Department of Informatics and Media

Master’s Programme in Social Sciences, Digital Media and Society specialization

Two-year Master’s Thesis

Pastoral Nostalgia and Digital Media: A Case Study Exploring Nostalgia Communication in Li Ziqi’s Online Short Videos

Student: Jinpei Deng ​ Supervisor: Helga Sadowski ​

August 2020

Abstract

The primary goal of this study is to observe how the meaning of nostalgia is negotiated and remediated in Li Ziqi’s short videos, and understand the construction and expression of pastoral images in the video, by examining its social modality of the audiencing site and the compositional and social modalities of the image site through a Critical Visual Approach(CVA). Except for CVA, Remix as a thinking tool helps to frame data selection, mixed methods and theories throughout. To be specific, the aim of this study is to examine Li Ziqi’s communication of nostalgia online via short videos, showcases how the pastoral characteristics are evoked in the videos and the relationship between nostalgia of pastoral life and short videos. Moreover, it is of interest to think about what nostalgia communication on short videos say about society. When it comes to the two sites, firstly, an ethnographic method of thick descriptions is used to study media text and selected comments on the audiencing site. Secondly, on the image site, compositional analysis on selected visual materials is used to examine its compositions and then signs and meanings embedded in them are analyzed through semiotic analysis and interpreted by thick descriptions. As for theories, nostalgia and media, the logic of social acceleration, remediation and new media, and simulacra and simulation are applied to facilitate discussion.

Keywords: Nostalgia, pastoral nostalgia, short videos, new media, Li Ziqi, communication, ​ critical visual analysis, semiotics, remix, Sina Weibo, online videos, digital

1

Table of Contents

Abstract 1

Table of Contents 2

List of Figures and Tables 4

Preface 5

1 Introduction 6 1.1 Background: Li Ziqi’s Online Short Videos 6 1.1.1 Li Ziqi and the Chinese Rural Life Published Through MCN 8 1.1.2 Arguments Concerning the Authenticity of Her Pastoral Life 10 1.2 Defining Nostalgia 10 1.3 New Media of Short Videos in China as a Product of a Fast-Paced Lifestyle 12 1.4 Aim and Research Questions 13 1.5 Disposition 14

2 Literature Review 15 2.1 Studies on Nostalgia and Media 15 2.2 Reasons to Study Pastoral Nostalgia 19

3 Theoretical Framework 20 3.1 Types of Nostalgia and Media 21 3.2 The Logic of Social Acceleration and Temporal Structure 22 3.3 Remediation and New Media 24 3.4 Simulacra and Simulation 25

4 Methodology 26 4.1 A Critical Framework and Remix Method 27 4.1.1 A Critical Approach 27 4.1.2 Remix: a Tool of Thinking About Methods 28 4.2 Mixed Method 30 4.2.1 Methodological Tools and Selection of Methods 30 4.2.2 An Ethnographic Method of ‘Thick Description’ 32 4.2.3 Compositional Interpretation and Semiotics 34 4.3 Data Selection 36 4.4 Data Sampling 38 4.5 Coding and Analytical Procedure 44

2

4.6 Ethics 46

5 Results and Analysis 47 5.1 An Overview 48 5.2 Through the Image Site of CVM 48 5.2.1 Content: 48 5.2.2 Color: 52 5.2.3 Spatial Organization: 56 5.3 A Mixture of Studying Audiencing Site of CVM and Media Text 61 5.3.1 The Audiencing Site of CVM and Media Text Study: Nostalgic Narratives 61 5.3.2 Media Text Study: A Simulacrum of Ideal Life 69

6 Discussion and Concluding Remarks 72 6.1 Critical Discussion 73 6.1.1 A Critical Discussion of the Image Site 73 6.1.2 A Critical Discussion of Studying Media Text 75 6.2 Research Questions Reiterated 77 6.3 Limitations and Implications for Future Research 79

References 82

Appendices 89 Appendix 1: A Mind Map of the Methodological Framework 89 Appendix 2: A Screenshot of Compositional Analysis to the Video 90 Appendix 3: A Screenshot of Comment Analysis 91

3

List of Figures and Tables Figure 1.1...... 7 Figure 4.1...... 41 Figure 4.2...... 41 Figure 4.3...... 46 Figure 5.1...... 52 Figure 5.2...... 55 Figure 5.3...... 64 Figure 5.4...... 66

Table 4.1...... 32 Table 4.2...... 38 Table 4.3...... 42

4

Preface

First and foremost, I am thankful to my supervisor Helga Sadowski for her thoughtful comments and recommendations on this thesis. I would like to express my gratitude to my examiner Martina Ladendorf for guiding me to develop critical discussion and for her feedback on thesis revision. I would like to thank Sarah Schwarz from the Department of Scandinavian Languages at Uppsala University for helping me with written and spoken English. I would like to thank Ylva Ekström and Bóas Hallgrímsson from the Department of Informatics and Media for the considerate guidance and support.

I am eternally grateful to have my dear friends: Xingxing, Benzhong, Aji, Tanling and May in my life for always listening to me, supporting me and encouraging me. To conclude, I cannot forget to thank my family for the unconditional support in my entire academic journey.

5

1 Introduction

1.1 Background: Li Ziqi’s Online Short Videos

Li Ziqi’s short video ‘Childhood Taste: Snacks for Spring Festival in Memories’ on Sina Weibo (published on the 30th Jan 2019) begins with an image of chestnuts on the ground and a rustling sound from leaves and footsteps, followed by the scene of Li Ziqi backpacking a bamboo pack basket and searching for chestnuts in the open. She is surrounded by two puppies and a sheep. The above scenes seem to display an ordinary day in the countryside. After picking up chestnuts, she takes the puppies and lamb home. At this time, a high-angle shot shows Li Ziqi, with small animals behind her, going home along the wind-blown weeds, giving people a feeling of peace in the vast world (see Figure 1.1).

At 40 seconds into the clip, Li Ziqi returns to the yard, calling out affectionately to her 'grandma' who is warming up around the bonfire in the yard, waiting for her. Except for communicating with her grandma, she hardly speaks anymore or deliberately looks into the camera. The puppies and lambs that follow her all the time surrounded her feet. She skillfully pours out the chestnuts that she has just picked up in the mountains from the back cage and uses tongs to remove the thorns wrapped around the chestnuts while sitting on a small bench in the yard. Two plates are quickly filled with chestnuts. Then the camera moves, she takes the chestnuts to the kitty oven she made, scoops out the charcoal fire with a shovel, and starts roasting the chestnuts. The camera turns again. The lamb is eating radish leaves in the yard. At this time, Li Ziqi is already holding stalks of wheat, wooden sticks, and vise to prepare the ingredients for rock candied haws. The next ingredients are already placed in front of the small table. Next is the cleaning part. She sits at the table where she always prepares food, red bacon and sausages hanging on the wall and green plants decorating the background. It gives the audience a sense of tranquility and simplicity. She cooks one dish methodically and quietly, brings it to the table, and goes back to the kitchen for the next dish. At the end of the video, the scene returns to her and her grandmother again. This is the most common scene in Li Ziqi's video since the end of 2017. She

6

carefully arranges the food on the plate and shares it with the grandma, surrounded by the puppy and lamb by the bonfire. The video ends with a burst of harmonious laughter.

This is also a typical scene in the video of Li Ziqi, the subject of this article. The video tries its best to express the tranquility and beauty of rural life in terms of content, sound, and spatial organization. At the same time, the young woman in the video is elegant and agile. It brings a sense of nostalgia to the tranquility of an ancient hideaway and a calming feeling by staying away from the hustle and bustle of the city. If the audience is attentive enough, they can already find out many objects that symbolize nostalgia in the video, such as baskets, kitchen utensils, cauldrons, and objects referencing pastoral life used by Li Ziqi. But at the same time, among other doubts and debates brought up by social media, are the beautiful images real? Is the image presented by Li Ziqi a real country life or a beautified mimicry?

Figure 1.1 Screenshot of the Scene from Li Ziqi’s Video “Childhood Taste: Snacks for Spring Festival in memories.”

The descriptions of the scenes above should give readers an indication of what type of pastoral characters are embedded in Li Ziqi’s short video, as well as the feeling of nostalgia evoked. After a glimpse of Li Ziqi’s video content and the concerns around her, to help readers have a better understanding of the phenomenon and the context, a brief overview of Li Ziqi, her network, and the rural China where she shots the video is presented below, as well as the online debates

7

around her. Moreover, it is essential to explain the development of short videos in China and the characters of short videos at the fast pace of modern life as a background.

1.1.1 Li Ziqi and the Chinese Rural Life Published Through MCN

Li Ziqi is a short video blogger known for displaying traditional Chinese cuisine with beautiful lens language and a simple aesthetic tone on multi-channel networks with a large amount of the audience at home and abroad. Although she lives in rural Sichuan with her elderly grandmother, she introduces pastoral life to people all over the world through digital platforms. In her lens, she displays clothing, food, housework, and all aspects of rural life following the changes of seasons. From brewing soy sauce to making wormwood dumplings, from woolen wool to cloaks and ancient papermaking, this girl seems to be handy in all sorts of rural labor. She appears in the camera silently while she elegantly works all the time as if she is omnipotent with her magic hands. According to Li Ziqi’s account on Weibo’s post, the ability comes from her experience in rural life from childhood when she watched and helped her grandpa cook as a chef in the village. She went to the city at 14 for a better life after her grandpa passed away. After 8 years’ struggling in the city, she returned home and decided to stay there to take care of her ill grandmother in 2012. The story from her childhood and her love to her grandparents later set the tone of the theme in her video.

To make a living at home, in March 2016, Li Ziqi published her first short video on the theme of farmhouse food and cooking skills on social media to advertise her online shop at Taobao which is the world's biggest e-commerce website according to Alexa. Back then, she used a cheap camera and edited videos on the phone before releasing them. She started to gain attention and clicks from her peach blossom wine making video on Mar 25th, 2016, after many trials. From 2017 with her popularity growing and her videos going viral, she hired a commercial team to help her run the production of short videos. It was from that time that the quality of her videos was noticeably raised in aesthetics with a cinematic feel. She also made a commercial success by registering the “Li Ziqi” trademark and selling food that appeared in her short videos (Li Ziqi.fan).

8

Organic food and wholesome lifestyle, what she presents is the natural cornucopia of the earth's bounty from old times, which is a lifestyle disappearing in modern society. In other words, she provides netizens an emotional habitat to escape from the pressure of urban life. Li Ziqi has become a remarkable phenomenon in short video production and distribution in China, not only because of her huge amount of followers and great popularity at home and abroad but also because she is acknowledged as an outstanding example for exporting traditional culture by Chinese mainstream media such as state media and by social media.

Besides her skills in farm work, food making, and handcrafts, she shot, edited, and published videos at the beginning. Over time, Li Ziqi started a multi-channel network (MCN) to publish her videos on different platforms at the same time. By MCN, it means that the video content is basically the same on her multiple platforms, except that the subtitles of those videos are adapted to the style of platforms accordingly, as well as different numbers of followers since the platforms aim at specific content and different target audiences. Taking her three popular platforms as examples, the account of ‘李子柒’(Li Ziqi in Chinese characters) has 5.559 million followers and 124 videos on Bilibili until the end of April 2020, a Chinese video-sharing website themed around animation, comic, and game, famous for its bullet-screen comments by which users can add commentary subtitles on videos. On Chinese Twitter-like Sina Weibo, one of her most active platforms, there are a number of more than 24.5 million followers (data acquired on April 30th, 2020) under the account ‘李子柒’(Li Ziqi in Chinese characters). As to the most ​ active platform, it refers that she replies and receives the most comments here on average by comparing the different platforms. Meanwhile on YouTube, ‘李子柒 LiZiqi’ has a number of 10 million followers abroad (data acquired on April 30th, 2020). With a top 5 category rank on YouTube (https://app.hypeauditor.com/en/youtube/li_zi_qi_liZiqi-UCoC47do520os_4DBMEFGg4A/), she can be seen as an expert as a How-to & Lifestyle video blogger of YouTube communicative ecology (Burgess and Green, 2009, p.57). Just on the 29th April 2020, the followers of Li Ziqi on YouTube channel reached 10 million which made her the first Chinese content producer who had ever attained this achievement on YouTube (Sina Technology, April 29th, 2020).

9

1.1.2 Arguments Concerning the Authenticity of Her Pastoral Life

Li Ziqi is popular yet controversial. Despite her popularity, there have always been debates on the authenticity of the countryside life in China presented in her videos. Some worry that she misleads the urban audiences by presenting a perfect image of rural China and diminishing the harshness of farm work. At the end of 2019, there was a heated discussion around Li Ziqi on Chinese mainstream media, China’s Twitter-like Weibo, as well as some other social media platforms in China. Discussions on her were focused on different angles, for instance, the hashtag # Is Li’s channel a cultural export # and # Does Li present a real country life in China? # Furthermore, there were some people questioning how real she is as a peasant working in the fields while looking perfectly coiffed and beautiful in front of the camera.

In Li’s videos, she presents a romantically pastoral life by making traditional Chinese food and handcrafts, such as clothes, bamboo furniture, silky worm quilts, and so on, from scratch. Interestingly, since the image of herself has blended with her video so deeply and has integrated into a brand of pastoral life, many people assume what happens in the video reveals her real life or some do not care about the blurring of two differences anymore as long as her video meets their fantasy of an ideal life. No matter what, Li Ziqi has become a household name and a sign in the online world in relation to pastoral life. The audience interprets her with different focuses. Some people see the philosophy of living harmoniously with nature, some capture the commercial opportunity in the countryside, some feel nostalgia, while others appreciate her DIY skills, and her hard-working (Xue, 2019; Dai, 2019).

1.2 Defining Nostalgia

To set the scene for the purpose of the study, this part first introduces the origin and evolution of nostalgia, as well as dissects the various definitions of nostalgia in different fields.

Etymologically, nostalgia is promoted by the two Greek words ‘nostos’ meaning returning home and ‘algia’ meaning longing or reminiscence (Boym, 2001, p. 24). Yet it did not originate from

10

Greece, instead, it dates back to 1688 when a Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer created the term “nostalgia” in a medical paper and treated it as a mental illness which might show physical symptoms ranging from mild ones such as nausea, loss of appetite to serious signs such as suicidal tendencies. Often it happens to those who arrive in foreign countries. When it comes to the medical solution, the possible ways to recover are returning home at once, leeches, opium, etc (2001, P. 25).

It was until the beginning of the 20th century that nostalgia was regarded as a psychiatric disorder. Soon after, it was taken as a depression accompanied by a sensation of loss and regret because of homesickness (Sedikides, et. al. 2008). From the late 20th century, an independent meaning of nostalgia other than homesickness emerged. The New Oxford Dictionary of English defines nostalgia as “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations” (1998, p. 1266). A similar definition in Merriam-webster is “a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nostalgia). Both definitions refer nostalgia to a pensiveness of happiness and positivity that only exists in the old time. Here, to distinguish them, homesickness is associated with the origin one comes from, while nostalgia refers to the past which not necessarily refers to home but can also be “events, persons or sights” (Sedikides, et. al. 2004). Some believe that nostalgia provides people with an emotional link to a utopian world (Turner, 1987). From the end of the 20th century with the popularity of the use of nostalgia, Fred Davis (1979) claims the wider scale of nostalgia including its commodification. He considers that nostalgia is deeply rooted in the social relations and social structure of an era.

In her work The Future of Nostalgia, Boym (2001) considers nostalgia as a yearning for a home ​ ​ that is not there anymore or has never been there, which implies it is “a sentiment of loss and displacement”, as well as “a romance with one’s own fantasy” (2001, p.12). She also argues that instead of a yearning for somewhere, nostalgia is more like a desire for a period where a happy childhood and slower pace exist. Nostalgia in this sense is resistance to time and progress in an

11

age of social acceleration (2001, p. 15), and it might get popular when frustration or dissatisfaction happens to someone in their present lives. Moreover, the truth is that nostalgics often find the feeling elusive and hard to define what they long for exactly and there is no universal rule to perceive it (2001, p. 22). Boym states, “Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals” (2001, p. 23). Klinina more recently mentions that temporal nostalgia and spatial nostalgia have always been intertwined and have never been isolated from each other (Klinina, 2016, p. 8). The integration of the two kinds is also looked at as nostalgia in most cases considered to be an emotional attachment to the past or “a version of the past” (Niemeyer, 2014, p. 216). People may experience nostalgia for different reasons, for instance, most commonly, “a longing for past childhood, family home, perhaps country of origin” (Niemeyer, 2014, p. 216).

1.3 New Media of Short Videos in China as a Product of a Fast-Paced Lifestyle

There have been tremendous changes in social development in contemporary China since the implementation of an economic reform policy called “Reform and Opening Up” in 1978. Unprecedented economic growth took place from 1978 until 2013 with an increasing rate of 9.5% per year (Fang, 2018: 26(2), 1-22). The economic growth and other aspects of social change happened due to “modernity by urbanization, reform of state-owned enterprises and joining the World Trade Organization (WTO)” (Gu, 2019, p2). What was accompanied by the changes was a large amount of migrations from rural to urban areas. In this case, the experience of going to the city to strive for a better life then return home to look after the elderly empty-nesters in the countryside is not only Li Ziqi’s personal story but also a collective experience of the post-80 and -90 generations. In between, the feeling of being displaced from home is related to nostalgia. Therefore, this should be marked as an important aspect of the social context of Li Ziqi’s social environment.

