Abstract:

Digital platforms play a pivotal role in people’s urban everyday life. The use of platforms and its relationship with urban spaces is increasingly being theorized as platform urbanism. In response to a call for urban ethnographic accounts on platforms, I examine everyday platform urbanism, focusing on everyday use of platforms and its relation to urban space. Specifically, I use WeChat to explore the digitalized city and how urban space is entangled with platforms. The talk will examine how places are represented by users on the platform, how the platform let users engage with urban space in several ways, and how urban spaces are organized in relation to the use of the platform.

This event is organized by the Digital Technology and Society Cluster under the Center for the Study of Contemporary China.