Abstract
Representing the life of a particular cultural community and their inhabited countryside can mean portraying generational family members, neighbours and their immediate surroundings. This chapter discusses the international recognition of the vlog channel of Dianxi Xaoge, a young Chinese female vlogger named Dong Meihua, who has been posting videos on Sina Weibo, YouTube and Facebook about traditional home-cooking, craftsmanship, vegetable growing and foraging from her family farm in a small western mountain of Youwang, Shidian County in Baoshan, Yunnan. This essay looks at Dong’s country life vlog on YouTube as operating within the frameworks of cultural ecology and the digital archiving of rural communities as her paradoxical strategy to both resist and sustain the production of information in the attention economy, and how her family, culture and community influence her exploration and life-writing practice on YouTube. I specifically focus on how Dong’s homespun tone of Yunnan rural community and ecological landscape can add to the sense of a “complete picture” of her culture and community, which creates an even stronger bedrock for her digital life-writing project.
Notes
- 1.
Dong’s vlog channel, Dianxi Xiaoge, can be found on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQG_fzADCunBTV1KwjkfAQQ/videos.
- 2.
Dong’s side channel, ‘Apenjie with Dawang’, can be accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVE5qJidksT07zPeEkY5xOQ/videos.
Works Cited
Abidin, Crystal, and Chen Guo. 2021. Liziqi and Chinese Rural YouTube Videos: Scoping the Genre. The 22nd Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (Virtual Event), 13–16 October, 1–5.
Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2011. Branding the Post-feminist Self: Girls’ Video Production and YouTube. In Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls’ Media Culture, ed. Mary Celeste Kearney, 277–294. New York: Peter Lang.
———. 2018. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham: Duke University Press.
Baym, Nancy K. 2006. Finding the Quality in Qualitative Research. In Critical Cyberculture Studies, ed. David Silver and Adrienne Massanari, 79–87. New York: New York University Press.
Bishop, Sophie. 2018. Anxiety, Panic and Self-Optimisation: Inequalities and the YouTube Algorithm. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 24 (1): 69–84.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2010. The Politics of ‘Life Itself’ and New Ways of Dying. In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diane Coole and Samantha Frost, 201–218. Durham: Duke University Press.
Chen, Zhen Troy, and Thomas William Whyke. 2022. Manufacturing and Commodifying ‘Chineseness’: Micro-celebrity Li Ziqi’s Construction of an Idyllic Rural China and Her Media Representation on YouTube. In China’s International Communication and Relationship Building, ed. Xiaoling Zhang and Corey Schultz, 150–164. London: Palgrave.
Cunningham, Stuart, and David Craig. 2017. Being ‘Really Real’ on YouTube: Authenticity, Community and Brand Culture in Social Media Entertainment. Media International Australia 164 (1): 71–81.
Glatt, Zoë, and Sarah Banet-Weiser. 2021. Productive Ambivalence, Economies of Visibility, and the Political Potential of Feminist YouTubers. In Creator Culture: An Introduction to Global Social Media Entertainment, ed. Stuart Cunningham and David Craig, 39–56. New York: New York University Press.
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
James, Erin. 2020. Narrative in the Anthropocene. In Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology, ed. Erin James and Eric Morel, 183–202. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.
James, Erin, and Eric Morel. 2020. Introduction: Notes Toward New Econarratologies. In Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology, ed. Erin James and Eric Morel, 1–24. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.
Joutseno, Astrid. 2020. Becoming D|other: Life as a Transmuting Device. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35 (1): 81–96.
Kennedy, Helen. 2014. Beyond Anonymity, or Future Directions for Internet Identity Research. In Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, ed. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, 25–41. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Kennedy, Ümit, and Emma Maguire. 2018. The Texts and Subjects of Automediality. M/C Journal 21 (2). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1395.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2020. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. London: Penguin Books.
LeJeune, Philippe. 2009. On Diary. Manoa: University of Hawai’i Press.
Li, Han. 2020. From Disenchantment to Reenchantment: Rural Microcelebrities, Short Video, and the Spectacleization of the Rural Lifescape on Chinese Social Media. International Journal of Communication 14: 3769–3787.
Liang, Limin. 2022. Consuming the Pastoral Desire: Li Ziqi, Food Vlogging, and the Structure of Feeling in the Era of Microcelebrity. Global Storytelling 1 (2): 7–39.
Maguire, Emma. 2015. Self-Branding, Hotness, and Girlhood in the Video Blogs of Jenna Marbles. Biography 38 (1): 72–86.
Martínez García, Ana Belén. 2020. New Forms of Self-Narration: Young Women, Life Writing and Human Rights. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Odell, Jenny. 2019. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Victoria: Black Inc Books.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2001. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2014. Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation. In Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, ed. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, 70–95. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Wang, Tianyi. 2020. Parasocial Relationship: An Analysis of Li Ziqi and Her Audiences, 1–61. Master’s Thesis. Middle Tennessee State University.
Wei, Clarissa. 2020. Dianxi Xiaoge: Exclusive Interview with China’s Viral Cooking Sensation. Goldthread. https://www.goldthread2.com/culture/dianxi-xiaoge-exclusive-interview/article/3050052. Accessed 10 July 2022.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Adji, A.N. (2024). Dianxi Xiaoge: Yunnan Flavours, Cultural Ecology and the Digital Archiving of Rural Community. In: Women Vloggers, Cultures & Nature. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36954-4_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36954-4_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-36953-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-36954-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)