Source: Association for Chinese Animation Studies (11/14/24)
Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: From Astro Boy to China’s Zhai Generation
By Jinying Li
In the first two decades of the 21st century, we witnessed a widespread cultural movement of geekdom that went global and mainstream simultaneously. While American media were announcing “it’s hip to be square” and “geek is chic,” their East Asian counterparts were embracing otaku and zhai as trendy labels to identify a new generation of pop culture heroes who thrived on the transmedia arenas of the digital era. In 2008, “zhai” was chosen as the Chinese “buzz word of the year” to celebrate the cultural prominence of China’s zhai generation which, according to the Chinese news media, not only defined the cultural meanings of the “Internet pop” (网络流行) but also characterized “a state of living and being” (生存状态) in the 21st century.[1] During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, zhai as “a state of living and being” was further embraced in China as a crucial cultural strategy to survive the pandemic quarantines and lockdowns, displacing the fear of an infectious disease with the obsession with spreadable media.[2]
The worldwide rise of geek and zhai culture points to the emergence and significance of a new demographic of transnational knowledge workers in a global economy dominated by information networks. This knowledge class functions as a crucial yet often overlooked nexus in the ongoing transformations of information society that we are still trying to understand. These so-called geeks, otaku, and zhai are the active agents, as both consumers and producers, connecting techno-economic developments to socio-cultural changes. Therefore, critically examining this social group and its cultural values, I believe, is the key to understanding our current information society at large.
My work is about the cultural values of geeks, otaku and zhai: how they emerged, why they matter, and what they mean. Through the lens of anime and its transnational fandom, I explore the meanings and logics of “geekdom” as one of the most significant sociocultural groups of our time. The key questions are why anime appeals to this rapidly expanding social group, and how anime constitutes a mediation environment that effectively translates between knowledge work and what Tiziana Terranova calls “knowledgeable consumption of culture.”[3] I study geek and zhai as informational knowledge culture in postindustrial society and investigates how anime constitutes a powerful media environment that cultivate and sustain this knolwge culture. Studying anime as the media environment of global geekdom, I want to shift the center of knowledge culture from the computer boys in Silicon Valley to the anime fandom in East Asia, problematizing the supposed American whiteness in the popular imagination of the knowledge class. This shift from the techno-culture of computing to the transmedia system of anime also calls for a theoretical rethinking of how knowledge culture is mediated. I argue that the culturalization of informational knowledge work needs a media form, which is animation rather than computation. Continue reading Anime’s knowledge cultures
