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Jul 18, 2025
Social Media and Ordinary Life
Affect, Ethics, and Aspiration in Contemporary China
Summary
Focusing on domestic workers, rural microentrepreneurs, disadvantaged young creatives, and young feminists, Social Media and Ordinary Life (NYU Press, 2025) is a deeply moving ethnography of how digital media infrastructures and platforms are woven into the rhythms of ordinary, everyday life. In choosing to foreground marginalized groups and communities, Cara Wallis gently shifts our attention away from the world of “social media influencers” and tech-centric discourses of entrepreneurial lives towards a decidedly ambivalent terrain of routine life practices.
Author Cara Wallis is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones, and her articles have been published in numerous journals, including Feminist Media Studies and New Media & Society.
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