 Welcome everyone, and a special welcome to Tricia, who's here to talk to us about her work. Tricia is a Berkman Center Fellows this year. She's also just recently finished her PhD, which she'll tell us more about. This is the first time that she's presenting her work after publishing her PhD online, so it's very exciting for all of us. She's a global tech ethnographer, transforming businesses into people-centered organizations. We'll learn a lot more about her work during this presentation, so welcome, Tricia. Thanks so much. As a tech ethnographer, I've done research in many different parts of the world, but my most in-depth work has taken place in China. I'm excited that this is my first public conversation about my work since publishing my dissertation last week online, which you can download with this link. Before I start, I want to thank my research assistants in China who have been critical in shaping the direction of this research analysis. Thank you, Reginald, Iris, Shayla, Ale, and Fiona, you guys are watching in China. During my talk, if you have any questions or photos to post, your comments on my handle is Tricia Wong, and the hashtag for this talk is Elastic Self. So prior to the revelations of the extent of NSA spying, there seemed to be this idea that digital surveillance and censorship, those were things that happened outside of the U.S. That doesn't happen in the West. A few years ago, you could see that there's reporters without borders released their study of internet black holes, places in the world that experience censorship. China was listed on there. We're talking about the world's largest population of internet users. Over 618 million people, almost twice as many as a number of internet users in the U.S., and according to this report, they all supposedly are living in information darkness. Now, all of us in this room know that this black-and-white story presented by reporters without borders isn't reality, and I'm not even going to get into the recent revelations that reporters have had some botchy statistics, which you can Google on Washington Post. But this discourse of China as a black hole, you know, it dominates the press, academic research, and even policy interventions. But if we look back in American history, we can see that, you know, similar events, relatively speaking, have happened before, and we can learn from our past, but we don't have to necessarily go back in time. We could just look to places like China, and we can see what we can learn from them. And for all the time that the West has spent focusing on China for its surveillance policies, there seems to be less mention of it over the last few months, and perhaps this is because we're concentrating on some of our own problems. But if we're going to learn, you know, just how people react to censorship and normalize it, how people come to recognize it, and then to counteract it or minimize it, it seems then as if China is, you know, really a good place to start looking. So to be clear, China is a place where freedom of speech is not a given, rights are not a given, and openness is definitely not a given. In China, a lot of information is suppressed. There's a strong belief that, you know, information can be dangerous, and that it's the state's role to be an information gatekeeper. This information paternalism, as I call it, manifests itself in the form of censorship. So it's like overprotective parents, the Chinese government argues that too much information can be harmful to its citizens. And so the state asserts the rhetoric of information paternalism in its policy, its enforcement, and its education. For example, like this rally, warning children of the dangers of information on the internet. You know, the red banner says, use the internet in a civilized way, stay away from the internet cafe, start from yourself. Now the hope is that citizens from a very young age will absorb the moral values of information paternalism and then reinforce it through self-censorship. So what is it like to grow up in an information paternalistic society, to be deeply embedded in a political system that's very close and yet have access to an internet of communication system built on open protocols? How does that affect one's sense of self? So to find out, I'm going to share with you three stories for you to give you an idea of what is like for Chinese youth who are growing up in China right now under such a system. So let's say you're a boy who's born in a rural village, far from any urban area, and you have little opportunity to interact with people from the outside. And let's say as you become a teenager, you find yourself attracted to other males. How would you make sense of this feeling? And especially when all you're told is that you're the product of generations of marriage between man and woman and that like everybody else, you will one day marry a woman and together you will make a baby, preferably a boy, to carry on the family's name and to keep the land and to please the ancestors. So when I met Leo, he told me exactly what I just told you. All of his life he thought he was actually born into the wrong gender because he was attracted to males. So he thought if he studied really, really hard, he could get into a really good college and then he could save up enough money for a sex change. And then as a woman, he could at least carry out his family's expectations to marry a person of the opposite sex. But when Leo started going online, he discovered all of these chat rooms were men who were attracted to other men. And one of those popular instant messaging sites, QQ, Leo learned search for the word gay and he found close to 400,000 groups. He met hundreds of men who didn't feel like they were born into the wrong gender, they were just gay. And these are people who taught Leo about his own sexuality and for the first time he didn't feel abnormal. I met another student at a university, her name is Mimi, and Mimi looked like the stereotypical studious Chinese student, you know, buttoned up shirt to her, you