The phenomenon of "fast" is widespread and everyone has got involved. In an accelerated society, people's life rhythm is getting faster while they have less time and more things to do, as the pressure and anxiety become prominent (Zeng & Shi, 2020). It can be said that contemporary

12

China has stepped into an era of "national anxiety" (Zeng & Shi, 2020). Moreover, anxiety is no longer just an occasional psychological symptom at the individual level. It has become a persistent social mentality, as well as a widespread life experience (Wang, 2015, p184). Zeng & Shi (2020) believe that anxiety has become an illness in the current world and it is an emotional expression of feeling uncertain under social acceleration.

As a consequence, the market for short videos in China has been rocketing. According to “The 45th China Statistical Report on Internet Development" from Cyberspace Administration of China (2020.4.28), "As of March 2020, the number of online video users in China has reached 850 million, accounting for 94.1% of the total Internet users, and the number of short video users is 773 million, accounting for 85.6% of the total Internet users." Short videos are inherently simple, direct, fast-spreading, and low threshold.

Nowadays, the prevalence of short videos is closely linked to the fragmented life and work as well as time anxiety. On one hand, short videos are convenient to watch on the short breaks during work and life regardless of locations and timing; on the other hand, people don't have to engage fully and think in-depth while watching short videos. Hence, the aesthetic feature of short videos is characterized by speed, which is totally different from traditional media like movies, TV programs, documentary, etc. When it comes to the expression of pastoral nostalgia, short videos as the product of the accelerated society provide a powerful platform for content producers to display the nostalgia that mainly exists in people’s minds. By making use of the short video, content producers combine new media with rural life to monetize the network traffic, displaying varied sides of rural life in China.

1.4 Aim and Research Questions

The primary goal of this study is to observe how the meaning of nostalgia is negotiated in Li Ziqi’s short videos, and to understand the construction and expression of pastoral nostalgia. It explores what the elements of pastoral nostalgia are and how they are expressed in Li Ziqi’s short videos. In light of the above, the study aims to answer the main research question “How is

13

communication of pastoral nostalgia like in Li Ziqi’s short videos?” This main research question broken down into the following sub-questions:

1. How is the nostalgia of pastoral life transformed and remediated in the analyzed videos? 2. What is the relationship between nostalgia and Li Ziqi’s short videos on Weibo? 3. What does nostalgia communication on short videos say about society?

The first sub-question focuses on ‘how’ and the construction of pastoral characters from the visual site by looking at the process of transformation and remediation of pastoral nostalgia on the platform. The question tries to explore how Li Ziqi delivers pastoral images to the public by repackaging her farm life through the videos. The study intends to explore the reasons behind the trend of the popularity of Li Ziqi’s pastoral construction. It thus considers a critical visual study, as well as the implementation of compositional interpretation, semiotic analysis and thick descriptions. The second question looks into the relationship between nostalgia and short videos, where it is possible to observe the communication on both the image site and the audiencing site. Both questions will be answered through data collection and analysis that entails the observation of a sequence of Li Ziqi’s videos. The third question explores the social meaning of the discussion on authenticity of pastoral life in the videos, as well as nostalgia communication as a whole process in this study. The discussion is based on the overall context that people in modern society suffer from the impact of social acceleration and they look for escapism through watching online videos to meet their imagination of the ideally good life as Li Ziqi’s videos show.

1.5 Disposition

To help readers have a better understanding of the research questions, in the first chapter, a brief introduction to the subject including the aim of this study and research questions is presented, and it details the case of Li Ziqi and short videos as background knowledge. Chapter 1 is made of five subsections. Li Ziqi’s short videos, the Chinese rural life, and her multi-channel networks are first introduced. It is followed by the introduction of the history of defining nostalgia. The

14

third section of this chapter brings in the background of new media of short videos in China as a product of a fast-paced lifestyle. The fourth section introduces the research questions and a research problem description. In order to answer the research questions in this study, chapter 2 provides an overview of previous research on nostalgia within the media. Thereafter, chapter 3 presents a theoretical framework consisting of media and nostalgia, simulacra and simulation, the logic of social acceleration, as well as remediation and new media. Following that, chapter 4 discusses the methodology where methods of sampling and analyzing are presented as the emphasis. Furthermore, ethical consideration is included. Chapter 5 is about the result and the analysis of data. Finally, chapter 6 consists of the concluding discussion, as well as the limitations and possible proposals for further research.

2 Literature Review

2.1 Studies on Nostalgia and Media

Nostalgia expression online is not a new thing, for instance, the application of faux-vintage photos (Jurgenson, 2011) which indicates a way of reproducing photos so that they look like old goods produced years ago, through the ‘Filters’ function on Instagram which is a social media platform famous for its photo-sharing and digital filters. Other examples such as the vinyl records come back in style and “[...]media design adopts new products to the vintage appeal of ​ old media technologies. TV dramas, music styles, advertisements, and product design alike are flirting with the charms and lifestyles of the past.” (Menke & Schwarzenegger, 2016, p. 2). Yet, ​ ​ ​ there has been little detailed discussion on how pastoral nostalgia is presented via short videos, especially in the context of online celebrities in a fast-paced era. As for nostalgia in short videos, it is not merely a phenomenon happening in China. Internet celebrities expressing nostalgia become popular around the world. In Sweden for instance, the internet celebrity Jonna Jinton who lives a life in a way of reliving her childhood memories in her grandparents’ peaceful village. She builds her own website and posts blogs and vlogs based on her nostalgia and peaceful life, as well as sells products and builds her business in rural north through social media

15

(https://jonnajinton.se/; https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAk3t7WHs2zjsZpopox8Taw). On ​ ​ ​ ​ her own webpage, there are nostalgia narratives recalling the happy childhood time with her grandparents, implying the nostalgia for something from the past. “On evenings like this, the ​ childhood memories from Grundtjärn come out so extra strongly. It is enough that a small evening breeze brings with it a scent reminiscent of then, for my heart to stop and I almost want to cry for a while. Not because I'm sad, but because it feels so strong. Because it's so beautiful. Because it is reminiscent of a time that no longer exists. With people who are no longer alive. Grandma and grandpa. ” (Jinton, https://jonnajinton.se/nostalgi/) ​

On Reddit, there are posts of Li Ziqi’s video as an example of non-eurocentric cottagecore under the topic ‘Cottagecore’. Also known as farmcore, cottagecore is an aesthetic movement inspired by a soothing, escapist interpretation of the life of living in a cabin in the woods, romanticized pastoral life (aesthetics.fandom). Common themes include plants, animals, rural kitchens, and straw (r/cottagecore reddit). Although hashtags and posts about the coziness of countryside life have been a mainstream theme on social media, it’s not until 2018 that the term “cottagecore” was coined (Jennings, 2020). It has proliferated online in 2020 when the COVID-19 hit, experiencing a boom on platforms like Tumblr, which has seen a massive spike in engagement with cottagecore content with posts up by 153%, likes by 541%, and reblogs by 644% (Haasch, 2020). This is in line with What Boym (2001) proposes, as mentioned in section 1.2, that nostalgia is more like a desire for a period of slower life and a rejection to fast-paced time (2001, p. 15), and it might get popular when people are preoccupied with unhappiness.

The irony is that people are forced to practice social distancing and trapped alone inside cluttered apartments alone, but cottagecore contents include the element of isolation. One of the reasons for that is the root of cottagecore oriented from the minimalist aesthetic, which is the desire to control your space, and in turn, your life. Most of the cottagecore content shows the netizens how to grow plants, raise animals, or bake bread. The fantasy of a self-providing lifestyle is a response to the global crisis when every resource one needs is out of one’s control. The DIY elements idealize a sustainable, environmental friendly lifestyle that is crucial for the future in

16

the after-epidemic era (Haasch, 2020). David Gauntlett also discusses this in “Making is Connecting” (Gauntlett, 2019), talking about everyday creativity is not just a sweet kind of sideshow compared to some serious political or social concerns. It is crucial and political because people made a choice to make things themselves instead of consuming goods through suppliers. It then relates to how to view and deal with the world, therefore, some significant or political changes could happen by stemming from it.

The second is that cottagecore contents include many calming elements (Haasch, 2020), which is quite understandable in an era defined by anxiety and uncertainty. This is in line with Gauntlett’s thoughts (2019) that in a time of ‘money buys everything’ where so many people feel alienated with the goods they use. Therefore, it becomes relevant to explore spaces like Li’s channel where individuals can perceive creativity so that they can obtain a sense of security. Li Ziqi sets an example of being creative by using some ordinary recipes in the daily scenes in her videos and it fosters a sense of shared feelings and common sense between makers and viewers. For instance, one YouTube user says: “Art is not only the painting but the things used on it and the time consumed in order to make a remarkable and wonderful painting”. Moreover, netizens talk about all the goods Li made just like talking about their friends. They are so familiar with her work and surroundings. This is the presence of the maker in the things she made, and it is creativity as a process and interaction with others. “It fosters a sense of shared feeling and common cause, even when the maker and the audience never meet” (Gauntlett, 2019, p. 256).

Interestingly, cottagecore aesthetics exist almost exclusively online. Most of the fans do not necessarily adopt the lifestyle of cottagecore, they just post and participate in the community formed online. One of the reasons is that most of them live in urban apartments or suburban bedrooms (Jennings, 2020). Buying a house in rural wood without internet access is not realistic. The cotagecore aesthetics is more of a state of mind than an actual solution. Fans have a vision of romanticized ideal life that human and nature is always in harmony and everything one needs is always within reach. Therefore, this lifestyle could be a future that urban netizens hope to adopt.

17

Back to scholars’ work on nostalgia, so far, there have been researchers studying the connection between Instagram and nostalgia (Meijers, 2015; Nguyen, 2017), for instance, the aesthetics of images with a trend of old modes, the ‘illusionist technology’ vs the new kind of nostalgia called ‘Instant Nostalgia on Instagram’ (Meijers, 2015, p. 14), as well as Instagram as the new form of digital media makes use of nostalgia through applying the retro aesthetics of old media (Nguyen, 2017). However, nostalgia on short videos as a new form of digital media applied to different social media platforms gain little attention in scholarly work. The following part will focus more on nostalgia expressions in China. In his PhD dissertation “The construction of nostalgia in screen media in the context of postsocialist China” (Gu, 2019), Gu identifies that nostalgic culture is displayed in different forms of screen media in the past thirty years in China. He argues that the nostalgic culture has been shaped together by the screen media industry and the Chinese government for political and lucrative reasons. On the political side, for instance, “the urban-rural divide, urbanisation, commercialisation, and youth experience”(Gu, 2019, p1) in the context of postsocialist China have affected the nostalgic expression. Gu states that “[...]three ​ kinds of nostalgic culture have been portrayed on the Chinese screen since the 1990s, attempting to transport viewers back to different types of ‘home’ within various social contexts” (p. 2), in ​ which “Each of these screen media evokes different longings for the past: some for enthusiasm ​ and passion, some for innocence, and some for simple everyday life. Such diverse nostalgias also carry different functions, as some tend to engage with social issues and have political motivations, while others lean more towards being seen as commodities to attract the screen market.” (p. 2). The paper tries to understand the dynamics between socio-economic and political ​ contexts by looking at five different forms of screen media texts in movies, internet drama, and TV documentaries (Gu, 2019).

In a special issue Media & Zeit (Menke & Schwarzenegger, 2016.4), there were concentrative ​ ​ discussions on nostalgia from a communication and media perspective where a wide range of topics were researched by media scholars. They mainly presented how nostalgia is entangled with the past, present, and future. As the editors, Manuel Menke and Christian Schwarzenegger

18

(2016, p. 2) concluded the recent trend of studying media and nostalgia. They mentioned that political events including the Brexit campaign, ‘Take back control’, and ‘Make America great again’ were indeed nostalgic discourses and strategies by reminiscing the good past and resisting the present to promise a better future. In an age of digital media occupying our life, through sharing past stories online, using nostalgia as a strategy of commodification and many other experiences related to the old time, it is possible for people to understand their identities. Nostalgia therefore could relate to “[...]political orientations, social norms, and cultural values” (2016, p. 3). Kalinina (2016) studied relations between media and nostalgia, as well as how vital that media is for nostalgic productions nowadays. About the commodification of nostalgia, as Niemeyer suggests, when nostalgia as a strategy is used for marketing and commercial purposes, it is only a sentimental construction of the past and media is an important role in this construction (Niemeyer, 2014). As we can see, there are some economic studies of nostalgia regarding consumer behavior (Marchegiani & Phau, 2010; Chen, Yeh. & Huan, T. 2014), as well as it being used for consumer purposes (Baer, 2001). Gu(2019) also considers that commodity attribute is one of the aims coming along with nostalgic construction. Other disciplines have literature related to nostalgia such as sociological (Keightley & Pickering, 2006), psychological (Vuennet, 2009).

2.2 Reasons to Study Pastoral Nostalgia

As a study of cultural expression via digital media, the research focuses on the socio-cultural dimension of the Li Ziqi phenomenon and the nostalgic expression in her videos. As we are aware, people who live in the city nowadays buy everything from the shop without knowing where they come from and they also lose the patience to wait for the whole year to see the sowing and harvesting. However, they find Li Ziqi’s video brings them back the happiness of knowing how things come out and the pleasure of living with a pastoral life. In the meantime, people complain about not having enough time all the time and they do not even have the patience to review the news that happened yesterday. After watching her videos one by one and browsing the comment section and news reportage on her, a feeling of nostalgia and the yearning for old time are obtained.

19

Among the many perspectives to look at in the Li Ziqi phenomenon, the nostalgic construction through short videos and what this might reflect on the connection between media and our society are the parts I am most interested in. The nostalgic feeling is a sentiment I am familiar with and nostalgia has been a keyword in my personal life since I left my parents’ place to boarding high school at 15 years old. At the end of 2019, there have been intense debates about Li Ziqi on Chinese Twitter-like Weibo and Chinese Quora-like ZhiHu where netizens argue around her passionately and sometimes acrimoniously. Unlike others, she is a typical online influencer that was first famous abroad and then caught attention in China. Curiously, I clicked on the videos of her YouTube channel named “李子柒LiZiqi” and could not stop watching the videos all afternoon. “I would also love to live her life.” I thought. It reminded me of each summer and winter break living with my grandparents in the countryside of China when I was a kid. Even though the memory fades over time, a sense of intimacy came over me when I watched her videos.

When it comes to the research, to apply thick description and semiotic analysis in this case, it asks the researcher to be an insider to know well about the research object. As for this, I am familiar with the life which Li Ziqi displays in the video not only because I am a Chinese who understands the traditional cultural signs and connotations embedded in her content, but also because I have seen familiar scenes at my grandparents’ home in my childhood. Located in Li Ziqi’s neighboring province which is southwestern China, there are many customs and cultures in common at my grandparents’ place compared to Li Ziqi’s hometown. Now that I have grown up and lived abroad, watching her videos also brings me nostalgia for the past. Moreover, I am a follower of Li Ziqi’s channel who watched most of her videos so I have a good knowledge of the content and the pattern of her short videos.

3 Theoretical Framework

Having understood the history of nostalgia in section 1.2, this part will present a theoretical framework of nostalgia, detailing how it relates to the relationship between nostalgia and media

20

by Fred Davis (1979), Svetlana Boym (2001), and Katharina Niemeyer (2014), as well as the logic of social acceleration and temporal structure, remediation, and simulacra and simulation.

3.1 Types of Nostalgia and Media

Scholars have put nostalgia into different types. For instance, Fred Davis (1979) categorizes nostalgia to three orders (types), which are “simple nostalgia” (1979, p. 17) where it emphasizes the positive feeling of the past by avoiding mentioning the negative experiences happened before and involves an emotional longing for return, “reflexive nostalgia”(p. 21) who adds a voice of questioning the past experience, and “interpreted nostalgia” (p. 24) who digs deeper and goes further to explore the reasons behind the nostalgia based on the first two types.

According to Turner, the idyll themed art was a symbol of stability and authenticity in western civilization (1987). It is believed that nostalgic feelings are hard to be captured by language or practice, but possible to be caught by photography partly. From a social and cultural discourse, nostalgia has four dimensions including the loss of “historical decline and loss”, the loss of “personal wholeness and moral certainty”, the loss of “individual freedom and autonomy with the disappearance of genuine social relationships” and “a loss of simplicity, personal authenticity, and emotional spontaneity”(Turner, 1987, p150-151). The nostalgic sensation is often associated with a loss of rural simplicity and stability influenced by industrialization, urbanization and capitalist culture, etc (Turner, 1987, p152).

