Curatorial Assignment on Ethnographic Reality: KUAISHOU - Cruel Monogatari of Chinese Rural

This is the Curatorial Assignment on an Ethnographic Reality for Theories of Media & Technology, DM-GY 6043-B.

Source:

A 14-year-old girl Instagraming her pregnancy

A youth live his streaming swallowing a raw snake

Another youth showing of his eating of ill pig

A youth live streaming his egg boom

A 16-year-old teen showing of his tribute tattoo

Resources

Comments on Kuaishou: http://www.lanjinger.com/news/detail?id=2223

Kuaishou: Let the world records you: https://www.kuaishou.com/

Discussion

Not until 9/11 has mainstream western culture realized the "conflict" of civilization could be so inevitably escalated in to a "crash". As stated by Tawanda Mark Gavhure, 9/11 "broke the status quo of ‘conflict between sovereign states in which certain rules apply...Terror comes to represent ‘unlawful combat’" [1].

The great, uncross-able fissure between modern culture and those who are defined as pre-modern, is not the conflict between two clear groups, rather a conflict between vague culture cluster and the accumulated pressure brought by modern culture to pre-modern people would one-day ignite a burst [2], 9/11, the election of Donald Trump, and KUAISHOU. Not until that time will the modern people realize the size and influence of those "hidden" in our life.

KUAISHOU, as a Instagram-like social media, is a prism of hidden majority in China geographically and Ethnographically surround the urbanized us, who live under the great shock of modern technology, suppressed by the disaster of globalization and trade. Those video is a reflection of their uneasiness, anger and fight-back towards the savage modernization.

References

1. Tawanda Mark Gavhure, Disruptions: 9/11 and the ‘End of History’

2. Žižek, Slavoj. "Tolerance as an ideological category." Critical Inquiry 34.4 (2008): 660-682. 3. Turkle, Sherry. Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each