know, neck, black rim glasses and straight hair down to her chin. Over a cup of coffee at Starbucks near her university, Mimi told me how she joined the Communist Party at her university and eventually became the party secretary. Now it's very difficult to join the party, much less become the party secretary at her university. So Mimi was very proud to share her accomplishment with me. Now part of the membership process requires all party hopefuls to fill out a very long application that asks you a bunch of questions like why are you applying, what are your views in the party, what's your family's background. Now the thing to know here is that most people actually don't fill out their own application. They search on Baidu, China's largest search engine, for applications uploaded by other people who have successfully joined the party. And then they plagiarize it. So as you can see here, a search turns up hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of links. Now Mimi didn't want to copy someone else's words, she wanted to show the party her impeccable sense of honesty. So she wrote that she had never cheated, she had never lied, and she told them how her parents loved the party and how she never did time-wasting stuff online like, you know, playing games, entertainment and celebrity gossip. But by our second cup of coffee, Mimi told me something she didn't want any of her friends inside the party to know. She confessed that she loved all that time-wasting stuff. She loved entertainment. She loved reading about, you know, which singer was dating who and who was going to come out with the next song. And she enjoyed it so much that she created a secret Weibo account, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter, and dedicated just a celebrity gossip. Every day she looked through her Weibo feed, favoriting and boarding posts. But if any of her friends found out about her account, she worried that her position and reputation in our school's party would be jeopardized, because then her friends would spread the gossip that she's doing something that's discouraged. So she felt a lot of shame over this, so she felt like she had to hide it. But at the same time, Mimi could see that lots of other people online were doing the same thing. So she knew that she wasn't the only person in the world who liked doing this. When I met Tauga, he told me that when he was a teen, he thought he was destined to be alone forever. Like Leo Leo, Tauga was born into a rural village, and in village life boys do what boys do, and girls do girl things. And even though he went to school with girls and boys, he never really interacted with any females outside of his classroom. And eventually, you know, most of his male friends left the village, you know, to work in the city or to get married and have families. But Tauga didn't become one of, you know, follow the path of his friends. He didn't become a migrant worker, because he had a completely different destiny. In junior high, his teachers told his parents that, you know, their son had a chance of making it into college, which is a really big deal. So instead of continuing his studies at the local rural high school, they suggested that his parents send Tauga to a boarding school where he would increase his chances of testing into a good university. So now, if parents see the potential for their son or daughter to go to college, they will spend well beyond their means, even borrow money to send their kids to live at a boarding school, because it means that their child will have a chance for a different life. So if Tauga followed this path, you know, what she did, he went to boarding school, he studied hard and tested into a good university. So the last summer before university, Tauga went home to the village and hung out with his parents. And his parents did what, you know, many parents and villages were perhaps due in earlier young man's life. They brought their male son to watch how the female pig gets impregnated. And this is what sex education looks like in rural China. So now, Tauga was very curious about pig sex, or about sex, but pig sex just made him confused. And so that summer, Tauga went to an internet cafe for the first time in a nearby town to find out more about the school he was attending. And so for those of you who haven't been to an internet cafe in China, this is what they look like. You know, typically large smoky rooms filled with 50 to 300 people sitting in rows of computer screens. Now, in this kind of situation, you can see that everyone can see everyone's screens, like there's really no privacy. So in the internet cafe, Tauga soon discovered that people weren't going online to look for information. They were going online for fun. Most people were playing games, downloading movies, or watching porn. So rather quickly, Tauga learned how to search for porn and download it and watch it himself. And while porn is definitely not the best way to learn about important things like safe sex, treatment of women, non-normative sex, but because of the internet cafe, Tauga finally had an idea of what non-pig sex looked like. So I spend a lot of time with youth like Lil Lil Mimi and Tauga. I'm a cultural sociologist, and I use very immersive ethnographic methods to understand how people use technologies in their everyday lives. So just to give you an idea of how I go about doing my work, I often spend nights at internet cafes to hang out with people like Tauga. So I do everything they do, play games, eat food, watch movies. If they live there for a few days, I'm with them every single moment. Or I work with migrants as a street vendor selling dumplings so I can observe informal cell phone markets that pop around construction sites. And I don't just show up for work alongside migrant workers. I live with them in the city slums. I prepare the food with them. I fix the bicycles. I sleep in the same room with them. Or I shop for cell phones, electronic malls with teams like Mimi. On my most recent fieldwork trip, I spent over more than a year