Boym (2002) considers the contemporary nostalgia concerns more on the present and she focuses on the correlation between personal and collective memories. She categorizes nostalgia into two kinds to explain “one’s relationship to the past, to the imagined community, to home, to one’s own selfperception” (2002, p. 70), which are restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. The two types provide references to think about what the feeling of yearning bears and in which ways it exists. Restorative nostalgia looks for a reconstruction of the past and the lost home while reflective nostalgia tends to stay in the sensation of loss and yearning, as well as interrogates the past. Restorative nostalgia also helps to ease the pain of displacement by

21

providing a return home even if it is not your own home (p. 74). Boym reminds people of the necessity of differentiating “the habits of the past” from “the habits of the restoration of the past” (p. 70) in restorative nostalgia.

As for the relationship to nostalgia and technology and media, Boym argues that “fundamentally, both technology and nostalgia are about mediation. As a disease of displacement, nostalgia was connected to passages, transits and means of communication. Nostalgia like memory depends on mnemonic devices.” (p. 406). People tried different devices to help settle the displacement but failed, from writing to fast transportation like railroads. It is now believed that the types and forms of nostalgia vary at different stages of modernization and each medium has its effects on nostalgia. Boym claims that cyberspace enables nostalgia in digital form which seems more desirable than nostalgia in reality (p. 408). To summarize, she mentions that “reflection on nostalgia allows us to reexamine mediation and the medium itself, including technology.” (p. 413). Nostalgia could never be caught by any technology since it is about human consciousness.

3.2 The Logic of Social Acceleration and Temporal Structure

According to Paul Virilio(2006) and Hartmut Rosa(2018), the phenomenon of acceleration is a defining quality of contemporary life. Each individual is drawn in a constantly accelerating world emphasizing efficiency, speed, and competition, from which the universal anxiety arises. Virilio(2006) takes speed as a basic condition for modern civilization. He proposes the concept of dromology (speed) which is “a shifting, restless logistics of differential governance transforming the raw material of the world and rendering it in a more appropriate form” (p. 10), and he believes that human civilization has been chasing after speed since the Industrial Revolution. In relation to the vision, Paul Virilio (1994) proposed that humans are stuck in ‘the vision machine’ that is created by technologies. “The use of the term visual culture refers to this ​ plethora of ways in which the visual is part of social life.” (Rose, 2016, p. 6) ​

In his book (Rosa, 2018) (Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, New Directions in Critical Theory, the original German title "Beschleunigung und Entfremdung: Entwurf einer

22

kritischen Theorie spätmoderner Zeitlichkeit", Rosa, 2013), Rosa discusses what affects the quality of life in modern society. He finds out the breakthrough point is time and temporal structure which can be analyzed by the logic of social acceleration. He thinks that social acceleration is the core process of modernity, which the acceleration is reflected in many ways including social structure, communication, lifestyle, and pace of life, to various extents. To answer the reasons for the acceleration, he points out that three aspects, accelerated technological development, the acceleration of social change, and accelerating pace of life, have gradually formed a closed circle, in which they speed up and affect each other. As a result, it leads to the new alienation of five dimensions in our daily life, which are space, goods, action, time, and self. The difference between the previous research and Rosa’s is that the former often emphasizes the determinism of technology, and believes that accelerating technologies increase the pace of life and social changes. However, if that is the case, why would we have less time instead of saving a lot of time? Therefore, Rosa (2015) suggests a new order of the three aspects of acceleration: first people use technology to deal with a fast-paced life, and then they save time to make social changes through the technology. However, the accelerated social changes bring more new things for people to deal with, therefore it leads to the increasing pace of life. The three accelerations interact with each other while each has its own internal motivation.

Digital media, as a tool of the progress of technology in post-modern society for us to communicate with, is in line with new alienation where Rosa(2018) addresses technological progress as the first layer of social acceleration, bringing acceleration of social change and the atrophy of the present. In response to the problem of new alienation he proposes, Rosa brings up the concept of resonance(in German ‘resonanz’, 2018 ), the reciprocal relationship between subject and world, as a solution. It means that if a human being is a social being, a fundamental premise of social conditions for a good life lies in whether he or she can be in a life world that would respond (resonanz) to him or her.

As Rosa suggests, in the age of acceleration, people should turn the critical perspective to the temporal structure in order to have a more complete view to diagnose social pathology. In his

23

book (Rosa, 2015)(A work in Chinese translated from the original German title “Beschleunigung: Die Veränderung der Zeritstrukturen in der Moderne”(2005). Dong, Trans.), Rosa (2015) points out that the development of modernization is manifested as the "acceleration" of the social temporal structure from the perspective of time sociology. Accelerating comes from the logic of increasing the density of time, instead of a physical property it is rather a fundamental change of the social temporal structure in the modernization. Therefore, this speed is about social acceleration, which is the nature of society itself.

3.3 Remediation and New Media

In the work ‘Remediation: Understanding New Media’, Jay David Bolter and Richard ​ ​ Grusin(2000) define remediation as “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms” (p. 273). It’s a competition in which new media try to take over while the old one tries to keep their current status (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 5). In general, it’s a constantly evolving process that one media borrows, remixes, and absorbs some characters of other media. For example, new media like news websites will integrate video with the news articles on the page, which are the features of the TV. But it also works the other way. Old media like News on TV nowadays will add running subtitles on the bottom of the screen. Hence remediation also refers to a blending of new and old media. Along with immediacy and hypermediacy, remediation is one of the three traits of our genealogy of new media (p. 273).

Immediacy and hypermediacy are also two major strategies in the medial competition between old and new media. Immediacy aims to fulfill the reader or the viewer’s desire to experience all sensations immediately and directly while forgetting the present of the medium (p. 272–73). On the other hand, hypermediacy is a “style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium” (p. 272). The goal of hypermediacy is to infinitely multiply our media and heighten our awareness of them by blending several different forms of media in one document. For example, cookbooks on Pinterest are remediated by turning recipes (or links to recipes) into pins that feature visually stunning food photos.

24

Each new media tries to reform the old one by promising a more direct experience, yet such a promise will make us aware of the new medium as a medium. The producers have to achieve the effect in a hypermediated way which results in “double-logic of remediation” – the desire to present a vast amount of media to a consumer while maintaining the illusion that they are getting an immediate, unfiltered look at the content (p. 17).

The remediation of digital visual media can be analyzed through the ways in which they borrow, remix, and absorb the old one (p. 15). They will continue to refashion other forms of media, presenting themselves as new, improved versions. Meanwhile, the medium of the Internet has a “jukebox”-like feature, like hyperlinking to different cameras on a webcam site, which allows the user to choose what they want to look at in real time (p. 6). With such a feature, the user could have a different experience compared to old media like watching a movie, despite the similar audio-visual presentation of the two platforms.

3.4 Simulacra and Simulation

Being one of the most important theories of Jean Baudrillard's work, simulacra and hyperreality become unique discourses in postmodern society. Baudrillard (1981) interprets simulacra in the way that in a contemporary society dominated by symbols, codes, and images, the original objective reality is dispelled to create a hyperreal world. In such a new society where material forms have disappeared, the boundaries between reality and falsity have disappeared. With the varied means of technologies, the real has been simulacified and the principle of simulation becomes the dominant power of social life. With simulacrum everywhere, people have unconsciously stepped from modern to postmodern society.

Baudrillard discusses three orders of simulacra in his book (p. 121) which include “simulacra that are natural (on counterfeit), productive (on production), and simulacra of simulation” and they correspond to the imaginary of an ideal world, science fiction, and ‘something different’. To be specific, on the first order, objects copied are regarded as a unique imitation of the original, and they follow the law of natural value, copy nature, and reflect nature. At this stage, there is

25

still a perceptible difference between the illusion and the reality, that is, the reality still exists. Not like the counterfeit on the first order, the product on the second order is no longer a copy of the original, but as an equivalent component of the original. As for the third order, Baudrillard points out that we are surrounded by “the simulacrum of value[...] by the law of value and of the commodity” (1981, p. 153). At the same time, simulation becomes the current order of simulacra. The simulacrum at this stage creates hyperreality which breaks the tradition, and the model constructs reality. In the simulation phase, reality disappears within the process of copy coming to its limit. The true not only becomes something that can be copied but also becomes hyperreality.

Baudrillard proposes that it is because of the media that has accelerated the degeneration (1981, p. 13)from the modern society to the simulacra society, and the contemporary society is a simulation society created by the mass media. “Today, it is the real that has become the alibi of the model, in a world controlled by the principle of simulation. And, paradoxically, it is the real that has become our true Utopia - but a Utopia that is no longer in the realm of the possible, that can only be dreamt of as one would dream of a lost object.” (1981, p. 122-123). He borrows the idea of ‘implosion’ (p. 79-86) by Macluhan and talks about the implosion of meaning in the media, in which implosion blurs the boundary between simulacra and reality. It corresponds to the chaos of the subject and the object and the death of meaning and the truth.

4 Methodology

This chapter discusses the research approach and methods that are used to collect, sample, and analyze data, that is, the justification of the selection of my data and analytical approach. In addition to that, the coding and analytical process will be presented. Thereafter, the limitations of the study including ethical considerations are likewise clarified.

26

4.1 A Critical Framework and Remix Method

4.1.1 A Critical Approach

It seems that this world is heavily encountered visually (Rose, 2016). Choosing short videos as a media form to analyze entails the necessity to face the visual world and figure out how things are visually constructed. In this study, in order to understand how pastoral nostalgia is constructed, transformed, and remediated through visual materials meaning Li Ziqi’s short video, and how visuality becomes meaningful, Critical Visual Methodology (CVM, Rose, 2016) as an ​ analytical approach is applied.

Why is it important to think about the visual? What’s more, why does it have to be critical in this case? To respond to the above questions, as Rose suggests, being critical means to study the visual from the perspective of cultural significance, social practices, and power relations, and it means ways of watching and understanding it can in turn affect the power relations (2016, xxii). Images are always constructed through something, being critical means to “(..) thinks about the ​ agency of the image, considers the social practices and effects of its circulation and viewing, and reflects on the specificity of that viewing by various audiences, including the academic critic.” (p. 23)

A few criteria for applying CVM to interpreting visuality are as follows (Rose, 2016, p. 22-23): firstly, this study takes visual representations carefully, to answer the first research questions, compositional methodology is used and therefore elements like color, light, the aesthetic style, etc are presented to see the effects of the image itself. Secondly, it is vital to consider the social context of the video content, which in this case is the context of pastoral nostalgia in an accelerated society and it could include its development, expression, as well as questioning and debates around it. Thirdly, I, as a researcher, need to have my own perspective to view the videos with reflexivity, with thinking about images responsibly.

27

Adopting Rose’s theory on methodological tools of visual analysis which are sites and modalities (2016, p16), it is possible to get an idea of the process of Li Ziqi’s short videos and develop a framework for methods to work with the visual. To quote Rose’s (p24) interpretations on sites and meanings of an image:

“The framework developed is based on thinking about visual materials in terms of four sites: the site of production, which is where an image is made; the site of the image itself, which is its visual content; the site(s) of its circulation, which is where it travels; and the site where the image encounters its spectators or users, or what this book will call its audiencing.”

Moreover, each site is reflected via three different modalities which are technological, compositional, and social (p25). By technological, it means technologies that make and decide the visual effects. By compositional, it means formal qualities such as content, color, and spatial organization, etc. As for social, it refers to "(..) economic, social and political relations, ​ institutions and practices that surround an image and through which it is seen and used." (Rose, ​ 2016, p. 26)

4.1.2 Remix: a Tool of Thinking About Methods

As was mentioned in the previous section, the four sites and three modalities of each site mean a big amount of data from different layers, platforms, and media, etc. How to generate data and rationalize the use of methods? It would be instructive to bring in Annette Markham’s philosophy of ‘remix method’(2013, p. 65) to further situate different methods and justify the data selection. Here, the term of remix refers to “the processes and products of taking bits of cultural material and, through the process of copy/paste and collage, producing new meaning to share with others” (2013, p. 64.) Remix is taken as a powerful tool to interpret meanings in qualitative studies (p. 65). It is actually a way of putting fragments of data together from everyday life including the digital world and practical life, and to make sense of them. Markham (p. 66) suggests five elements of remix which are generate, play, borrow, move and interrogate

28

to better implement qualitative research in the digital world. The idea throughout the entire process reminds us that research is “exploratory and creative, a mix of passion and curiosity” (p. 66)

Now I will detail the five elements and combine them in this case. As for ‘generate’, what Markham means is for data gathering and data should be approached decidedly instead of sitting still and waiting to be picked. “Focusing only on the first layer of data (the original stuff we ​ collected) doesn’t allow us to fully appreciate what is actually at play when we engage in the long, involved, inductive, and explorative art and science of ‘writing culture’.” (Markham, 2013, ​ p. 74-75). That is to say, the inquiry of data will influence the scale of data and further affect how we interpret data. In this study, ‘generate’ is reflected in sections 4.3 and 4.4 where data selection and data sampling are first implemented through online observation and then decided by taking the nostalgic references into account.

‘Play’ is a way to explore and help finding connections in complex social media contexts. In inquiry, remix combines different elements to make sense of them inventively. It provides guidance in research design regarding contexts and in “[...]finding forms of representation that ​ have contextual integrity and finding rather than simply applying conceptual models that help make sense of these phenomena.” (2013, p. 76) The focus of this study is not to analyze isolated ​ images, but to explore how pastoral nostalgia is constructed and transmitted. Therefore the strategy of ‘play’ is to mark the text posts that involve a nostalgic meaning and to point out what nostalgia the visual samplings, as well as the decision to apply a mixed method of compositional analysis and semiotic analysis to the visual materials.

According to Markham, borrowing or quoting from others is fundamental or almost inherent in academic work, for instance, we borrow sampling methods, theoretical frameworks and analysis tools. As she points out, there are many aspects of Internet-related phenomena happening across varied platforms and different media. In the process of inquiry, things get clear by applying

29

“approaches, perspectives and techniques [...] to figuring out creative ways to grapple with ​ these contexts.” (2013, p. 77). ​

“Inquiry is always situated, but never motionless[...]It is also not necessarily forward, in that ​ many movements will take us back to the beginning or will cause us to see the entire project in different ways, forcing us to mark our current point as a new beginning to move from.” (2013, p. ​ 77) As Markham argues, ‘move’ as a philosophy of being adaptive encourages scholars to embrace the flows and changes, and to be flexible and creative within the whole process.

“[...]everywhere we see the production of culture, we know we are witnessing the outcome of a ​ process of reflexive interrogation” (2013, p. 77). ‘Interrogate’ means a constant questioning of ​ what, how and why in the process of study and a reflexive attitude of doing research. It also happens in this study, as the pastoral nostalgia means a yearning for the past in real life while in Li Ziqi’s videos, we talk about the construction and simulation of pastoral life and how the audience absorbs it, this indicates interrogation of nostalgic communication online.

4.2 Mixed Method

Having introduced the above critical approach and the tool of remix, section 4.2.1 will present an overview of methods (see Table 4.1), and section 4.2.2 and 4.2.3 will further discuss the details of mixed methods.

4.2.1 Methodological Tools and Selection of Methods

The present part will translate methodological tools into this study by examining the intersection of sites and modalities and explain which of them are more important. Since the research questions do not involve circulation and production, the sites of circulation and production are not included in the study and other two sites including image and audiencing will be discussed, together with three aforementioned modalities: technological, compositional and social.

30

First, to explore the research question of how nostalgia of pastoral life is transformed and remediated, it intends to find out answers from the image site. For the compositional modality, content, light, and spatial organization (Pollock, 1988, p. 48) are three prominent tools that formed an iconic aesthetic style in the video. It will be discussed emphatically and how they are closely tied to nostalgic expression by bringing in the discussion of nostalgia and media (Boym, 2001). When it comes to the social, visual meanings of the selected videos should be studied. The methods of semiotic analysis and thick descriptions are therefore applied to interpret the meaning of the compositions of visual materials.

Second, when it comes to the audiencing site, this study focuses on the comment section specifically, for it provides a context of a naturally occurring data among the audience. The snippets of comments show personal narratives of nostalgia triggered by Li Ziqi’s video content and there are some categories rising to analyse nostalgia. Limitation of taking comments only to examine the audiencing site is, it is only a reflection of the opinion of a small percentage of people since most viewers do not comment. Therefore, a large sample of comments are taken to make up for the limitation of not being able to represent more audience.

It is worth noting that distinctions and boundaries between different sites in practice are not strictly clear. The visual tools that Rose suggests is only a schematic device to borrow and they should be developed accordingly. In fact, the intense discussions regarding the content of Li Ziqi’s short videos on social media and mass media can be interpreted from different aspects. There have been debates in academia that visual studies put too much emphasis on the image itself instead of the site of audiencing where audiences play an active role (Morley D, 1980; Hall S, 1980). To study reception, the early studies often interview the audience to explore 'cultural knowledge and competences' through what people understand what they see (Rose, 2001, p192). Morley (1992, p181) also takes interviews as the main way of examining reception through their expressions such as the words and the way of forming them. In this case, based on the online observation, narratives from a large group of individuals emerge in the commentary section,

31

therefore comments are specifically taken as the material of understanding the social modality of the audiencing site.

