University of Heidelberg

Jing Wang : Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, S.C. Fang Professor of Chinese Languages & Culture, MIT, USA 

28 Oct. 2011, 18:00, Karl Jaspers Centre, R212

Speaking of trends is to delve into the cultural practices of trendsetters. The movers and shakers of the twenty-first century are no doubt the first and second generations of the digital natives whose preferences are transforming not only how goods are consumed but how civic engagement is fashioned.  Technology is the enabler, tearing down silos and bringing together unthinkable partners.  One of the most fundamental changes brought on by the Net has been a shift in the role of the consumer – from isolated to networked, from passive to proactive – to become a ‘prosumer.’  As the best specimen of “Generation 2.0,” a growing number of creative prosumers is acting as conduits between two previously irreconcilable worlds – markets and civic habitats.  This talk examines the impact of new media on branding and trending, via a discussion of the emergence of a new class of hybrid trendsetter who is simultaneously a pleasure-seeking brand child and a playful networked citizen.  The emergence of this mixed breed is one of the most significant trends that compelled advertisers to re-imagine the ways goods interact with consumers.

A range of advertising 2.0 and civic media 2.0 campaigns in the US and China will be sampled along with the investigation of select questions posted by the conference.  How did local history and national policy influence the rise (and fall) of a trend?  What role does social media, and most notably, WOM (digital viruses), play in the proliferation of a trend?  Does the tie between marketing and trending remain as strong as ever in the Internet era?  More importantly, how can we conceptualize something as ephemeral as trends? 

Indeed, situating global prosumer culture in the context of new media environment enables us to better acknowledge the urgency of reinventing critical vocabulary and explore to what degree paradigms popular in the previous decades remain relevant to us today.  As new media are reshaping our social relationships and slowly eroding the cognitive mapping of elites, critical categories emphasizing the principle of play are on the rise again.  Concepts like the ‘tribe’ and the ‘crowd’ (as in “crowdsourcing”) are intrinsic to our understanding of prosumer culture.  But can we retrieve the notion of agency from those categories?  What kind of free agents emerged from the faceless smart mob that is cruising on the Net?

Out of this phenomenon emerged a new trend in mainland China, embodied in the concept of Fashioning the Social Good” (时尚公益) has become a new catchword attracting where we witness the convergence of the two previously unconnected sectors, the for-profit and the nonprofit.

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