With the development and rapid growth of the modern internet in the 1990s and 2000s, social media has emerged as a distinctive and influential cultural and sociopolitical phenomenon. Social media is frequently used for entertainment, community building, activism, advertising and brand-building, as well as the circulation of information and disinformation. Social media also functions as a vast petri dish where new cultural forms can evolve and circulate.

While in theory most major social media platforms have a global reach, in practice a variety of factors such as state regulations and sociocultural, ideological, and linguistic differences mean that the social media ecosystem is frequently divided into an array of mutually overlapping subcommunities. This session uses an interdisciplinary perspective that draws from literary and cultural studies, media studies, and political theory to examine the cultural and discursive dynamics of a set of social media formations, with a focus on formations related to East Asia.

In particular, the session asks how social media may be examined as cultural phenomena, and how they interact with a variety of other sociocultural configurations (both digital and non-digital). Drawing on analytical paradigms ranging from Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism and more recent discussions of techno-Orientalism, to contemporary media studies discussions of platform capitalism and other digital phenomena, the session examines some of the distinctive East Asian characteristics of the social media formations under consideration, while also reflecting on how the formations remain embedded within a set of global processes.

Each presenter will 12-13 minutes for their presentation, the presider will take about 5 minutes to frame the panel and introduce the panelists, and at least 15 minutes will be reserved for open discussion. Presenters will also exchange drafts of their presentations with one another beforehand, to better facilitate discussion at the session proper.

This session is being proposed as a non-guaranteed session sponsored by the East Asian LLC, and the four papers cover phenomena associated with three of the region’s nations, as well as a set of diasporic concerns. First, SaeHim Park considers the role of social media in the public’s response to South Korean President Yook Suk Yeol’s attempt to impose martial law in December 2024. Amanda Kennell and Leland Tabares and both consider social in relation to Japan and a set of transnational factors. First, Kennel uses the Japanese media franchise Bungo Stray Dogs as a case study to examine how US-originated social media platforms such as Facebook are transformed when they circulate internationally to regions such as Japan, while Tabares considers an inverse phenomenon wherein Western social media influencers travel to Japan to harvest content that they can then share with their (mostly) Western audiences—a practice Tabares calls “platforming techno-Orientalism.” Finally, Eileen Cheng-yin Chow considers how an array of Sinophone social media platform function not merely as cultural formations, but more specifically as literary formations. Considering several case studies that include contemporary Taiwanese authors, Southeast Asian migrant workers in Taiwan, and rural-urban migrant workers in mainland China, Chow considers how various social media contributions intersect with different literary genres.

The session incorporates a diversity of voices in the sense that the four presenters are from different ranks (three assistant professors and one mid-career scholar), different genders (three women and one man), and have different disciplinary training (they have doctorates in English, Comparative Literature, Art and Art History, and Asian Studies). All four scholars are currently based in the US, but at least two are originally from East Asia (and furthermore one will be professionally based in East Asia beginning in Fall 2025).