JOANNA DOONA (ED.) AN ECOLABEL 3041 0903 NORDIC SW Excellent MSc Dissertations 2020 Excellent MSc Dissertations 2020 Excellent MSc Dissertations 2020 ryck, Lund 2021 Media and Communication Studies, Lund University JOANNA DOONA (ED.) WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM Printed by Media-T YUNYI LIAO, CHERYL FUNG, JIAN CHUNG LEE, YUKUN YOU & XIN ZHOU This edited volume, Excellent MSc Dissertations 2020, is the fifth in the series that collects postgraduate dissertations written by students who undertook the MSc degree in Media and communication studies at Lund University in Sweden, and graduated in June 2020. The five chapters in this volume represent work originally presented and evaluated as part of the final thesis exams in May of 2020, in which they were awarded top grades. During the autumn of 2020 they were revised and edited for publication in the series Förtjänstfulla examensarbeten i medie- och Media andCommunication Studies, Lund University kommunikationsvetenskap (FEA), launched by Media and communica- tion studies at Lund University in 2008, in order to bring attention to and reward student research of a particularly high quality. With this publication, we hope to inspire future students who are wri- ting dissertations, as well as contribute to debates inside and outside of academia regarding media, society and culture. In particular, the chapters in this book urge us to critically reflect on what it means to engage with, in and through different media, in different contexts. Through studies of nationalism ‘from below,’ the significance of protest art, affective news engagement practices, the digitalisation of sleep, and virtual celebrity; the chapters emphasise the force of media enga- gement to provide people with common cultural symbols, manifesting nationalism, political issues or fandom; as well a means of mobilisation, entertainment, self-management, interaction and remembering. The issues brought up makes us reflect on how media fits into, makes up and helps structure our lives and our societies. LUND UNIVERSITY Faculty of Social Sciences 957675 Department of Communication and Media 2020 Förtjänstfulla examensarbeten i MKV 2020:2 ISBN 978-91-7895-767-5 789178 9 Excellent MSc Dissertations 2020 1 2 Excellent MSc Dissertations 2020 Lund University Ed. Joanna Doona Authors: Yunyi Liao, Cheryl Fung, Jian Chung Lee, Yukun You & Xin Zhou 3 Cover photo by Pelle Kronhamn Faculty of Social Sciences | Department of Communication and Media ISBN: 978-91-7895-767-5 (print) ISBN: 978-91-7895-768-2 (pdf) MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES • LUND UNIVERSITY Förtjänstfulla examensarbeten i MKV 2020:2 Printed in Sweden by Media-Tryck, Lund University Lund 2021 4 Table of Contents Introduction 7 Joanna Doona The Myth of ACGN Nationalism in China: Animation, audiences and nationalism 13 Yunyi Liao Canvas of dissent 61 Cheryl W. L. Fung Parameters and performances of news engagement: a case study of Swedish audiences 111 Jian Chung Lee The gamification of sleep 155 Yukun You Virtual YouTuber Kizuna AI: Co-creating human-non-human interaction and celebrity-audience relationships 205 Xin Zhou Author biographies 255 5 6 Introduction Joanna Doona This edited volume, Excellent MSc Dissertations 2020, is the fifth in the series that brings together postgraduate dissertations written by students pursuing MSc degrees in Media and communication studies at Lund University, Sweden. In this edition, five students who graduated in June of 2020 showcase their outstanding contributions to the field. In this two-year international master programme in Media and communication studies, students are trained to develop their ability to ask and answer critical questions. This focus on critical approaches to contemporary social, political and cultural issues in media and communication encourages students to follow their curiosity, and contribute by exploring and examining taken-for-granted assumptions about how media works, and what it does. In doing so, they engage with key issues, theories and problems in media engagement, democracy and cultural citizenship, media industries and creativity, gender, health and society, audiences, popular culture and everyday life. Tackling national and transnational media environments, students emphasise theorising and researching media, society and culture using real world case studies and diverse theoretical, conceptual and empirical tools. The importance of media engagement – to us personally, to groups and organisations and to our general sense of belonging, as well as to the social, political and cultural development we face – is clearly illustrated through the issues explored in this collection. This volume is made to demonstrate what such exploration and examination can lead to, in