In addition to the above two sites, media reportage on Li Ziqi and her team’s response on life in the video vs life in reality could be seen as a media text study in which the theory of simulacra will be applied to understand authenticity and constructedness. Using the tool of remix on generating data, the materials will be digital news reportage (with the interviews to Li Ziqi and her team spokesperson). Thick Description (Geertz, 1973, p5) will be applied to analyze the media text.

Table 4.1 An overview of visual tools: sites, modalities and methods (Gillian Rose, 2016, p50) ​

4.2.2 An Ethnographic Method of ‘Thick Description’

In his seminal work The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Geertz outlines culture as "a system ​ ​ of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life." (p89). In line with Max Weber‘s “webs of significance” (Lindgren, 2017, p308), Geertz believes that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one

32

in search of meaning.” (Geertz, 1973, p5). As a study of a contemporary cultural phenomenon on digital media, it aims to capture how nostalgia is constructed and expressed in Li Ziqi’s short video, as well as its transformation and remediation. To arrive at such a goal on the social of the different sites, an online ethnography of thick descriptions is possible to not only display an account of facts but also to specify details and to interpret meanings (Lindgren, 2017, p308).

As the most crucial concept in Geertz’s research, the goal of thick description is to take out the meaning from what makes up the behavior and culture by reading and telling a meaning web consisting of “facts, commentary, interpretations and interpretations of these interpretations “ (Lindgren, 2017, p308). It is essentially semiotic and is originally and mainly used in anthropology and sociology. Thick description as a way of adapting the complex process of doing ethnography to the digital context, is also discussed by Hine C (2015) in her recent book Ethnography for the Internet. It is taken as an interpretative approach to reach the meaning that people place on the phenomenon, which means, the cultural context is crucial. The author has to provide enough context so that an outsider can also get meaning of the behavior or culture by reading their actions and words etc.

Instead of a simple factual description in “thin description” (Geertz, 1973, p7), thick descriptions, in this case, will show readers the details behind her work scene and the deeper meaning of the selected posts and comments. This is especially useful, because there is no firsthand data on Li Ziqi’s opinion of nostalgia since no feedback on my request of interviewing Li Ziqi. Thick descriptions would include the evocative language and very specific description of the scene and the interpretation so that even people who do not know Li Ziqi and Chinese culture can understand the meaning. For instance, by explaining what the oriental artistic conception is and how the beauty of Chinese nature poetry is displayed in her video, it will be easier for outsiders to understand the connection between her content and the pastoral imagination. This is important not only for Li Ziqi’s case but also can be important for the transferability of nostalgia in general in an accelerated digital media world. Instead of finding patterns like other experimental sciences, this study is more about the interpretation of the meaning of a cultural

33

phenomenon and an explanation of the complexity of social expression. To achieve this goal, the archives of the interview, Li Ziqi’s posts and the selected comments on Sina Weibo can provide rich data.

4.2.3 Compositional Interpretation and Semiotics

This part presents the two methods of approaching the visual materials. Firstly it examines how the compositional analysis approach to the image site by focusing on components of content, color and spatial organization such as mise-en-scene, montage, sound, light, expressive content(Rose, 2016, p 63-83). As we can tell, compositional interpretation extremely emphasizes images, therefore compositionality asks for the ‘good eye’ (p63) to break the images into the above-mentioned elements. It is a practical and useful way to look up the image itself, however, by saying a critical visual approach, there are limitations to apply compositional analysis alone without digging deeper into the social level. In other words, it is hard to ignore the social context in which images are produced and read.

Since semiology essentially cares about the social effects of meaning and ideology (Rose, p. 107), one of the main methods to answer the research questions would necessarily include elements that provide options to investigate semiotic aspects, as well as tools to reveal facts needed to explain the meaning of pastoral nostalgia in practice. Therefore, the following part will interpret the three components semiotically. Semiotic content analysis on her videos and the thick descriptions in section 4.2.2 on the materials of media archives, posts and comments are, to some extent, complementary, even though they are both semiotic. By combining the result of components with semiotics, it is possible to add the social aspects of viewing and the visual representation, since the ability for the codes of social recognition comes before reading an image (Bryson, 1991: 65). Rose (2016, p. 107) also thinks that “semiology offers a certain kind of analytical precision”.

Semiotics, as the science of signs (Stokes, 2003, p70) and a form of the study of the interpretation of literature (Saussure, 1983), is a good approach to study visual media (Stokes,

34

2003, p70). The key point of semiotics is about how the content producer delivers his or her opinion through the picture and how we interpret the meaning (p71). Barthes (1984, p32) developed the idea of Saussure and discussed how exactly the meaning gets into the image and how readers get it out. According to Stokes (2003), the argument of the semiotic method often points out that people may have different understandings of the image from the author, as well as from other people. Therefore, it might not be as objective as other methods as it depends a lot on researchers. However, the value of it is more about enriching our understanding of the texts (p72).

One advantage of the semiotic method is that it can finish interpreting with only a few materials (Stokes, 2003). On the one hand, the relatively few texts do not generalize semiotics. On the other hand, it asks for good knowledge about the research object before digging deep in it, which means that researchers should be an insider of the community in order to understand and explain what is in there (Stokes, 2003). In mainstream semiology, the ‘sign’ is the most essential concept. In his work Course in General Linguistics(Saussure, 2011), he concludes semiology as ​ ​ “a science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable[...]it would show what ​ constitutes signs, what laws govern them.” (p. 16). He interprets sign, signified and signifier (p. 65-70) in chapter Nature of the Linguistic Sign, where a sign is a combination of a concept meaning ‘signified’ and a sound-image attached to a ‘signifier’ (p. 67). According to Saussure, a signifier and its signified are not inherently relevant, and a signifier can have varied meanings. Therefore, it is the sign’s referent that the actual object in the world really relates to a sign. And the more important thing is to explore the relations between signs. In relation to this study, the semiotic analysis explores how signified meanings are transferred between the visual materials’ signifiers. The first step of the analysis would be to identify the signs of an image. Considering signs are complicated and there are different terms and vocabulary to describe them, this section first brings in some basic concepts. For instance, signs can be denotive (Rose, 2016, p. 121) and connotive. Moreover, a related term diegesis meaning the sum of all denotive meanings in the visual was introduced (Barthes, 1977). They will be further interpreted in chapter 6.

35

The last term to bring in is referent systems (Williamson, 1978, p. 20) which is used to describe wider systems of meaning- signs including “indexical, symbolic and connotive” (Rose, 2016, p. 127). Williamson uses the example of how Catherine Deneuve advertises the Channel product to explain the referent system as a whole, “The system of signs from which the product draws its image is a referent system in that the sign lifted out of it and placed in the ad refers back to it.” (Williamson, 1978, p. 26).

This study adopts her famous work Decoding Advertisement (1978) by Judith Williamson who is ​ known for the interpretation of how adverts transfer signifieds from one signifier to another. The way that Williamson looks into the compositional modality of the adverts to study how they produce meaning is echoed with the compositional analysis to the video, thus the two methods will be combined and presented together.

Having introduced the above terms, to avoid getting lost in the tanglesome terminology of semiology, it will skip the abundant theoretical vocabularies and go directly to the application. In sum, chapter 5 will start with the analysis procedures: find the signs as a start, then tell what they signify ‘in themselves’, followed by finding the relation between signs and different signs ‘in themselves’, then discuss how they connect to wider systems of meaning, and finally come back to signs through codes and explore the expression of ideology (Rose, 2016, p. 132).

4.3 Data Selection

As it was mentioned above, data consists of two parts. One is visual materials which are the short videos that Li Ziqi releases on her Sina Weibo platform (this includes titles and screenshots) and pictures posted on her Weibo account, the other is online interactions on the media platform which is the online comments from Li Ziqi’s Weibo followers, media archives from the existing interviews and the text posts from Li Ziqi’s Weibo account. The data were collected in the span of time between 2017 and 2019. Since one of the simple ways to obtain small samples is to capture them from the platforms straight away (Laestadius, 2017, p. 582) and this can be done by taking screenshots of the data (Mayr & Weller, 2017, p. 108), therefore this study will extract

36

snippets of visual data by screenshots when needed. Moreover, as mentioned in section 4.1.2, it is instructive to think about the method of data selection by using the element of ‘generate’ of remix. Online observation is the first step to use to have a good understanding of data.

To find proper approaches and methods to collect data on social media, it is suggested to select the particular platform of interest as a start for content sampling (Mayr & Weller, 2017, p110). On the first play, the online observation is made to have a good understanding of the data. For the selection of visual data, as discussed in section 1.1.1, Li Ziqi releases her videos on her multi-channel platforms around the same time. To compare the five most viewed videos on three discussed platforms before April 30th, 2020, on Bilibili, they are Luosifen which is also known ​ as Liuzhou rice noodles with river snails, soy sauce, hotpot, cotton and berries ice cream making. While on Sina Weibo, the five most viewed videos are An oven to bake bread and ​ ​ chicken, The “scholar’s four jewels” of China, A sofa bed made from wood waste, New Year’s Eve dinner, Fo tiao qiang soup. On YouTube, her five most viewed videos are “Peanut and ​ melon seeds, dried meat, dried fruit, snowflake cake - snacks for Spring Festival Sugar”, making persimmon, “using bamboo to make some sophisticated old furniture--bamboo sofa”, Luosifen, and tomato sauce. The above observation tells that there are mainly two themes in her video ​ content which are cooking and crafting, where cooking is more emphasized. Plus, food memories are an expression of nostalgia especially when it is associated with the bittersweet past. Therefore, this study intentionally chooses a cooking-themed video as the study object.

On the one hand, the online observation shows that Li Ziqi has a big amount of active followers at Sina Weibo with the criteria of its number of comments and reposts compared to other platforms such as DouYin, MeiPai and Bilibili in China. On the other hand, the users on YouTube, which is the biggest platform where Li Ziqi releases her videos abroad, are mostly non-Chinese and this study is concerned with the social aspect of production mainly in China. Therefore, taking the research aim and research questions into consideration, this study chooses the comments and posts on Sina Weibo which is one of the main social media platforms that Li Ziqi uses in China and in particular the Weibo account @李子柒 (“Li Ziqi” in Chinese). For the

37

next step, data of selected video, text posts and comments will be gathered from it. After carefully browsing through her Sina Weibo account and its feed, the decision was made. For the next step, data of selected video, text posts and comments will be gathered from it.

4.4 Data Sampling

Based on the tool of remix and critical visual method, it is possible to notice that the sampling is connected to nostalgic expression and the sites of production and image, because the selection of content is tightly referenced to nostalgia in terms of how nostalgia is represented, fostering a nostalgic atmosphere on Weibo. Online observation for a thorough understanding of the data is needed consistently. Firstly, by observation, the titles of some posts imply a stronger feeling of nostalgia than others（see Table 4.2). One of the most crucial elements in sampling is to find out videos in relation to an expression of nostalgia. Therefore, after browsing through all the titles of her videos on Weibo, 15 out of 124 were captured including the keywords of memories from childhood, once upon a time, missing old time and reunion, or a feeling of loss and displacement (Boym, S, 2001).

Table 4.2 Titles implying nostalgia on Weibo ​ Titles imply nostalgia on Sina Weibo Time / Views(millions)

年华鼎鼎催人老，将见青青梅子黄 2019.5.24 / 44.6 Age Grows like the Green Plum always Matured in Yellow

新年特辑--回忆里的各种年货小零食 2019.1.30 / 52.1 Childhood Taste: Snacks for Spring Festival in Memories

小孩小孩你别馋，过了腊八就是年 2019.1.23 / 70.7 Kid, kid, What Are You Craving in Laba Festival

养了一季蚕，给奶奶做床被子过冬 2018.10.16 / 46.3

38

Raised a Season of Silkworms and Made a Quilt for Grandma for the Winter

曾经让我挨过揍的一道菜，有“树人参”之称的刺龙苞 2018.4.27 / 51.7 A Cuisine Once Got Me beaten up

记忆里那双带着温度的千层底儿布鞋 2017.12.16 / 50.7 A Pair of Cloth Shoes with Warm Memories

回忆里的那碗芋头饭 2017.10.13 / 54.3 A Bowl of Taro Rice in My Memory

记忆里用柴火烙出焦黄的玉米饼，有多久没吃过了 2017.7.8 / 45.3 The Browned Tortillas Bake by Woodfire in Memory

没事儿就去钓个虾，做份香辣小龙虾 2017.5.23 / 49.2 Fishing and Cooking Spicy Crayfish at Idle Time

每个人的记忆里，都有一把香香脆脆的馓子 2017.3.13 / 19.5 Everybody Remember the Crispy Fried Dough Twist

梅菜扣肉，一种味道念一个人 2016.10.3 / 12.3 Pork with Preserved Vegetables: The Taste of Missing Somebody

味道是有记忆的，传统手工老月饼 2016.9.12 / 8.3 Traditional Handmade Mooncake: Taste Has Memory

炸荷花，爷爷做过下乡厨子，这是记忆里的味道 2016.8.14 / 5.4 Fried Lotus: a Dish Made by My Grandpa As a Chef in Countryside

做给父亲的一道 2016.6.20 / 8.4 A Dish for My Father

39

小时候的蒸野槐花 2016.4.18 / 4.7 Steamed Sophora Japonica from My Childhood

Secondly, browsing through her videos on the Sina Weibo platform, 11 videos with a thumbnail image of her grandmother (see Figure 4.1) were marked, either watching Li Ziqi or working, as well as 7 videos with a thumbnail image of Li Ziqi surrounded by puppies or sheep (see Figure 4.2). They were therefore screenshotted from her Weibo content. Both of these general image compositions can be understood as a sign of everyday life and companionship as it appears that she is invoking and reviving old memories from her childhood of making food or handcrafts with her grandparents. By contrast, based on the same way of observation on her videos, it is noticed that Li Ziqi’s earlier videos barely included her grandmother in neither the thumbnail nor the video at all. Rather, the thumbnails of these earlier videos consisted mainly of images of food or of Li Ziqi herself dressed in Han Chinese clothing, posing and performing like an actress actively focused on the existence of the camera instead of naturally representing herself living her everyday life. Both her video quality and style changed notably from Oct 13th, 2017 when her grandmother appeared in the video called “a bowl of taro rice in my memory” for the first time. Following that video, her grandmother continued to appear as a primary narrative element.

40

Figure 4.1 thumbnail image of her grandmother (Acquired from Li Ziqi’s Weibo account ) ​

41

Figure 4.2 thumbnail of her surrounded by puppies or sheep (Acquired from Li Ziqi’s Weibo ​ account)

Table 4.3 the list of videos with a cover picture of her grandma or puppies and sheep ​ Cover picture including her grandma Cover picture including her puppies or sheep

The life of cotton 棉花的一生（2020.1.20， Brew my own beer 酿啤酒（2019.6.8， 92.8） 牛）

The life of ginger 姜的一生（2019.11.23, Bamboo shoot 吃笋子（2019.5.10，狗） 55.4m）

Breakfast with soymilk and steamed rice cake A feast on stewed pork backbone in freezing 熬个豆浆再蒸几块紫薯米糕，再忙都要好好 days 天冷，大口啃肉（2019.1.5，羊和两 吃早饭（2019.11.8, 41.2m） 只狗）

Make household gadgets while sunning the Weave a lamb wool cape 蚕丝换羊毛纺线 millet 趁着秋收晒谷子的空档，做了些乱七 编衣裳（2018.12.21，羊） 八糟的小东西（2019.9.30, 47m）

The life of corn 玉米的一生（2019.9.6, 49.7m Hand-made noodles in hot and sour soup 天 ） 寒地冻，来一碗麻辣鲜香的手工酸辣粉（ 2018.11.25，狗）

Shu embroidery 蜀绣，一针一线里绣出的是 From sugar cane to old brown sugar 纯甘蔗 中国上千年优秀文化底蕴（2019.8.9, 47.4） 汁熬出的糖香（2018.11.10，水牛驾车）

Pumpkin and other fruits又到了什么蔬菜瓜果 Make pea jelly 在家也能做的纯手工豌豆 怎么吃都吃不完的季节（2019.8.4, 33.6） 凉粉（2018.5.4，54.4）

Various fruit spreads 夏天吃不完的果子，当 然是要做成酱（2019.6.22, 39.1）

42

Green plums 年华鼎鼎催人老，将见青青梅 子黄（2019.5.24, 44.6）

Zongzi for Dragon Boat Festival 过了立夏就 盼着端午，吃粽子（2019.5.14, 42）

Slow-boiled autumn pear paste 秋风起，做一 罐宫廷秋梨膏（2018.9.7, 42.9）

Therefore, to combine with the above factors (see Table 4.2, 4.3) in these videos, this study identifies the five most-watched videos before the year 2020, with a title including the nostalgia meaning on the Sina Weibo platform which are “Childhood taste: Snacks for Spring Festival in memories 新年特辑--回忆里的各种年货小零食（2019.1.30, 52.1m)”, “Kid kid, what are you craving in Laba festival 小孩小孩你别馋，过了腊八就是年 (2019.1.23, 70.7m)”, “A cusine once caused me being beaten up 曾经让我挨过揍的一道菜，有“树人参”之称的刺龙苞（ 2018.4.27, 51.7m）”, “A pair of cloth shoes with body temperature in memories 记忆里那双带 着温度的千层底儿布鞋（2017.12.16, 50.7m）”, “A bowl of taro rice in my memory 回忆里的 那碗芋头饭（2017.10.13, 54.3m）”. After carefully going through Li Ziqi’s Weibo account, the hottest comment column including the secondary comments of the above five videos are sampled (data was acquired on June 27th 2020). Considering the big feeds of the comments, an automated approach will be used to collect this part of the data. That is to say, the hottest comments (including the secondary comments) of five selected videos were grabbed through the software of Web Crawler, and they were imported to MAXQDA to analyze. The secondary comments have actually formed a small community in which commenters discuss the content and reply to each other. Often they comment on the quality of the object that appears in the videos, in many cases the comments include their childhood memories and emotional attachment to it. Li Ziqi’s video content sometimes can bond her followers together who are most likely strangers to each other, by bringing them the same pastoral experience.

