Reaching for the stars: DingTalk and the Multi-platform creativity of a ‘one-star’ campaign on Chinese social media

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Abstract

This study explores mediated forms of creativity and multi-platform affordances used by Chinese social media users and producers in a ‘one-star’ rating campaign aimed at DingTalk, an online teaching platform. In February 2020, in response to delays to resuming in-person instruction due to the COVID 19 pandemic, DingTalk launched a new feature called ‘Zaixianxuexi (online learning) which was then used across the country. However, users became increasingly critical of the platform and mounted a ‘one-star’ campaign through the Apple’s App Store rating system to try to have the platform removed. In response, the producers of DingTalk released a short-animated video and promotion campaign through Weibo and Bilibili, rather than the DingTalk platform. The video literally begged users to give it more stars. Adopting a social semiotic multimodal analytical approach, we examine the mediated interaction between users and the producers of DingTalk across three Chinese social media platforms. In particular, we examine the mediated forms of creativity and technological affordances across multiple social media platforms during the three stages of the event. The analysis focuses on the creative strategies adopted by both users and the producers of DingTalk as they engaged with each other across platforms. The study highlights Chinese social media as rich spaces where technological and cultural resources are creatively co-ordinated across platforms. In situating modality within a cross-media environment, the research underscores the creativity that characterises Chinese social media within an interconnected multi-platform social media ecology.

Introduction

The rapid development of social media and mobile technologies has given rise to numerous forms of creative practices in China’s digital environment. Predicated on the notion of user-generated content, social media and mobile technologies have provided innovative spaces where users can create, share and comment on various topics in the forms of text, image, memes, gifs, and audio-visual products. Although Chinese social media is experiencing a growing interest from discourse studies, as the number of papers published in this journal along with the papers in this special issue attest, studies so far have only scratched the surface of the sheer depth and variety of this mediated environment. Previous studies of Chinese social media from discourse perspectives have examined user engagement with social media (Ren, 2018b, Wu and Fitzgerald, 2021, Yuan, 2018), emerging linguistic and discursive phenomena through social media technologies (Ren, 2018a, Ying and Blommaert, 2020, Zhang and Ren, 2020), discourses constructed around public and crisis events (Wang, 2018; Wu & Montgomery, 2020), and discursive struggles and political engagement (Feng & Wu, 2018; Montgomery et al., 2015; Wu, 2018).

Although many of these studies highlight user creativity and playfulness through social media engagement as well as insights into the sociocultural context in which they operate, studies tend to focus on a limited number of platforms and apps such as WeChat or Weibo (Shan and Tang, 2017, Sun and Creech, 2019, Wu, 2018, Wu and Fitzgerald, 2021 Yang and Peng, 2020). While these apps are amongst the most prominent and popular ones in China, they are part of a much larger social media ecology where an ever-increasing range of apps compete for the Chinese social media market including platforms such as Bilibili, the most popular video-sharing website that features ACG culture (animation, comics, and games) and danmu commenting technology (Yang, 2020; Teng & Chan, forthcoming, this issue) and TikTok/Douyin, one of the most popular short-video-sharing and e-commerce platform (Darvin, forthcoming, this issue).

Previous research has also tended to focus on user engagement on a particular platform rather than engagement across platforms, where users and producers interact across a range of platforms, addressing the same audience or topic, while creatively employing the features of different platforms (See also Sandel & Wang, forthcoming, this issue). Indeed, social media platforms, trending topics, and user interaction do not exist in isolation but in a complex and intertwined environment where they move across platforms frequently for different purposes and for different target audiences. For example, in the 2016 ‘Diba Expedition’, an online nationalist campaign organized by Chinese social media users to fight against Taiwan independence leaning individuals and institutions, organizers of the campaign mobilised it across several important social media platforms (Yang, 2019). They used QQ, a Chinese developed messaging app and social networking site, for preparing the materials and labour division of the event, Weibo, a popular microblogging service in China, for promoting the campaign and recruiting more people, and Facebook, a widely used social networking site, for the discursive battle against Taiwan independence.

While current research on Chinese social media has highlighted the importance of understanding the way technology and cultural forms are symbiotically mobilised as creative forms within particular apps and platforms, it is also increasingly important to conceive and examine social media engagement as a cross platform phenomenon within a broader social media ecology. In this research, we focus on multi-platform engagement through a case study of a ‘one-star’ App Store rating campaign, initiated by users of an online teaching platform DingTalk, which then migrated across different platforms where users and the producers of DingTalk continued the campaign. We then explore how cultural resources, together with technological features of different platforms, provide spaces for mediated forms of creativity.

Section snippets

Literature review

Creativity in this study is an encompassing term that both refers to new and innovative use of social media in users’ social (inter)action, and various kinds of creative practices related to language and multimodal content production. Although there is a large body of literature on the creative practices in social media in discourse analysis, less attention has been paid to creativity in Chinese social media where forms of creativity show distinct characteristics due to the unique technological

Data and methods

The data for this study consist of texts, images, and videos from three platforms, Apple’s App Store, Weibo and Bilibili over three phases of the event. The first dataset contains the initial move, as consumers were encouraged to give one-star ratings in the App Store, an Apple owned digital distribution platform for downloading and rating apps, of the DingTalk platform, an online teaching platform extensively used during Covid-19 when schools were closed. By the time of the data collection,

Data analysis

In this section, we trace the three key stages of the one-star rating campaign by focusing on the way users mobilised the technological affordances and semiotic resources provided by different media platforms and the linguistic and cultural forms for creative engagement with the platforms, producers and users of those platforms. In the first section, we examine the way users motivated the initial stage of the campaign through the App Store reviews. The second section focuses on the video

Discussion and conclusion

This study explores forms of mediated creativity through a case study of a ‘one-star’ campaign aimed at the educational platform DingTalk as it moves across different social media platforms. Examining the three stages of a ‘one star’ campaign, the analysis highlighted how both the producers and users of DingTalk initiated their ‘campaign’ within the App Store and then continued the campaign across the platforms of Weibo and Bilibili. Our analysis focused on the way users and producers

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the editor-in-chief, Caroline Tagg and the associate editor, Carmen Lee for their support for this project and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. We also want to thank Todd Sandel and members of the Department of Communication Seminar for comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

Funding

This work is supported by the Post-Doctoral Funding of the University of Macau, and The Philosophy and Social Sciences Planning Projects of Guangdong Province “广东省哲学社会科学规划2020年度青年项目” [grant number GD20YXW03].

Xiaoping Wu is Associate Professor in the English Language and Literature Studies Programme at BNU – HKBU United International College, China. She has held positions at Sun Yat-sen University and University of Macau and has published extensively on social media discourse studies, media and translation studies, and intercultural studies. Her recent work has appeared in journals including Social Semiotics, Discourse Studies, Media, Culture & Society, Discourse, Context & Media, Language and

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    Xiaoping Wu is Associate Professor in the English Language and Literature Studies Programme at BNU – HKBU United International College, China. She has held positions at Sun Yat-sen University and University of Macau and has published extensively on social media discourse studies, media and translation studies, and intercultural studies. Her recent work has appeared in journals including Social Semiotics, Discourse Studies, Media, Culture & Society, Discourse, Context & Media, Language and Intercultural Communication and Babel. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Discourse, Context & Media.

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