order to inspire future students and media scholars: in everything from their original research design and use of multiple methods, to the critically based, theory-guided analysis of qualitative empirical data, as well as to the important issues they highlight. Its contributions 7 emphasise how a wide range of media are important to us in so many different ways – be they cultural, political, personal or somewhere in their cross section. By studying media engagement in different forms and regions of the world: through issues like nationalism in animated films and their audiences, the creation and spread of protest art, affective news engagement, health gamification, and virtual celebrity, they challenge us to think further and more critically about what it means to engage with, in and through media in different contexts. Media engagement provides people with common and affectively charged cultural symbols manifesting nationalism, political issues or fandom; as well as a means of mobilisation, entertainment, self-management, interaction and remembering. These studies challenge us to consider how complex those issues are. Teaching us about state sanctioned nationalism versus nationalism ‘from below,’ the political and social significance of protest art, the emotional complexity of contemporary news engagement as performance, the many facets of the commercialisation and digitalisation of sleep, and the meaning of virtual celebrity, this book provides ample food for thought. Digital technology plays an important role here, not only as a provider of novel ways of finding and gathering empirical materials, but more importantly, as it pertains to new patterns of content diffusion, tools and solutions to everyday issues, and ways of bonding for citizens and audiences alike. Impacting power structures, democratic concerns and cultural consumption, digital media engagement is important to all of the investigated areas of this book. It has helped the development of animation and its fandom expressions. It has aided the imperative circulation and archiving of political protests and news, both on- and offline. It allows for inventive market-optimised ‘solutions,’ as in health focussed app technology and news circulation, and it is clearly imperative to the existence of virtual celebrity. As these studies show, the consequences of such technical development are not straightforward nor isolated from other forms of cultural input, societal developments or power flows. This in turn illustrates the utmost importance of this MSc programme’s motto – from friend of the programme, professor and media scholar John Corner: ‘assume less, investigate more’ (2011:87). Understanding subjective constructions and experiences as well as the context of specific regional cultures matters to studies of engagement, as illustrated by the chapters in this collection. 8 In the coming chapter two, Yunyi Liao studies the construction of nationalism in communities engaged in what has been called ‘the rise of Chinese animation.’ Exposing the value of contextualising approaches, Liao investigates audience engagement in the unprecedentedly successful Chinese film Ne Zha (2019) – without losing sight of the film itself, or the way in which it was marketed. She shows how affective nationalistic discourse is prevalent among audiences, connected to a wider nationalistic ACGN subculture (animation, comics, games, novels). Audiences and fans actively promote Chinese animation on- and offline, using practices such as commenting in social media or inviting – ‘amwaying’ – friends to the cinema; thereby playing an important role in the creation and diffusion of such nationalism. By scrutinizing what she calls forms, rationales and hidden power mechanisms in engagement with the film, Liao addresses everyday nationalism within the context of the film itself and its promotion, allowing for the emphasis of audiences’ constructions of nationalism ‘from below.’ In doing so, everyday practices are put to the fore and connected to nationalistic ideology, showing how fandom in entertainment can amount to civic engagement. As such, Liao’s work additionally illustrates how nationalism can be studied in, as well as through culture. This theme of everyday engagement practices is carried into the following chapter. Here, Cheryl W. L. Fung explores protest art – ‘the theatre of protest’ – which invites citizens to participate. In a careful and detailed analysis based on protest posters as well as interviews with protesters during the 2019 Hong Kong anti- extradition law protests, Fung exposes how the creation, spread, interpretation and archiving of such art plays a significant role in the formation of the movement, and engagement of individuals. Art in the form of posters, graffiti and statues are used to form