments, alternatives notion of uptake provides a framework to ad- (pp. 19–26). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton.

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