43

Among the five selected videos, the video “Childhood taste: Snacks for Spring Festival in memories 新年特辑--回忆里的各种年货小零食（2019.1.30, 52.1m)” is randomly sampled to be conducted with the video analysis. Semiologists normally only take a few samples rather than a wider range of visual materials as the sample. The reasons that they do not pay attention to justify the selection of the visual materials are because they tend to select materials based on the conceptual interest so they would pick those that happen to support their idea, and the analysis of meaning-making that is socially significant is more important (Rose. 2016, p. 110).

4.5 Coding and Analytical Procedure

In line with section 4.2, this section will detail how mixed methods approach the varied materials. The video of “Childhood taste: Snacks for Spring Festival in memories ” was downloaded at Li Ziqi’s social media site and it was then imported to MAXQDA. The conversation that happened in the video is in Chinese dialect however since there is only a little talk, and the content of the conversation will be interpreted in English in the following chapter if needed.

The comments are sorted and viewed ‘by hot’ (see Figure 4.3). Considering the big feeds of the comments, the top comments (including the secondary comments) of five selected videos were grabbed through the software of Web Crawler, and they were imported to MAXQDA to analyze. To have a good understanding of the content of the comments, my approach to analyzing the commentary section was to scan the associated comments of the five selected videos and familiarize with the content first. According to Saldaña (2013), coding is about linking the data and idea, “Qualitative codes are essence-capturing and essential elements of the research story, that, when clustered together according to similarity and regularity (a pattern), they actively facilitate the development of categories and thus analysis of their connections.” (p. 8). The first step of coding and analytical procedure is to code the data using descriptive coding (Saldaña, 2013, p. 88) and it is about to summarize the topic of the excerpt with a word or phrase. The primary codes are then recoded by merging the similar codes. Some codes that are uncorrelated to the research aims are also discarded. For instance, “commenters ask for free prize draws” is

44

excluded. This study skips the small list of categories. To recognize common patterns of the comments, the researcher runs queries by keyword related to pastoral nostalgia using MAXQDA. To code them, text search queries to identify the instances of chosen keywords are implied. The data of 1542 comments generate 4 categories which are “the familiar food or goods associated with feelings of nostalgia, personal narratives of childhood stories, a feeling of loss through the contrast between the past and present, affection to Li Ziqi and her pastoral lifestyle”. The coding and categories are used in the analysis chapter.

Through the observation of the commentary communities and coding of the comments, it is possible to gain a better understanding of how pastoral nostalgia is constructed between Li Ziqi as the content producer and the audience on media platforms. The data of comments are in mandarine but they were analyzed in English. The data analysis was conducted in MAXQDA 2018.

The analysis of data starts from answering RQ1 which is how the pastoral nostalgia is transformed and remediated in the video by conducting video analysis to “Childhood taste: Snacks for Spring Festival in memories”. For the compositional video analysis, the researcher generates keyword queries for the previously defined categories based on the CVM framework. As for the RQ2, a mixture study will be used. The excerpts of existing interviews are presented and analyzed, and posts from Li Ziqi’s Weibo will be screenshotted.

45

Figure 4.3 an example of comments sorted ‘by hot’, the top comment includes a secondary ​ comments section of another 1238 comments. Screenshotted on Weibo

4.6 Ethics

In this study, the data of comments obtained on Weibo and screenshots from Li Ziqi’s video all might raise ethical issues just as other studies on social media might have. Consent is one of the most important principles in research in general. However, it is indeed very difficult to conduct online visual research in an ethical manner. As we know, there is a big amount of all kinds of

46

data online, it is especially like this on social media (Lingdgren, 2017). In many cases, it is impossible to ask all of them for consent as traditional research does. No matter how much the possibility of risk is to participants, the traditional ethical principles can no longer guide the study since “[...] social media data blur the lines between public and private spheres”(Sloan & Quan-Haase, 2017, p. 664). Considering there are more than 24 million followers on her Weibo account and the interactive atmosphere through comments, it indicates both the videos and comments have been produced at least with the purpose to be engaged in Li Ziqi’s account with this amount of people. People including Li Ziqi herself that are featured on her Weibo platform are therefore conscious of the fact that there might be a big amount of people to access their comments and visual data. For this reason, it would be impossible to get the consent of the audience who have published comments, therefore data obtained in this study was carried out without consent. However, considering the different context their text will be used and commentators might be confused with having their words appear in other places for research purposes, this study does not contain any information regarding their usernames and personal information, that is to say, the quotes generated from their discussion will be anonymized. “A common practice for reviewers during the peer-review process of a social media project is to request the anonymization of all data”(p. 644). Anonymization might be a way to protect participants’ privacy but it can also mean data loss. As for Li Ziqi, the key player in this study, if she can not be recognized in the dataset, “[...]this would preclude scholars from drawing specific interpretations based on the social status of these key players and the role they play in society”(Sloan & Quan-Haase, 2017, p. 664). It can be assumed that she does not mind the recognition of her videos for the promotion of the exposures online.

5 Results and Analysis

In this chapter, the results of the study will be presented in the form of pictorial screenshots from visual materials, commentary extracts and snippets of existing interviews. They will then be analyzed in relation to Gillian Rose’s(2016) analytical framework of Critical Visual Analysis (CVA) and the mixed method discussed in chapter 4.1, and the theoretical conceptions such as nostalgia and media, remediation and new media, the logic of social acceleration, and simulation

47

will be brought in. The chapter will be divided into three subsections. In section 5.1, a brief summary of the results is introduced. In section 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4, the practical application of CVA “site” and “modality” are analyzed, which correspond to the three research questions.

5.1 An Overview

Through the image site, the study examines the content, sound, spatial organization relatively. It is possible to tell that many compositions appear in the video as an emotional attachment to the past or “a version of the past” (Niemeyer, 2014, p. 216). In the discussion of ‘content’, it is of interest to think about the paradox, yet harmony, between ‘fast’ and ‘short’ in short videos and ‘slow’ characterized pastoral image, to see how the nostalgia of pastoral image in turn affects the expression of short videos. On the audiencing site, from the content of comments, it is possible to sense “a sentiment of loss and displacement” (Boym, 2001, p.12).

5.2 Through the Image Site of CVM

The analysis of the visual materials responds to the first research question of how the videos evoke images and characters of pastoral life, as well as a nostalgic feeling. It is answered from the following three aspects of the image site by applying the compositional interpretation of the visual materials and semiotic analysis, as well as thick descriptions.

5.2.1 Content:

To get an idea of the content of Li Ziqi’s videos, my approach to analyzing the pattern of narration in her videos was to enter the homepage of her Weibo and go through her videos from beginning to end. After watching 80 of her 108 videos and handwriting notes overall and chronologically on Weibo with a timeframe from 2016 till the end of April 2020, an impression of her video composition has been obtained. The narration is always around Li Ziqi as she is the main storyline in the videos. Other content consists of nature, food material, her yard and house, puppies and sheep, and other characters such as her grandma and sometimes neighbors in the village, in Weibo’s case, the countryside peddler who makes popcorn on the spot appears in the video.

48

The character relationship in Li Ziqi’s videos is simple with the main focus on herself, which means that she is the protagonist. To examine Li Ziqi as a sign in the video, representations of bodies, manner and activity (Dyer, 1982, p. 96-104) are looked at. She is a young woman, beautiful and slim, with a bittersweet childhood and a strong bond with her grandparents. She always has her hair combed perfectly, and she looks peaceful and happy. Besides, she is diligent and omnipotent at cooking, handicrafts and farming. Li Ziqi’s grandma becomes the second main character in the scene. The return from the city to a rural home to take care of her ill grandma and living in the countryside since then, set the tone of the story and became the pretext of Li Ziqi’s nostalgia and rationalize her behaviors in the video. Li Ziqi’s grandma does not speak much; often the activities of grandma are sitting there, waiting, sometimes help Li Ziqi with the housework, as well as sharing food with Li Ziqi at the end of the video. Grandma is an old lady with benign smiles, she moves slowly and she is taken care of by her granddaughter in the videos. This frames the grandma as a sign of waiting, accompanying, sharing, and an object of family affection in the video. The pedlar who makes popcorn door to door (or sometimes villagers in her other videos) is a sign of a simple relationship in small villages. Other frequent characters include the dogs and cats to help build a homey atmosphere. It is easy to notice the emotional connection among them by presenting the images of Li Ziqi’s grandma waiting in front of the firewood, and puppies and the sheep wandering around her. When they appear in the same video, it weaves a picture of a warm and peaceful pastoral life. Moreover, considering the theme of the selected video is about making snacks for Chinese New Year, it is associated with the grandest occasion for family members to reunite and have a happy time, and look back at the past year and wish a happy coming year. It could add a taste of missing home and nostalgia to people.

In sum, the above signs from characters all have their representations of bodies, manner and activity (Dyer, 1982, p. 96-104). What they signify in themselves are different, but the signs are all related and when they are put in a wider system of meaning which is referent systems here,

49

they will react to each other and they are seen by the audience as nostalgic qualities and make meaning. This gives a glimpse of how pastoral nostalgia is transferred through characters.

Having introduced the characters, the following is the narrative pattern of her content through the aforementioned browsing. First, there is a task to accomplish in each video which can be summed up in one sentence starting with “Li Ziqi makes” and followed by the name of the task. Normally it is the food or handicraft she is about to make, such as fruit jam, bamboo benches, soy sauce, Lamian, etc. A similar narrative pattern can be identified in the structure of these videos with different themes and tasks. Besides, her video content mainly involves two themes, one is to display traditional food making, the other is about traditional handicrafts. Taking her food making videos as an example, it begins with collecting the raw material often by planting and harvesting (picking), then arranging or cleaning them, followed by cooking and presenting food and finally finishing the clip by a sweet scene of dining together with her grandma at the table.

Second, the other pattern from scanning her videos is that there is an obscure sequence of the narrative. It could be observed through the content and theme of food in each video, that is to say, she makes the videos based on the 24 Solar Terms and traditional Chinese holidays. For instance, she chooses the ingredients according to seasons and holidays, such as seasonal ingredients like cucumbers, bamboo shoots, tomatoes, lotuses, and traditional holiday cuisines like dragon boat zongzi, moon cakes, sweet green rice balls, la ba porridge, etc. Observation on her YouTube homepage of categories of the playlist can support this point, although it has been said data were mainly collected on Sina Weibo, it is believed that findings from other platforms can still be an auxiliary device to borrow (Markham, 2013). This is due to the different web design since there is no such playlist on Weibo while YouTube shows categories of Seasonal Diet and Chinese Festival Diet. It intentionally reminds the audience of the themes of her videos. In short, cooking as the sequence of the 24 Solar Terms and Chinese festivals presents the wisdom of the working people and traditional culture, attracting more clicks and resonance.

50

Specifically, the task in the sampling video “Childhood taste: Snacks for Spring Festival in ​ memories” is to make snacks for Spring Festival which is the most important festival to celebrate ​ the beginning of a new year based on the traditional lunar calendar and it represents the reunion with family members at the end of a year in Chinese culture. The task of making snacks is divided into making 10 different foods which are sesame and peanut candy, roasted chestnuts, snowflake crisp, spicy beef jerky, popcorn, fried melon seeds, fried peanuts, crispy biscuit roll, tomatoes on sticks and dried mango. It begins with an image of Li Ziqi searching chestnuts in the forest with a bamboo pack basket. Puppies and sheep are wandering around. The first 20 seconds displays the first step of the narrative pattern of her short video, which is collecting the raw material. After going back and starting to prepare for food material and making them successively, the video ends with her making a small snack using the existing materials and sharing it with her grandma as she did in other videos.

From the above, it is possible to observe the other content which are goods displayed in the video. “[...] nostalgia requires an object world to seize on – buildings, fashion, images, and the ephemera of everyday life” (Bissell, 2005, p. 221). If we check the image of goods appearing in the first 5 minutes, we have already got objects referencing pastoral life. Cooking facilities, firewood, bamboo backpack, etc appeared in her videos are distinctly different from what people normally have in the city, these are old objects materializing pastoral life (see Figure 5.1). Images of things revealing agrarian past, such as green hills and clear waters, lands filled with lotus, bamboo forest and wooden houses, clay stoves and giant wok, burlap clothes, birds, poultry and livestock, have been one obvious category of content emerged from her video. These signs of agricultural civilization appear repeatedly in her video. All the above signs together represent a meaning of reclusiveness. It possibly implies the beauty of the philosophy of life --- stay away from industrialization and urbanization, and return to simple and rustic rural life. Through studying signs in this part, it is essential to observe how signifieds transfer to signifiers through videos based on Williamson’s (1978) semiotic analysis on adverts. The signifieds with specific signs are shifted to other signifiers. This is one way of how pastoral images are repackaged, in which old objects become associated with pastoral characters.

51

Figure 5.1 Objects that reference a typical household in the countryside in Li Ziqi’s video (the ​ upper left is a steamer in a big wok, the upper right is a hoe used for digging the vegetables under the ground; down left are bamboo baskets, bottom right is a sewing basket with the sewing kit.)

5.2.2 Color:

Another fundamental element of compositionality is color, where Taylor (1957) suggests three aspects which are hue, saturation and value to examine the color quality of a visual image. However, it is more essential to understand how they function in visual images since colors are normally used to emphasize specific parts of an image (Rose, 2016, p. 65).

The video analysis shows an important role in the use of color in Li Ziqi’s video. In the sample video, it especially emphasizes the arrangement of colors. One of the typical strategies is stressing the saturation of the color of nature and plants (see Figure 5.2), and it provides a natural color tone in the video. In the sample video, the rooster cries start the morning in the country. At

52

5 minutes and 16 seconds, a scenery shot of blue mountains in the mist suggests this is a regular winter morning in the countryside, peaceful and calm. At 5 minutes and 26 seconds, Li Ziqi asks a countryside peddler on the other side of the valley to come and make popcorn, and the picture frame shows her standing in front of the misty mountains with a graduated color of white, baby blue and green dress. At 5 minutes and 31 seconds, closely followed by the response from the peddler, it is light green and dark green of different layers of fields interlaced in harmony with a shadow standing in the mist. Sometimes it is emphasized by close-ups, at 9 minutes and 8 seconds, the yellow color of ripe pomelos and orange-red tangerines is a close-up while many pomelos are scattered under green trees along the road. The dazzling colors provide the audience with a vast imagination. The visual effect in regard to the coordination of light, shadow, and sound, etc which will be discussed subsequently in the spatial organization section.

Another strategy is the color matching of food. The arrangements and presentation of colorful food are throughout the whole cooking process such as collection, preparation, cooking and presenting. It is visually pleasing, meanwhile, it is never innocent. At 3 minutes and 34 seconds in the video where she is preparing materials for a snack called nougat, there are various ingredients presenting in a range of colors on the wooden plate, and these include white marshmallows, brown crackers, red berries, dark red cranberries and dark brown chestnuts. Moreover, the bright yellow and green color of the rape flower appears as flower arrangements on the side. Thereafter at 4 minutes and 14 seconds, it is another scene of meat and vegetables with mixed colors where a plate filled with green onion, yellow ginger, white garlic, red chili, brown cinnamon bark, and pink beef is presented. At 4 minutes and 50 seconds when she cooks, a colorful range of food material mixes together in the dark wok.

At 2 minutes and 10 seconds, during her cooking sugar gourd, the fireworks in the stove are burning which echoes with the steam of the red haws in the pot. After finishing cooking, it is normally the moment characters enjoy food and kinship (the last image in Figure 5.2). The exquisite arrangements of food and colors arouse people’s desire for food and create a warm and tender atmosphere. Speaking of this, it is necessary to introduce ‘artistic conception’ in

53

traditional Chinese culture, in which it shows an idea of combining the subject with the object. As renowned Chinese poet, Zong Baihua stated that "[...]the creation of aesthetic conception is to symbolize subjective feeling by objective matters. A myriad of thoughts and ideas filled my mind could not be reflected by a single thing. Inspirations filled our mind can only draw from natural scenery like mountains, prairies, forests, clouds, sunrise and sunset." (Zong, 1981, p. 62). Also according to Mao, “In today's world where digital technology is widely used, ancient style illustrations draw the charm of artistic beauty from traditional Chinese culture and painting art” (Mao, 2019). Mao mentions that the sources of artistic conception include harmony between humans and nature, the culture of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, as well as China's traditional art of calligraphy and painting. And the performance of aesthetic conception mainly includes ethereal beauty, poetic beauty, and humanistic beauty. To perceive the beauty of the artistic conception, it normally asks for an echoing between the author and the reader. In fact, this is in line with what Williamson (1978) proposes, that the use of color is a nuanced means of shifting signifieds between images. By using similar colors on different objects, it is possible to bring signs together and make the shift of the meaning more smoothly. In this case, it can be seen that the transfers of signifieds happen through the color match of food (implying a colorful life in the present), characters’ dress, and nature, as if the whole world is retinted in a color of pastoral paradise.