traveling over 60,000 miles to 30 cities across buses, trains, planes, various donkeys and scooters, like whatever way I could get around. And I spoke with hundreds of youth, and I spent thousands of hours shopping and eating, clubbing, drinking and karaoke, and just going online with them. And I did all this because I really wanted to understand what is it like to come of age in a country where information and emotional expression are repressed. And so to do this, I drew on a long history of deep ethnographic immersion. So if you want to learn more about my methods and field analysis techniques and how my independent variables and independent variables change, along as my research question evolved, you can comb through my methods section and my publication. But what I want to share with you today is some of my findings. Now, while most studies on Western youth show that online practices are more or less consistent with their offline lives, so far I've found that much of Chinese youth's online practices are very inconsistent with their offline lives. You know, Chinese youth spend a lot of time with strangers, like a lot. So when we go back to the stories of Liolio, Mimi and Taoga, it's clear that access to the internet enabled them to discover and express themselves in ways that weren't possible offline. But more importantly, this discovery didn't unfold through people they knew. It wasn't through friends or family, it was through strangers. You know, when Liolio joined all those chat rooms, it wasn't to become more connected to his friends. If anything, he was trying to get away from his friends because when he finally came out of the closet and was brave enough on Renren, the Chinese equivalent to Facebook, when he did that, people who he thought were his good friends mocked him. So in response, he deleted his Renren account and turned to online spaces where he felt accepted. So he joined more QQ groups for gay males, questioning males, queer males, and he started connecting with some of these people in person. And by narrowing chat rooms down by location, he can meet people in the same city that he lived in. So for example, in Beijing, you can see that there are currently 564 QQ groups for gay males. He found sites like Faizan, a gay social network that I would describe as a mash-up of Granger and Facebook. He found Baidu knows, a Chinese equivalent to Quora, and he joined groups where people asked questions about what is like to be gay. So every day, Lio Lio goes onto these QQ groups on Faizan and Baidu knows all spaces filled with strangers. Strangers who make him feel accepted and who make him feel like a whole person. Now for Mimi, she's so badly wanted to be accepted by Communist Party members. And as you already know, Mimi didn't plagiarize her application, but she's still feared that the party would discover, or friends in the party would discover her celebrity Weibo account. So while celebrity gossip is not politically sensitive, wasting time on trivial information could be seen as unpatriotic. So she hid the side of herself by creating two identities. Her first Weibo account used her real name where she followed people she knew and famous party leaders. And then her second Weibo account was under an anonymous name where she followed celebrities and anyone else she found interesting. And she did this because no one would ever then find out that the account would belong to her. So Mimi's strategy of living this double life is very common in China. Most youth do not feel safe enough using their real names when expressing themselves. So like many others, Mimi felt that she could only show this non-public side of herself with strangers. Now Togo felt the same way as Mimi. He couldn't talk to his parents or friends about anything he was feeling, especially around sex. And even though Togo spent his entire teen years at a boarding school in a dorm room with ten other boys, they were all too focused on their studies to think about anything else. So he told me how in high school he started waking up with wet pants and he thought he had a urination problem. He was freaking out and he really thought that he had a problem. And he wanted to find out why this was happening, but he didn't know what it turned to for help. And he was too embarrassed to talk about it with his dorm mates. There were no libraries at his school. He was in this boarding school completely isolated. And even though there were internet cafes in the town, teachers warned the students that only bad students go to inner cafes, only bad students go online, and that if they didn't use the resources at the school, it would be seen as disrespectful. So without any answers, his bed-wetting problem only made him feel more awkward around girls. So it wasn't until he went into internet cafes that he kind of started to learn what sex was all about. And he learned about sex in a context where shame was removed because there wasn't as much risk with anonymity. And when he finally made it to college, his six roommates were from all different parts of the country. No one knew each other's parents or past, which allowed him to talk more openly about things, including sex. They also did many things very openly, like watching and sharing porn. It was through this communal interaction that he learned from his dorm mates that they masturbated after watching porn. And after he tried it for his first time, he finally made the connection that he wasn't a bed-wetter after all. And after he realizes he felt much more normal. So whether it was a room full of strangers at an internet cafe or a dorm full of strangers at college, Toga felt freer in these spaces. So Lioliu, Mimi, and Toga are not alone in China. You know, almost every single youth I've ever met in my past ten years of research has told me that they can't fully express themselves with people they know. The risk of shame is just really too high. And while those of us raised in the West, we do have things that we keep from our friends and family. We don't have this extreme fear of expressing ourselves with the people we trust. And yet with Chinese youth, this is precisely the fear that they have. And I think it's important to understand that when I say friends and family, for Chinese youth it means something different from what it means here. When we think of friends here, we think of a nucleus family, and then we have our friends that we choose. But in China, people have humongous and extensive social networks that have last generations. And it gets to the point where it's almost impossible to do anything without everyone you know finding out. So it almost feels like you're living in a village, even if you're in an urban area. And these strong village kind of like tides can be very, you know, restrictive when you want to explore identities that may not be, you know, socially, that may not be sanctioned. So, and in this kind of context where there's little trust to share your feelings or explore identity, it means that China is a very low trust society. And this actually extends back to the communist era of China where the Maoist regime broke personal trust. The party encouraged people to express their loyalty to the party in many different ways. And one way was to become an informant by reporting on any potentially anti-party or imperialistic behavior among people they knew. So this kind of reporting, it destroyed people's lives, you know, children reported on parents, best friends told on each other, confiding in your spouse wasn't even safe. Everyone became suspicious of everyone and sharing information and also becoming the bearer of information became a risk. So friendships, even the family unit completely disintegrated under Mao's regime. No one could be trusted. And in post reform in open China, fear-based campaigns like this, you know, to identify anti-communist no longer exists, but collective memories still circulate and remnants of these practices still persist. Parents and grandparents tell stories of how their friends betrayed their trust. This popular quote, you know, making friends out of self-interest, expanding when the benefit is exhausted, kind of illustrates this perception that friendships are still made for instrumental reasons. So youth are not immune to these stories, you know, even though they're not growing up in this kind of communist China. Like their parents and grandparents, they have developed a fear of friendships and they too withhold personal information from their peers. So if we can imagine growing up in a society where you also have Confucian principles that kind of deem emotional expression as a sign of weakness, along with the communist legacy of emotional attachment as risky behavior, we can see how it's created a cultural milieu where there's little social or personal trust. And so further compounding this low trust is that Chinese youth have limited opportunities to socialize with people outside of their existing social circles or even explore identities that just aren't sanctioned by the three primary institutions that ruled their lives, you know, the family, the state, and the school. And under these conditions, Chinese youth have access to a very narrow set of predefined and normative relationships and identities. So however, over the last few decades in post reform and opening China, where the government, you know, has introduced a bunch of free market policies, a series of events have created spaces for youth to explore new identities and resuscitate low levels of trust. So one of these new places is social media. But I discovered, you know, during my time in research, it wasn't all social media platforms that were hosting this identity exploration and trust resuscitation. It was only some platforms. And what these, you know, few or some of these platforms had in common was that everyone could interact with strangers. So I'm going to just take a moment to explain this. On social media sites, there are dominant informal interactions. Sociality tends to mirror or extend existing interactions, because people are socializing with people they already know. So networks and formal interactions tend to be very tight and homogenous, which makes it very hard for strangers to enter into these circles. On social media sites, there are dominant and informal interactions. Sociality veers towards the exploratory, performative, and even fantastical, because people are socializing people they don't know. So social networks tend to be more loose and disconnected, and the connections with people aren't as defined or transparent. Now in China, youth's existing social ties are produced on Renren, the Chinese version of Facebook. And on Renren, people are primarily interacting with people they already know. And Renren has several features that keep the interactions formal. The most important feature is its real name policy. And this is a site where Lilio came out of the closet and received negative reactions to people who he thought were his friends. So when he closed down his account, he didn't turn to another site that required him to use his real name or to add people he knew. If you recall, he turned to fades on, a social media platform for the informal mode of interaction with strangers. You know, Mimi, when she created her second account, it was on Wavewall that also doesn't have a real name policy. So both of them were able to be around in platforms or in situations where they could actually interact with strangers that would give them a reprieve from the structured formal interactions that made them feel unsafe. So we can actually start categorizing social media platforms by the mode of interaction they afford. And what starts to become clear is that sites that fall under informal modes are the ones where youth are most likely to interact with strangers. They gravitate towards these sites because they're trying to get away from people they know. So informal modes of interaction are appealing because around strangers, youth can engage in what I call an elastic self, which is characterized by the feeling that one's identity is malleable