54

Figure 5.2 Screenshots from video “Childhood taste: Snacks for Spring Festival in memories” ​ ​ ​ presenting the use of color

55

5.2.3 Spatial Organization:

“[...]the organisation of space ‘within’ an image and the way the spatial organisation of an ​ image offers a particular viewing position to its spectator” (Rose, 2016, p. 66) are two aspects to ​ think about the space of images. As discussed in the previous chapter, spatial organization is normally examined from the use of mise-en-scene, montage, sound, light and expressive content(Rose, 2016, p 63-83). “The spatial organisation of an image is not innocent. It has ​ effects and it produces a specific relation between image and spectator” (p. 73). This section will ​ focus on its montage, sound and expressive content aspects.

Firstly, according to Rose, “Montage is another term related to the composition of moving ​ images, and refers to the temporal organisation of a film [...] A quite distinct aspect of the temporal organisation of a film is its narrative; describing its narrative structure can also be an important way of interpreting a film.)” (2016, P. 76-77) In the sampling video, timeline and ​ space are the two most impressive elements. As it has mentioned in section 6.2.1, the narrative structure, in this case, follows with a continuity cutting where “Shots are edited in order to allow ​ the clear development of the story and to maintain a realistic representation of the spaces which the narrative occupies.” (p. 77). In her video, time passes slowly in acres of farmland, a few huts ​ ​ ​ and a small yard with the change of seasons in her video, delivering viewers a feeling of leisurely pastoral life, which is opposite to the fast pace in urban space. To quote again ‘visual imagery is never innocent’ (Rose, 2016, p. 23), any image in the video can be understood as a way to intentionally reconstruct the relationship between time and space in nature. However, considering the limitation of the time length of short videos, it could be a challenge to fill the gap in time between screen and reality. Therefore, the narrative of montage fits her style.

To be specific, the first approach to situate time and space in Li Ziqi’s video is compression. In her videos, the pastoral life that Li Ziqi centers around in reality is activities with long periods, such as cultivation, weaving, brewing and construction. In another video called ‘Turn a soybean into a drop of soy sauce’ (published on Dec 4th, 2019), in order to present the original and

56

organic process, the video shows the audience the growth of crops through most of the year. To describe it more clearly, she starts with tilling the land and sowing soybean seed in April in the first year, then she harvests the plants, air dries them, dusts them off and stores the soybeans in autumn. It went through three seasons in the actual life but the whole process is presented within one minute in an easy-manner in the video. The critical scenes of sowing, plowing, sprouting, flowering and yielding are edited together. Time-lapse photography combines with light and airy tunes, like a lyric interval between the passages of narratives. The movement of the camera corresponds to the pulse of life in nature. The vivid scenes convey the vibrant energy of country life to the audience. In such a fast-paced society, what is presented to the audience in Li Ziqi’s videos is things made at a slow pace. Certainly, Li Ziqi cuts most of the hard work and tedious time out by editing. Considering the nature of short videos, which is even more interesting is the difference between how short the video is and how long the process of making crafts and food takes. It is of interest to think about the sharp contrast between the reduced media content and the real-time length as well as what might be the reasons. Video image as a reflection of the actual time and space is essentially a reconstruction of the time-space relationships (Liu, 2020). In this case, how Li Ziqi deals with time echoes with a sense of anxiety about time in modern ages. The length of most of her short videos is between 5 mins to 11 mins, which is obviously a realignment of the actual time and space. The name of ‘short’ implies anxiety of time. As Hartmut Rosa (2018) points out, among all the consequences caused by social acceleration, the most astonishing one is the wide-spreading time scarcity. Modern people are always haunted by the feeling that time has run out quickly. Drawing on Rosa’s theory of speed and temporal structure (2013), speed is a social phenomenon with the main form of the change of temporal structure. He elaborates acceleration as the increase of the density of events with the decrease of the intervals between events in a certain period of time (2013, p. 125). Therefore, the producers of short videos have to catch the attention of the audience as soon as possible by using technical skills to put the fragments together. This could explain the compression in Li Ziqi’s short videos.

The second method of construction is omission which is both interesting and important. Many netizens are amazed by Li Ziqi's all-round talents. She is an almost perfect female figure with all

57

sorts of traditional labor techniques. However, in reality, this is definitely an illusion shaped by the edition of shots. It draws together all the best moments of living together with her grandma in a yard in the woods, leaving out the drudgery part. The process of creating something from scratch makes the audience feel like getting involved in a conversation with nature. The background of every image is warm, adorable and rosy-tinted. In fact, the recipe of Li Ziqi's ideal life lies in delicate omission which cuts out all the exertion and the boring parts, saving the happiness of enjoying yielding. Moreover, the drudgery does not only mean the hard segments of rural life but also refers to the actual work of her getting a camera ready with her make-up, using a phone to edit in her early time, sitting at a laptop cutting videos and scripting them, etc.

The process of her working scene behind the camera was shown to the public as a response to the negative voice online on Li Ziqi’s Weibo post on May 13th, 2017: “[...]I ran around in the yard to shoot short videos from early in the morning till midnight each day and my legs hurt[...] sometimes I edited videos in my room all day without eating, nor did I step out of the door. My grandma would warm the food for me and rewarm it when she found me never touching it[...] I climbed mountains and went to the river, bearing the cold weather, the rain, and the sunburn, to get videos shot. Sometimes I climbed the trees to get a good angle[...] As for editing, I did it through my phone at the beginning. What was more difficult is the memory of my camera since it could take 5 to 8 hours to transfer the format of video materials from mov to mp4. Sometimes, I had to start over when the editing software froze. There was a time that I spent 3 days editing the video but it crashed at the end and it took me another 4 times to finally finish it[...] As for shooting and music, I practiced and failed so many times before they were presented [...] I had to shoot the videos, carry the tripod and find a good angle all on my own, and I was criticized by not looking nice in the lens because running in the sun made me sweat and my hair oily [...] I had to redo the footage if my facial features seem to be unnatural, or if my hair looks messy, and if there are creases in my clothes[...] The 10 seconds of beautiful snowscape presented in the video took me 8 hours to get to the top of the mountain in the weather with a temperature of minus 10-degree celsius.” (translated from Li Ziqi’s Weibo content in Chinese)

58

Behind the picturesque life in the videos that people envy, spending a lot of time on the road, shooting, and editing, suffering from the bad weather and sickness, and adjusting her posture several times to cater to the audience before she is presented perfectly in the camera, are more like the real scenes in her life. According to her narratives, she states the actual life behind the scene and explains the reasons why those dried and boring components were deleted from the clean version of the videos displayed.

The third means is the rearrangement of time and space. Williamson (1978: 20-4) suggests that the position to watch the objects is vital to the shift of meaning between objects, humans and qualities in the visual. In her series of works, the center of scenes is the rural yard which stands aloof from worldly success and noise of cities, which conjures the complex of the Peach Blossom Valley, an equivalence of ancient Shangri La in Chinese culture (Liu, 2020). Since the theme can not contain the wildness of the countryside, the basic logic of creating an image is that it can only focus on Li Ziqi's yard and everything that happens within.

When it comes to the aspect of sound, three types of sound: environmental, speech and music are observed in the sampling video, this is in accordance with Monaco’s (2009:235-9) idea of types of sounds. And sound can make the expressive content of videos very different. Especially when sound and images overlap, there are three ways of thinking about the relationship between them (p. 238). The actual sound and commentative sound are discussed. From the perspective of background music, most of Li Ziqi’s videos adopt absolute music from China and Japan. For instance, the background music in the sampling video is ’Karma’ by Takeshi Abo and ‘勝利～善 のテーマ～’ by 有澤孝紀(‘Victory-Theme of Goodness’ by Takanori Arisawa), and it delivers a sense of peaceful and ethereal beauty. The same pattern of tunes is found in a series of her videos, which is in line with the whole atmosphere of the video. In addition to the background music, there is a certain sound throughout the video such as people talking in Sichuan dialect, the sound of burning wood, cutting vegetables, and birds burping, etc. Comments from the browsing tell that some audiences capture it as a use of ASMR which is an abbreviation of Autonomous

59

Sensory Meridian Response, a physiological phenomenon that performed as a very comfortable numbness or tingling pleasure in the brain, or through the back of the head and spine, usually triggered by listening to whispering speech and role-playing, giving people a relaxing listening experience (Lopez, 2018). The voice from nature throughout the video reminds people of a tranquil and pleasant life in the country.

The last aspect of examining spatial organization is expressive content. This is especially important in this study as it helps to understand the mood and atmosphere by evoking its “affective characteristics” (Rose, 2016, p. 79), which other aspects of compositional analysis could barely reach. It is also related to how the nostalgic feeling is embedded in the video. By looking into the expressive content of the video, it is possible to have a glimpse at how empathy of the feeling within the visual happens. According to Taylor (1957:43-4), expressive content is interpreted as ‘the combined effect of subject matter and visual form’.

It therefore should call out ‘aesthetic conception’ in Chinese culture as discussed in section 5.2.2, for it plays a big role in the expressive content of the video. In the sample video, most scenes focus on natural landscapes which denote the aesthetic conception of the combination of human and nature. It thus echoes the peaceful quality of pastoral life that modern people seek. Specifically, the process of planting and harvesting is the poetic prelude in Li Ziqi’s works. She wanders down the countryside, farmland and creek with the change of weather and seasons on screen, like a scene cut from an ancient Chinese scroll, with a hint of Zen. The audience was seized by a sense of slow-down in Li Ziqi's short videos, which is the aesthetic feature of her works.

As discussed above, all the process of manual labor as tasks was highly accelerated by editing the image of time and space. Why would the audience still catch a feeling of slow-down? This could be understood from the expressive content. Firstly, it is the charm of Li Ziqi's personality and performance. She always dresses in a flowy Han costume from ancient China or simple outfits like a peasant girl. Her behavior is confident in an easy manner, silent yet strong.

60

Secondly, it refers to two keywords in traditional agriculture civilization: nature and folk culture. The culture that is born in nature inherited among folks. Thirdly, diverse natural surroundings leave a lot of rooms for the various shooting techniques on camera. The combination of long shots and medium-close shots with time-lapse photography as transit captures the genuine image of nature. Therefore, the techniques help implement the nostalgia of pastoral images.

5.3 A Mixture of Studying Audiencing Site of CVM and Media Text

5.3.1 The Audiencing Site of CVM and Media Text Study: Nostalgic Narratives

There are four categories generated in regard to the content of comments (see section 4.5 coding and analytical procedure) which are “the familiar food or goods associated with feelings of nostalgia”, “personal narratives of childhood stories”, “a feeling of loss through the contrast between the past and present”, “affection to Li Ziqi and her pastoral lifestyle”. The comments (see Figure 5.3) can be seen as an effective means to understand viewers’ reactions after watching Li Ziqi’s short videos.

Firstly, it is found that a large percentage of comments are about sharing their personal stories. The second category is about familiar food or goods in the videos triggering their nostalgia. Many nostalgic references are found in Li Ziqi's videos as discussed in section 5.2 and Figure 5.1. Goods referencing a typical household in the countryside, traditional food making from scratch, or sometimes the scene of Li Ziqi eating with her grandma could all cause the feeling of missing home or the viewers’ childhood time. It shows a trend of a collective memory of childhood for rural kids in China. The third category is about feelings of remorse and loss, and it normally happens with the description of the contrast between the good old days of the countryside and life in the present. The fourth category is expressing affection to Li Ziqi and her lifestyle in the videos. The four categories are not mutually exclusive, instead they often coincide with each other.

Comments from user 1:

61

“My grandma passed away this year at 83 and I missed her a lot. She used to cook for me with a wood-fired oven. My grandpa liked to roast sweet potatoes in the ashes while building a fire. They are so sweet together, my grandpa always served my grandma food first before he ate to show his love in subtle ways, and he cried like a baby when my grandma died…”

This is a quote including the first two categories, the personal stories and old goods and familiar food. Since Li Ziqi’s videos are mostly about food, this normally triggers the expression of food memories and attachment to it. The keywords of the user’s personal descriptions such as ‘grandma, wood-fired oven, grandpa, sweet potatoes’ from this participant reveal details of his or her own story, and the warm and sweet atmosphere that the words depict seem to share the same quality of nostalgia in Li Ziqi’s short videos.

Skimming through comments, it is found that users tend to share family stories or private life with vivid descriptions. The time span of the comments is big, which possibly means that new users get in and are stimulated by other’s memories. Most of the time, users are stimulated by the video content. Except for the familiar goods that might trigger viewers’ affection, characters in the videos could also cause their sensation of nostalgia. For instance, user 2 screenshotted Li Ziqi’s grandma from the video and commented: “Finally her grandma shows up, bringing me a ​ warm feeling as if I am seeing my grandma. I miss my grandma so much but I can’t see her anymore.”

User 3 says: “My parents divorced when I was 2, I was supposed to live with my father but my ​ grandma was the one taking care of me and she was so nice to me. There were times when I was sick and she carried me on her back and walked to the hospital in town for more than one hour every day. I don’t know why but my father doesn’t allow me to visit her too often when I am older now. So I went back to see her one or two times per year. I cried each time when I had to leave her but I didn’t want her to see my crying face.”

62

User 3 describes a feeling of loss through the contrast between the past and present when the user tells the personal story that he or she could not see grandma often and things change. However, there is no answer about the reason why the user could not visit grandma too often. User 4 also expresses a feeling of loss about the change in the village. The comment shows that the population in the village has decreased sharply because people left and move out:

“My grandparents are both in their 70s. I live in Zhejiang, and my grandma lives in Shanghai taking care of my cousin. We left my grandpa alone living in the village in AnHui. It just occurred to me it was so lively in the village and people gradually left, now there are only 2 families. I feel so sad thinking about this.”

User 5 comments: “Alas, sophora flowers in May, shepherd's purse in early spring, and dried ​ plum beans… all I missed are tastes of grandma’s food in my memory, however, I will never have the opportunity to see or eat them.” User 6 replies user 5: “We are in the same situation. I ​ ​ went back home to pick up my grandma to celebrate the spring festival, but I won’t have her anymore from this year.” User 7 replies user 5: “I feel the same. I don’t like this spring festival, ​ that’s why I don’t want to go home.” In other words, with the communication going on in the ​ social media community, the process of nostalgizing happens. In fact, with Li Ziqi’s short videos and social media as platforms, the audience gets to recall memories and practice their nostalgia. A network community has been formed to respond to each other's questions, and a multi-level dialogue has been constructed based on the videos.

“Groups provide us the stimulus or opportunity to recall; they also shape the ways in which we do so, and often provide the materials. [...] all individual remembering takes place with social materials, within social contexts and in response to social cues” (Olick, 2011, p. 19). Put shortly, memory connects us to the past. And there is a term called ‘collective representations’ from Durkheim (1968[1915]) meaning symbols or meanings binding to the group. From the commentary section, it is possible to get the idea that what presents in Li Ziqi’s videos, either characters, old objects, buildings or nature, can be seen as stimuli to the audience for they

63

stimulate individual narratives and public memory. Many similar comments revealing personal narratives on the contrast between the past and the present, as well as a feeling of loss to the disappearance of countryside life, could possibly be taken into consideration to understand the collective memories of urbanization (Gu, 2020) in China. Moreover, there are also some who never had such pastoral experience but feel nostalgic regarding Li Ziqi’s country life display, because nostalgia does not ask for the exact same experience (Boym, 2001).

64

(a) (b)

(c) (d)

65

Figure 5.3 The audience reply to her by sharing their feelings of nostalgia for the pastoral life in ​ terms of personal stories, lost memories, emotional yearning, and longing for food (the information of user name and profile pictures have been removed due to ethical consideration)

Nostalgic narratives also come through Li Ziqi’s posts on Weibo. The following part will present how it happens. The childhood story and the real rural life experience provide good preconditions for the construction of nostalgia in her videos. According to Li Ziqi, the reason why she came back from the city and ran the channel in the countryside is that she had to take care of grandma in 2016. The first trial on short videos was not so successful until one day she found her content of making peach blossom wine on the recommendation on the MeiPai webpage which is a video-sharing based social media platform in China. Starting from here, her channel got more and more clicks and followers. However, the consciousness of storytelling regarding pastoral nostalgia, a complete narrative structure of the videos and a real play of communication did not happen until she brought her grandma in the video from Oct 13th, 2017 (see also discussion in section 4.4 data sampling, p. 39). This enriches the image of the characters and the family affection in her became the persistent theme throughout her later videos.