and the action of trying on many identities that are beyond the realm of a prescribed self. And the prescribed self consists of identities you're born into, like your gender, your ethnicity, your nationality, your family. It's the things that you didn't have a choice over initially. The prescribed self is embedded in social ties and forced a formalized set of interactions. And this prescribed self emerges out of existing ties. And over time, interactions amongst these ties can shape the generally accepted beliefs of what constitutes normal displays of one's identity. And so what we end up with here is actually very prescriptive, singular, and discreet identities. On the other hand, the elastic self emerges out of new ties. And since these new ties are with unknown people, the interactions are less scripted. So we end up seeing a wider spectrum of identities emerge from informal interactions. The elastic self flourishes in informal mode because in the presence of strangers, individuals feel more liberated to try on different identities without the pressure of committing to just one. And for Chinese youth who are coming of age right now, they're spending a lot of time in spaces that are optimal for informal interactions. Now there's a lot of other differences and properties between the formal mode and informal mode that I'm not going to get into right now. You can find this table in my publication, but what's important to know is that the particular degree of interaction, or motive interaction, is highly significant because it reflects the degree to which people can express themselves. And the opportunities for them to meet new people and join new communities of interest. So now that we know that Chinese youth are hanging out with strangers on social media platforms dominant in the informal mode, it actually makes us ask the question of how do you figure out who to trust when everyone is a stranger, when you're hanging out in chat rooms? How do you know like this is someone I can talk to and actually start sharing all this personal information? So I witnessed a lot of youth creating rituals of trustworthiness, and I'm going to walk you through one ritual that I witnessed. So let's say you start out on QQ, the most popular instant messaging app. You know, they start looking for personal details like if someone shares the same horoscope sign, or the same blood type, or occupation, school, education level, hometown, address, or zip code. They look for similar hobbies listed in people's profiles. They look for specific commonalities like shared frustrations. This is the anti-parents group, and I think I'm an asshole group, which has hundreds of thousands of members. Then once teens become closer, they wish each other happy birthday with virtual presents. And then the next step of trust is to celebrate birthdays by sending presents to the mail, or buying a present online and sending it to that person's address. And then the relationship becomes more intimate once both sides share their cell phone numbers and start text messaging each other. And then teens send pictures of themselves, which act as a way of verifying each other's gender and profile. And then one of the ultimate tests of trust is to do the quick 30-second video check. You know, both sides turn on the video cameras for 30 seconds to verify that the person in the video matches the profile and the pictures that have been sent. So by putting all of this work into verifying contacts, youth are creating rituals to help assess who they can trust and very personal information that they can't share with anyone else anywhere else. So I met a lot of youth who came up with their own rituals on other social media platforms. I spent a lot of time with Han, who became famous around the world for throwing a shoe at Fan Bingxing, popularly known as the father or architect of the Great Firewall of China. Now Han carried out his shoe-throwing act based on tweets from people he followed on Twitter, people who he had never met but had come to trust. So I'm not going to get into Han's story right now, but what's important to note is that he didn't sign up for Twitter because he was like looking for censored information and wanted to engage in an act of dissent. He signed up for Twitter because he was bored and because his roommate told him that it would be fun. I spend a lot of time with people who develop rituals of trustworthiness for online shopping. One of my participants, Mai Mai, refuses to share her emotions on Run Run because she fears that her friends are going to think that she's Qigua, which means weird and being called weird is one of the worst things you can call anyone in China. So when Mai Mai is bored, she doesn't reach out to her friends. She goes on to Taobao, the largest e-commerce site in China, but she doesn't go there just to shop. She actually spends more time on Taobao just hanging out with her online communities there, with her anonymous account. This is where she asks questions about, hey, what should I wear? Is this clothing style okay? Because if she asks that from her friends, they might think that she's Qigua. So I saw Chinese youth like Han and Mai Mai engaging in the rituals of trustworthiness once they were ready to enter into a phase that required them to figure out who to trust. So the elastic self has three phases. And all Chinese youth start out in this first phase, the exploratory phase, including Mimi, Taoga, and Liliu. This is where youth are exploring their emotions and private interests with strangers around a common set of interests. Now in the exploratory phase, youth don't actually need to put a lot of effort into figuring out who to trust because their interactions with strangers are more or less ephemeral. But for youth who want to develop deeper relationships with a stranger or join a community, they have to start figuring out, well, who to trust. And that's when they start learning and creating rituals of trustworthiness in the trusting phase. Their shared interests with strangers from the exploratory