Pictures posted on Li Ziqi’s Weibo page are often accompanied by texts delivering a feeling of loss through memory. Li Ziqi expresses her nostalgia for food in many videos but it is more obvious in the caption where she expresses a feeling of missing her grandpa who brought her a joyful childhood as a farmer and a chef. One Weibo-post on April 12th 2017 shows pictures of old bamboo handicrafts and furniture and it is only one example out of many that imply nostalgic sensations in her posts. “Whenever there was a wedding or a funeral in the village, Ziqi’s grandpa was in charge of cooking for the guests. Ziqi had to help out, and it was during this time she learned most of her cooking skills.” (liZiqi.fan). However, her grandpa passed away in her fifth grade. She remembers her grandpa by making food and handicrafts he used to teach her (see Figure 5.4). In a post on her Weibo account, she made a speech talking about the nostalgia those old bamboo handicrafts give to her, “When I was nine years old, I learned how to make bamboo

66

baskets, bamboo fans from my grandpa in my summer break, while in winter we made bamboo lanterns, bamboo steamers. Then we sold those to pay my tuition fees for the next semester.” She explains that her grandpa is the one teaching her all skills and that’s why she seems to be capable of doing everything. “He died when I was eleven and his last words to my grandmother were asking her to support me to finish my studies. Grandpa, I really miss you.” (See Figure 5.4) Although the quality of life back then was harsh, the time she spent with her grandparents is described with warmth and joyfulness. The bittersweet memories suggest a happy childhood for her in general. This is a narration echoing the theme of her current videos by sharing her feeling of nostalgia for childhood time in relation to her grandpa’s accompany.

Figure 5.4 A speech of missing her grandpa on Li Ziqi’s Weibo post. Images below the text are ​ bamboo handicrafts from her grandpa, referencing a typical household in countryside

“When I was a kid, my grandpa would make everyday items with bamboo, and sell them on a market. He knew how to make things like chairs, stools, fans, baskets and dustpans. I always

67

helped him while he was making them. Now when I recall the moments with my grandpa, this scene always comes to my mind. ” This is what she said to the journalist of Goldthread in an interview. Besides the feeling of reminiscing, there is also a sense of loss and regret in memory of her grandpa in her words, for not being able to spend more time with him, suggesting a sense of incompleteness in her life. Subsequently, it was the same reason that urged her to come back to the countryside from the city to look after her sick grandma in 2012 (liZiqi.fan).

Besides, there is also the direct narration regarding nostalgia in Li Ziqi’s videos. For instance, on one scene in her video called “Woodblock printing, engraved with the essence of the ancient Chinese culture” (Aug 20th, 2018, at 4 minutes 35 seconds), she prints the paper letter with a little poem through the self-made woodblock, and she ties the letter to the leg of a homing pigeon and sends it away, the video ends with Li Ziqi standing on the ground and watching the homing pigeon flying away. The little poem is:

“The temperature from burning logs, the porridge from grandma, the cranes from the fields, and the aged wine from the cellar. These are my best childhood memories. Now, I want to bring them to you.”

The descriptive words in the poem display an image of old time and countryside life. Words such as “burning log, porridge, grandma, cranes, fields, aged wine, cellar, childhood” are essentially narrations to weave a home image with all the imagined elements, yet no longer the real scenes of life. There is a feeling of romance with Li Ziqi’s fantasy. It is the fond memories of living with her grandparents that generate a nostalgia expression in her short videos to the place where she spent her childhood. Moreover, the form of using paper letter in the new media of short videos is a way of remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 2000) in which short videos integrate the features of old media such as paper here, for paper holds memories of the past which is in line with the essence of nostalgia. The remediation of visual media, short videos here, refashions the old form of paper letter by remixing it. It potentially brings viewers a special experience by presenting the combination of both forms but on the platform of short video.

68

In Li Ziqi’s case, her personal life story such as her bittersweet childhood, food memories, and the close tie with her grandparents becomes the stimuli of her nostalgia, as scholars suggest “personal nostalgia” (Sedikides et al., 2004). Li Ziqi using techniques and media to express nostalgia could be seen as an effective action for strengthening her identity and affecting viewers, which later triggers nostalgia among viewers.

It can be seen from the comments that the experience of nostalgia that is triggered among the commenters has passed the first order (Davis, 1979) which is a simple nostalgia that only refers to a happy memory about the past. The descriptions of the comments implies that users are aware of where nostalgia comes from and why it is there. However, it is barely found people questioning or wondering if the nostalgia was as nice as they recall. We could not tell the deeper reasons behind the phenomenon in this study. Urbanization (Gu, 2020) in China could be the social reason that leads to collective nostalgia, which will need further study.

5.3.2 Media Text Study: A Simulacrum of Ideal Life

This section presents the media text in regard to the discussion of the contradiction between pastoral life in Li Ziqi’s videos and real life in rural China by applying thick descriptions. The content is the response to the contradiction from Li Ziqi and her spokesperson in the form of the existing interview excerpts from China Newsweek. Remix is used to generate the materials from different platforms. They are regarded as a source of literature to analyze and respond to the third research question which is “What does nostalgia communication on short videos say about ​ society?”.

When she was asked if she enjoyed her current life in the interview from a reportage on Tencent News (Li, 2019), Li Ziqi responded: “I like my life when I don’t have to shoot the video. In fact, finding a subject to shoot is easy because there are numerous themes in the countryside but I have to spend most of my time figuring out the way of shooting, the photograph composition,

69

and structuring the footage, as well as post production. So basically, the life of making short ​ videos is different from living my normal life, they are two concepts.”(Li, 2019). ​

Li Ziqi once opened up about her life in the interview by Goldthread under South China Morning Post, “[..]many of the techniques she portrays are grounded in real-world knowledge and come from a genuine desire for the pastoral ideal. The only thing she has sculpted is her on-screen persona. ‘I’m just filming my life,’ she says. ‘Or rather, I’m just filming the life that I want.’ ​ ​ (Goldthread, 2019)

A post on Li Ziqi’s Weibo account on May 12th, 2017 replied to the questions of her constructedness of her life, “I like to accompany my grandma, eat with her, and watch her favorite TV series with her[...] I like planting vegetables and flowers and I am happy to watch them turn green from a seed under the ground. I like to share the beautiful view in my hometown to you...however, the only thing that I don’t like is shooting videos myself. I have shot 20881 ​ footages within this year and I walked 260 km only to run around to press the shooting button.”

Li Ziqi’s team once explained their operation philosophy in the interview, to quote the reportage from China Newsweek （Gu, 2019, the excerpts are translated from Chinese to English, ​ ​ http://www.inewsweek.cn/people/2019-06-03/5958.shtml): ​

“Li Ziqi, who wore an antique skirt, chopped wood and fed horses in the exquisitely decorated farmhouse, demonstrated her powerful farming and cooking skills and is now the head KOL of Weibo. Although she also relies on local resources for content output, she denies her relationship with the words ‘village internet celebrities’. Li Ziqi’s agent and the staff of Hangzhou Weinian (a cultural and entertainment cross-consumer company that incubates KOLs through short videos to become IPs and extends to consumer brands) told reporters that they are ​ unwilling to associate Li Ziqi with the rural. When describing Li Ziqi, they chose the word ‘pastoral’. There have always been people questioning the authenticity of Li Ziqi’s life on the ​ internet. Li Ziqi’s agent does not agree. ‘Chinese people have a dream of landscape and

70

pastoralism. This is also Ziqi’s dream. The reason why Li Ziqi is successful is that she turns a ​ dream into reality through short videos.’, The agent told . Li Ziqi and her ​ team are very clear that what the countryside looks in her videos does not represent the real nature, instead it is a simulacrum of an idyllic landscape. Li Ziqi and her team create dreams, ​ ​ ​ ​ as well as maintaining the existence of it through professional management of her online image. [..] then Li Ziqi and his team went a step further: consciously relying on the countryside to ​ create and design a mimic environment to meet the imagination of urban people.” ​

More than two years have passed since she publicly said that she would love to live her real life just like in her own videos, Li Ziqi had not changed her idea of the ideal life while speaking to China Newsweek (Mao, 2019, http://www.inewsweek.cn/people/2019-12-30/8203.shtml) in ​ ​ another interview, that is, “[...] I want a life just like in the video, self-sufficient and nothing to ​ care about. I can just live in the yard with all kinds of fruits and vegetables. Every morning, I go ​ to the field to pick enough fruits and vegetables, and then put some seasonal flowers in the room. I stay at home all day when the sun comes out and gets hot, and all I do is to cook delicious food, make handicrafts and binge watch TV series and live this steady life until I am old.”

Putting together the idea of the above reportages, in Li Ziqi and her team’s perspective, the debate of authenticity of pastoral life in the videos is moot because what the videos present are clearly different from the real life. They acknowledge the video content is a simulacrum of an ideal pastoral life, and essentially it is about catering to the imagination of netizens as a lucrative business. The videos are heavily edited and carefully designed, and presented as if they are natural daily scenarios. Life in the videos even replaces real life in a way. This is what Baudrillard (1981) called the simulacrum where he considers that in postmodernity the divisions between the real and the unreal have disappeared. Visual materials such as images or videos have departed from the actual world and now simulacra takes over the visual world.

Critics argue that Li Ziqi’s videos glamorize farm life since the real rural life is much harder, therefore she could not represent the authentic rural China. They insist her short videos are taken

71

mainly as a manipulation of advertising her own brand “Li Ziqi”. In fact, questions and critics of her commercial behavior could probably reveal the internal contradictions of nostalgia. That is, people are aware that the past is not necessarily a perfect place to escape and the present is not good for nothing, however, thinking about going to the past still appeals to them for alleviating the anxiety of living in an accelerated world. People long to escape modernity and return to the distant past while they could never abandon the benefits of modernity such as the convenience of consuming goods, and using social media to share and view short videos in this case.

There are many more online celebrities shooting rural life now in China (Gu, 2019). The mechanism behind the phenomenon is the comprehensive role of business strategy and policy guidance, as well as the prevalence of the internet and short videos among the general population (Gu, 2019). Except for the poetry pictures in Li Ziqi’s videos, there are many clips with crazy and cruel images in other vloggers’ cameras, intentionally edited in order to meet the curiosity and the aesthetic imagination of pastoral life. However, not many people really care about what they are doing and how their real lives are, which could lead to a disappearance of the real, according to Baudrillard’s simulacrum (1981).

6 Discussion and Concluding Remarks

The last chapter has examined the social modality of the audiencing site and the compositional and social modalities of the image site through a Critical Visual Approach. The diverse data and methods help to grapple with the complexity and have a better understanding of the travel and remediation of pastoral nostalgia in this case. At this point, it is possible to expound the theoretical discussions regarding pastoral nostalgia, short videos and media that this study wishes to contribute to. This chapter first presents critical discussions on the two sites, followed by section 6.2 reiterate research questions and section 6.3 Limitations and Implications for Future Research.

72

6.1 Critical Discussion

6.1.1 A Critical Discussion of the Image Site

To understand the visual materials, only applying compositional analysis to images is believed to be superficial. Therefore this section not only examines its compositions but also critically discusses its social site under the surface of the compositions.

Firstly, as discussed in the introduction chapter (section 1.3 New Media of Short Videos in China ​ as a Product of a Fast-Paced Lifestyle), short videos have features of being short in time and ​ length and being fast characterized aesthetically, which are in conflict with the slow characterized pastoral images. However, the contradiction regarding time and speed between short videos and pastoral nostalgia is resolved by the strategies such as compression, omission, rearrangement of time and space in Li Ziqi’s short videos. Other strategies include content and color also help to build up a homey atmosphere overall and to immerse viewers in the constructed visions, bringing them to experience the time in the visual world. Initially, this study aims to find out the construction of nostalgia through the media, in fact, we could observe how short videos adapt to pastoral images aesthetically. Therefore, it is possible to say that pastoral nostalgia, in turn, has affected the form and expression of short videos.

Secondly, time is compressed in Li Ziqi’s videos. In other words, it takes less time in the videos to finish the same amount of work in reality on planting, making food or doing handicrafts. When viewers watch the videos, they seem to immerse themselves in the videos. As previously argued (3.2 The Logic of Social Acceleration and Temporal Structure), viewers are aware of the lack of time in an era defined by social acceleration, compared to really living a slow life in reality, they spend much less time experiencing life in the videos by watching Li Ziqi’ life as if they live the same pastoral life with her. This efficient way makes viewers dependent on the media. Would the experience of pastoral nostalgia through watching short videos be absorbed

73

and become a life experience for viewers? Rosa believes that the time experience is different from time in memory and it could be seen as an alienation of time (Rosa, 2015). He also thinks that people’s experience is getting richer while their life experience is getting poorer. As a result, time for modern people seems to pass fast but leave little in memory. In fact, this might be a reflection of the core interpretation for the quick running of time. We have not made the time that we experience become our own time. The time we experience and the time we spend on experience are alienated from us. Moreover, the lack of absorption and possession of our own actions and experiences could lead to self-alienation (Rosa, 2015).

Thirdly, the strategies of omission and only presenting selected footages adopted by Li Ziqi, in fact, echo with the simulacra (Baudrillard, 1981) which have become a character of our times, ‘that of the production and reproduction of the real. The other production, that of values and commodities[...] has for a long time had no specific meaning.’ (1981, p. 23). Baudrillard argues that society seeks to restore the truth from the production and explains why ‘the material production’ is the ‘hyperreal itself’ (p. 23). In his mind, the birth of the simulacrum society is the result of the extreme development of the consumer society, which eventually led to a fully simulacified world.

Last but not least, it is worth noting that there is a mixture of elements of traditional culture with western culture in Li Ziqi’s videos. For instance, she selects a piano music form of background sound in the selected video, while piano is not the traditional musical instrument in China. The background music indeed brings the viewers a peaceful time and helps with nostalgia construction in Li Ziqi’s videos. The way of borrowing foreign elements from modern time implies a combination of bringing foreign elements into Chinese featured content. This method urges us to think about what kind of nostalgia and to what extent nostalgia is displayed in the videos. According to Davis (1979), the experience in Li Ziqi’s videos goes to the first order which is simple nostalgia, which focuses on the sunny side of the pastoral images and there is neither questioning nor interpreting of why the nostalgia produces in the videos. From the social and cultural aspects, in the light of Turner (1987, p. 152), the nostalgic feeling often comes with

74

a loss of simple wisdom of life in the countryside caused by industrialization and urbanization. Boym also states that “the rapid pace of industrialization and modernization increased the intensity of people's longing for the slower rhythms of the past, for continuity, social cohesion and tradition.” (2002, p. 39). Li Ziqi’s videos display a simple pastoral life that was lost in the urban world, which is in line with the above viewpoint. Earlier in the analysis the videos were broken down and analyzed at the level of aesthetics in regard to content, color and spatial organization. Even though the analysed video is connected to the old time aesthetically, it is altered and combined with modern elements, therefore it is not a simple replicated version of the past any more. When looking into the extent of the nostalgia, on the basis of Boym (2002) introduced in the chapter of theoretical framework, the nostalgia displayed in Li Ziqi’s videos is not a reflexive nostalgia for there is no doubt to the past, but a form of restorative nostalgia (p. 81) in which a reconstruction of the past is seen. The pastoral homeland that Li Ziqi’s short videos provide relieves the ache of displacement of viewers, even though it is not exactly the same home as they have. However, the pastoral life that Li Ziqi displays in the videos is not exactly as it was. This is what Boym emphasizes, that people have to distinguish the past from the restoration of the past. In this case, the old habits in Li Ziqi’s memories are different from the invented habits in her short videos simply because of the irreversibility of the past. Nostalgia in Li Ziqi’s videos could also be seen as a creative nostalgia (Boym, 2002, p. 413) in the way that it reflects the fantasy of the temporary society in which the vision could possibly happen in the future. There are words for the kind of nostalgia displayed in Li Ziqi’s videos: “One is nostalgic not for the past the way it was, but for the past the way it could have been. It is this past perfect that one strives to realize in the future” (Boym, 2002, p. 413).

6.1.2 A Critical Discussion of Studying Media Text

Commodified nostalgia is a big dimension in nostalgia study. The commercial use of Li Ziqi’s short videos should be considered when talking about authenticity. In Li Ziqi’s case, earning clicks and advertising her online shop indeed was the primary intention that she released her videos on social media platforms, and she now owes a professional production company to run the content since she became famous. Since then, her video production has been affected and

75

transferred to higher quality and aesthetically with the clarity of expression. On the front page of Li Ziqi’s online Taobao store, she is labelled as “a gourmet of oriental lifestyle”. Her fans seem to share the joy of her lifestyle by buying the food in her store, as if they are purchasing a taste of healthy idyllic life.

On the political side, one post of the state-owned media CCTV on Weibo says: “Li Ziqi prompts China in a nice manner and tells a beautiful story about China without praising China.” Other recognitions from the state representation include naming Li Ziqi an ambassador of the Communist Party Youth League in 2019 and giving her “People’s Choice Award” by People’s Daily, a state-owned newspaper (Wang, 2020). It is believed that Li Ziqi is acknowledged by Chinese officials as a soft power to bring Chinese culture to the world through her short videos. This might not be the plan of her intention when she shot short videos at the very beginning though, however, it is now affecting her short videos in many ways. Most of the time, YouTube comments show a trend of positive reception of Li Ziqi’s videos, “life in paradise”, “comfort”, “beautiful” are some of the most common phrases that western netizens comment on. It seems that Li Ziqi’s videos provide viewers an escapist fairland to escape from modernity and look for their roots, even if it is only for temporary visual enjoyment. The criticisms of authenticity of her life displayed in the videos have risen for there have been netizens abroad arguing if Li Ziqi is spreading an “authentic” Chinese image, or only showing a vision of China that people expect to see as a new form of the propaganda of Chinese Communist Party.

It could come to the conclusion that the authenticity of Li Ziqi’s pastoral life in the videos is not that important and there is nothing wrong with her videos. However, it is necessary to note that a better future lies in facing the fact and reality at present. The popularity of highly romanticized and conceptualized pastoral life in either Li Ziqi’s videos or other media online such as the phenomenon of cotagecore (section 2.1) could hinder the development of real agricultural industry and farm life, because investors might cater to the tourists’ interest instead of crop production. On the political side, we should be aware that nostalgia for the good old days in more extreme cases can easily turn into nationalism, racism and conspiracy theories that are

76

indeed spreading around the world. For instance, “Make America great again”, “Take back control” at the beginning (see section 2.1) are in fact nostalgic discourse and they are used politically.

6.2 Research Questions Reiterated

How is communication of pastoral nostalgia like in Li Ziqi’s short videos? The analysis pursued throughout the study has arrived at the conclusion that construction of pastoral images was made from the elements including content, color, and spatial organization in the videos. Except for nostalgia construction through videos, nostalgia communication is also observed from the audiencing site through comments. 1. How is the nostalgia of pastoral life transformed and remediated in the analyzed videos? 2. What is the relationship between nostalgia and Li Ziqi’s short videos on Weibo? 3. What does nostalgia communication on short videos say about society?

To answer the first question, with reference to the compositional analysis, thick descriptions, and semiotic analysis on chapter 5, there are three aspects to conclude concerning how her short videos evoke pastoral images. The first is through content, old objects such as cooking facilities, firewood, bamboo furniture, countryside yard constantly appear in the video. They are goods that materialize countryside life and reference pastoral images. In this way, lots of items filled in videos become associated with pastoral characters. Besides goods, typical landscapes in the countryside such as green hills, clear waters, bamboo, and forest are another reference to pastoral life, and the aesthetic conception in the video helps to weave a peaceful picture in the countryside. Moreover, by presenting the process of an authentic cooking method of local food following seasons and traditional Chinese calendar and festivals, as well as showing a sweet home with old grandma and small animals accompanied, it brings the audience to a scene of the world’s life in her village. The second is on the use of color, by improving the saturation of the color of natural scenery in the video, it provides a natural color tone in the video and this implies an idyllic life from a semiotic perspective, as well as presenting colorful food with a careful

77

collocation which helps to trigger a food nostalgia and create a great sense of space and tranquility. The third is about spatial organization, through which a viewing position is intentionally provided for the audience. Regarding montage, strategies of omission, compression, and rearrangement are used to rebuild the relationship between time and space. Besides, the sound and expressive content also help with a soothing atmosphere, bringing the viewers a pastoral paradise. In sum, the above compositions in her videos are all used as means of shifting signifieds between images. Through them, it is possible to bring signs together and shift the meaning and ideology to images, further it produces connections between pastoral images and spectators in different ways. All together they weave an idyllic picture and seize the viewers.

As for the second question, it was explored by mixed methods from both the image site and the audiencing site. It is imperative to comprehend how the process of communication of pastoral nostalgia looks like, as well as its characters, transition, and remediation in short videos. From the study of comments, it is possible to get the idea that what presents in Li Ziqi’s videos, either characters, old objects, buildings or nature, can be seen as stimuli to the audience for they stimulate individual narratives and public memory. Comments appeared in commentary sections come with nostalgic narratives transfering sensations of loss and recovery by calling back to the past. Here nostalgia is more of a dynamically interacting process instead of a stable sensation. Family stories or personal experience are shared through individual narrations and then are communicated among people. Therefore, nostalgia and media have a mutual effect on each other. We not only examine how short videos construct nostalgia but also find short videos accommodate nostalgia aesthetically.

With a wide array of nostalgic engagement involved in politics and our daily life, nostalgia becomes a trending topic. Yet, other than a trend, it in fact contains strong power for it relates to time and space. The exact content and proneness of nostalgia might not be the same for different people in varied contexts. This study concentrates on nostalgia in the Chinese cultural sphere and contexts, specifically on pastoral images in Li Ziqi’s short videos. The process of conducting the study, throughout finding theories, building methodological framework, collecting data, and

78

analyzing, suggests that communication of pastoral nostalgia through short videos is dynamic and constantly negotiated. Through the technology of short videos and social media, people get to recollect memories of a good past and hope to reach a promising future by diminishing the present. It explores the varied characters that define nostalgia as a community of bridging personal experience and collective ones. Therein lies short videos as a place to embed contents and Sina Weibo to provide a platform.

To answer the third question, media text study is applied, with the data of the media reportage of the response from Li Ziqi and her spokesperson on the authenticity of her pastoral life in short videos. It can be argued that an understanding of the pastoral construction and presentation in the new media of short videos and its relationship with social media platforms have taken a new dimension in relation to how they get on with the authenticity. From the media text, we can tell that instead of a regular course of life, pastoral life unfolded in Li Ziqi’s short videos is a simulation of the past combined with the modern elements. With the reality that people already live in the simulacrum society, it is even not that important to pursue the authenticity of Li Ziqi’s pastoral life in the videos. With the proliferation of visual and audio technologies, and online communication through social media, the repackage of pastoral nostalgia in Li Ziqi’s short videos appears to be a compromise of the authentic pastoral life, a real past, the unsatisfying present, and the better future for most viewers.

6.3 Limitations and Implications for Future Research

Given the limited scope and ambition of this research, there are indeed some limitations in terms of transferability criterion and credibility.

Regarding the transferability criterion, this study takes a pretty small sample regarding the selected video to understand communication of pastoral nostalgia in Li Ziqi’s short videos. Therefore, an obvious limitation of the study is that it was merely about Li Ziqi’s case while there are many other communications happening in regard to pastoral nostalgia within short videos in China. Though it does not intend to generalize conclusions, it is possible to expect that

79

the results of the study may contribute to further research on the relationship between nostalgic communication and digital media in China due to the same environment. It is also possible to expect the effort of making nostalgic communication more transparent by discussing the discourse around it such as the authenticity of the pastoral life Li Ziqi portrays. Therefore, future studies could enlarge the study object to include other online phenomena in relation to pastoral nostalgia in China. Moreover, future research could adopt a comparative approach to understand the process diversely.

As for credibility, interpreting compositions of the visual is only about interpretation. As a qualitative and interpretative study, it is difficult to avoid the influence of my positionality as the researcher in this study. That is to say, this study takes my own position and preference to build theoretical and methodology frameworks. It might be questioned with its credibility. However, as Stuart Hall(1997a: 9) says, there is no absolute right answer to the question ‘What does this image mean?’ because it is hard to guarantee either if there is ultimate truth or if it will never change. This work is meant to be interpretative so ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is not the thing to chase. “The best way to ‘settle’ such contested readings is to look again at the concrete example and try ​ to justify one’s ‘reading’ in detail in relation to the actual practices and forms of signification used, and what meanings they seem to you to be producing.”(1997a: 9) Also, according to Rose, ​ a good interpretation relies on how you engage with what you see. “[...]depend on the pleasure, thrills, fascination, wonder, fear, or revulsion of the person looking at the images and then writing about them.” (2016, xxiii) Despite the above argument, it is still possible to adopt a quantitative approach such as content analysis in the future, to carefully think about data selection, coding and analysis to a relatively large sampling. The last thing is that conducting andiencing study by only taking the data of comments could not represent the most audience since most of them do not comment. However, comments are still considered to be a nice and naturally produced source to study how nostalgia is triggered in the audience. The future study could take a further step to interview the audience to get a deeper understanding of their personal nostalgia narratives.

80

In addition to the above mentioned, this study also has its limitation in gender perspective since Li Ziqi as a female with the qualities of being beautiful, young, smart, and omnipotent at housework and handicraft, is in large measure a main focus in this case. The data and analysis of gaze from spectators in regard to feminism is not included in the study, which could be explored in future studies.

81

References

Annette N., M. (2013). Remix Cultures, Remix Methods: Reframing Qualitative Inquiry for Social Media Contents. In Norman K. & Michael D. (Eds.)，Global Dimensions of Qualitative Inquiry （pp. 63-81）. Routledge.

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. ( S. F. Glaser, Trans.). The University of Michigan Press.

Bissell, W. C. (2005). Engaging Colonial Nostalgia. Cultural Anthropology, 20 (2), pp. 215-248.

Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Boym, S. (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books.

Cai, F. ( 2018). Perceiving Truth and Ceasing Doubts: What Can We Learn from 40 Years of China's Reform and Opening up?. China & World Economy, 26(2), 1-22.

Cottagecore. (n. d.). Retrieved from https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cottagecore ​

Click, J. et. al. (2011). The Collective Memory Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Davis, F. (1979). Yearning for Yesterday. New York: The Free Press.

Dai, W. (2019, December 27th). How Li Ziqi Repackages Rural China For Urban Fantasies. Retrieved from https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1005007/how-li-Ziqi-repackages-rural-china-for-urban-fantasie s

82

Danah, B. (2009). A Response to Christine Hine: Question 1: Defining Project Boundaries. In A. N. Markham & N. K. Baym (Eds.), In Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method ( pp. 26–32). Los Angeles: Sage Publications.

Debord, G.(2006, March 1). The Society of the Spectacle. (Z.F. Wang, Trans). Nanjing: Nanjing University Press.

Gauntlett, G. (2019). Making is Connecting: The social meaning of creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0.

Gibraltar, M. (2014). A Semiotic Analysis of the Video Music: “Indonesia Bangkit”: Comparing Audience Interpretation. Humanities and Social Sciences, 2(6), pp. 148-156. doi:10.11648/j.hss.20140206.13

Goldthread. (2019). Behind the scenes with Li Ziqi, the mysterious Chinese internet celebrity with 58 million fans. Retrieved from https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/entertainment/article/3027602/behind-scenes-li-ziqi-mysterious- chinese-internet-celebrity

Grainge, P. (2002). Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and Style in Retro America (p. 24). Praeger Publishers.

Gu, X. (2019, July 3). The Influencer from the Rural. Chinese News Weekly. Retrieved from http://www.inewsweek.cn/people/2019-06-03/5958.shtml

Gu, Z. (2019). The Construction of Nostalgia in Screen Media in the Context of Post-socialist China. Retrieved from http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/59053/1/Zhun%20Gu%20PhD%20Thesis%202019.pdf

83

Haasch, P. (2020, April 10). People Online Are Flocking to 'Cottagecore,' an Online Aesthetic That Idealizes Agricultural Life, to Calm Their Hyper-stimulated Nerves. Retreived from https://www.insider.com/cottagecore-isolation-aesthetic-tumblr-explained-social-distancing-202 0-4

Hall, S. (1997a) ‘Introduction’, in S. Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage. pp. 1-12.

Jennings, R. (2020, August 3). Once Upon a Time, There Was Cottagecore. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/8/3/21349640/cottagecore-taylor-swift-folklore-lesbian-cl othes-animal-crossing

Jeziński, M., & Wojtkowski, L. (2016). Nostalgia Commodified Towards the Marketization of the Post-communist Past Through the New Media. Media & Zeit, 2016, 96-104.

Jurgenson, N. (2011). The Faux-Vintage Photo. The Society Pages.

Kalinina, E. (2016, April). What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Media and Nostalgia?. Media & Zeit, 2016(4), 6-15.

Keller, M. (2016). Experienced Mood and Commodified Mode: Forms of Nostalgia in the Television Commercials of Manner. Media & Zeit, 2016, 61-71.

Laestadius, L. (2017). Instagram. In L. Sloan & A. Quan-Haase (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods (pp. 573-593）. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Lariviere, C. (2017, March 18). Nostalgia in the Age of Social Media: Identity, Meaning & Connection, Retrieved from https://medium.com/@christinelariviere/nostalgia-in-the-age-of-social-media-identity-meaning-c onnection-da9f31d2c413

84

Leach, E. (1976). Culture and Communication: The Logic by which Symbols are Connected. Cambridge University Press.

Li, W. (2019, December 13). The Businesswoman behind the Fairy Li Ziqi. Retrieved from https://www.huxiu.com/article/330894.html

Li, X. (2020, March). How Big is the Gap Between So-called Daily Life and Reality: the rural fantasy in Li Ziqi’s short videos. Tianfu New Theory, 2020(3), 134-141.

Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic Inquiry. Beverly Hills, Calif: Sage.

Lindgren, S. (2017). Digital Media and Society. Sage.

Liu, Y.C. (2020). About Time and Space, Rhythm and Artistic Conception. Media Observer, 2.

Markham, A. N., & Lindgren, S. (2014). From Object to Flow: Network Sensibility, Symbolic Interactionism, and Social Media. Symbolic Interaction and New Social Media, 43, pp. 7-41.

Mao, L.P. (2019). Study on the Beauty of Artistic Conception in Chinese Style Illustrations. Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 378, p. 756-758.

Mayr, P., & Weller, K. (2017). Think Before You Collect: Setting Up a Data Collection Approach for Social Media Studies. In L. Sloan & A. Quan-Haase (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods (pp. 107-125). London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Megan A. Moreno, MD, MSEd, MPH, corresponding author Natalie Goniu, Peter S. Moreno, MS, JD, and Douglas Diekema, MD, MPH,. (2013, September). Ethics of Social Media Research: Common Concerns and Practical Considerations. Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw, 16(9), 708–713. Publications Ltd.

85

Meijers, Y. (2015). Instagramming Nostalgia: Faux- vintage Photography and Nostalgia in the ​- 21st Century

Nguyen, PT. (2017). “Nostalgic for the present”: Digital nostalgia and mediated authenticity on Instagram. id: diva2:1107774

Niemeyer, K (ed.). (2014). Yearning for the Past, Present and Future, (ed.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Rosa, H. 2013 (2005). Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. (J. Trejo-Mathys, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.

Rosa, H. (2015). a Chinese version of “Beschleunigung: Die Veränderung der Zeritstrukturen in der Moderne”(2005). ( Dong L., Trans.). Beijing University Press.

Rosa, H. (2018). a Chinese version of "Beschleunigung und Entfremdung: Entwurf einer kritischen Theorie spätmoderner Zeitlichkeit"(2015). ( Zheng Z.Y., Trans.). Shanghai: Shanghai People Press.

Rose, G. (2001). Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Saldaña, J. (2013). The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. London: SAGE

Saussure, F. (2011). Course in General Linguistics. In Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy (Eds.). Columbia University Press.

Saussure, F. D. (1983). Course in General Linguistics. London: Duckworth.

86

Seta, G., & Olivotti, F. (2016). Postcolonial Posts on Colonial Pasts: Constructing Hong Kong Nostalgia on Social Media. Media & Zeit, 2016(4), 83-95.

Sedikides, C. et. al. (2008). Nostalgia. Past, Present and Future. Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol.17(5):304.

Sedikides, C. et. al. (2004). Nostalgia: Conceptual Issues and Existential Functions.

Sloan, L., & Quan-Haase, A. (2017). A Retrospective on State of the Art Social Media Research Methods: Ethical Decisions, Big-small Data Rivalries and the Spectre of the 6Vs. In L. Sloan & A. Quan-Haase (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods (pp. 662-673). London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Stokes, J. (2012). How to Do Media and Cultural Studies. Sage.

The 45th China Statistical Report on Internet Development. (2020, April 28). Retrieved from http://www.cac.gov.cn/2020-04/27/c_1589535470378587.htm

Turner, B. S. (1987). A Note on Nostalgia. Theory, Culture & Society, 4(1), 147-156.

Virilio, P. (2006). Speed and Politics.Translated by Polizzotti, M. MIT Press.

Wang, X.Z. (2015). On anxiety: a fundamental social state in an era of uncertainty. Zhejiang Journal, 2015(1), p. 184.

Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., & Baden, D. (2004). Nostalgia: Conceptual Issues and Existential Functions. Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology (p. 202). The Guilford Press.

Williamson, J. (1978). Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. Marion Boyars Publishers Inc.

87

Xue, Y. (2019, December 16). Pastoral-Life Vlogger Sparks ‘Cultural Export’ Debate. Retrieved from https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1004955/pastoral-life-vlogger-sparks-cultural-export-debate

Zong, B.H. (1981, July 2). On Aestheticism. Shanghai: Shanghai People Press.

88

Appendices

Appendix 1: A Mind Map of the Methodological Framework

89

Appendix 2: A Screenshot of Compositional Analysis to the Video

90

Appendix 3: A Screenshot of Comment Analysis

91