phase developed into a sense of shared identity with unknown others. And their ties with strangers in this phase start moving from transactional to more personal connections. Now a very, very small subset of youth who I spoke to entered into the third phase, which is the participatory phase of the elastic self. This is when they became engaged in network civic participation through social media online and offline. Their interests expanded from private to public ones. And with all of the youth who I met in this phase, they were willing to give up on their anonymity or start merging some of their identities across a variety of their platforms that were informal. And this is when their shared identity with their online friends developed into a sense of shared responsibility. Now, I spent a lot of time with several youth who entered into the participatory phase. One of my participants, Huligan Sparrow, is a well-known advocate for sex workers and has been featured many times on Global Voices and cited in publications such as The Economist. Now in our time together, I have witnessed her experiencing many, you know, many precarious situations with the police and local gangs. But Huligan Sparrow didn't just all of a sudden start out in the participatory phase. It wasn't like she woke up and said, oh, I'm going to become an activist today for sex workers. You know, she, like many other youths like I spoke to, started out in the exploratory phase and then she entered into the trusting phase when she needed to learn how to assess credibility among people she was hanging out with. And after a few years of being in the trusting phase, then she moved into the exploratory phase when several, a series of events that kind of happened and were serendipitous that kind of propelled her into that. Now I followed many more youth who aren't globally famous like Huligan Sparrow but who are just as brave in initiating social action. You know, the stories I tell of youth in this phase are very exciting but it's absolutely critical to note that a very small set of youth only entered into this phase, which leads me to make a few points about the implications of my research for how we think about China and any regions where the internet is highly censored. First and foremost, research and journalists usually tend to speak to the most vocal citizens in China. They usually find people who are already in the participatory phase where individuals are already active as public figures, leading some sort of change and are very willing to talk to people who will listen to their story. But to think that this is an accurate reflection of Chinese society at large is terribly wrong. Understanding how private interest on an individual level can expand to the public interest on a community level is critical because it allows us to place more outspoken citizens in the context of other citizens who may be in the exploratory and trusting phase. It's also very valuable to talk to people who aren't in the participatory phase because we want to know how individuals make decisions that sync up with emergent self-organized collectives then we need to know what they're doing before they become politicized and how it is that they become politicized. When we have a framework that actually helps to see how the most civically active group of people online or actually the least representative of Chinese society or Chinese internet users we can avoid a common sampling bias found in politically-centric studies on the Chinese internet. So this doesn't mean that researchers should stop talking to activists in China but it does mean that we have to be very careful about what claims we make and be very deliberate about our analytical models. So for those who want to dig deeper into this I have a few pages of charts where I show how I operationalize the phases of elastic self and the indicators of each phase. So my hope is that this work provides a starting guide for not just those who are researching in China but also researching other parts of the world who are asking similar questions. Second, my research reveals that most youth in China simply are not going online to engage in political actions. Chinese youth are mostly going online for emotional, not political reasons. They don't feel stifled by political censorship, surprise, surprise, right? So instead they feel very stifled by social pressures for conformity, restrictions on emotional expression and their low trust in people they know. So in this way Chinese youth actually share a lot of similarities with geographically isolated youth who have access to the internet like rural gay youth in America, where Mary Gray has done a lot of research on this. The context may be very different but the motivations for getting away from people you know is very similar. Now even though Chinese youth are more worried about their peers and families surveillancing them than the government, this doesn't mean that they're not aware of censorship. You know when I asked my participants to what extent censorship actually affected what they do online, they were like well obviously we're aware of it but it doesn't determine what we do online. And if they needed to talk about anything that was sensitive they knew how to do it through stenographic methods such as memes, you know symbols and word play to route around the sensitive issues. So just because the country is experiencing censorship doesn't mean that it's a black hole. People in China are far more connected now than they ever have been and even though access to information is restricted in many ways, Chinese youth are leveraging what access they have to engage in more emotional expression and that become a gateway for more complex social interactions that we have been seeing and the trusting and exploring our participatory phase. So the agency that comes from expressing their emotions and sharing information with strangers can spill into other aspects of their lives like learning how to be a friend, you know a member of a community and a citizen. And as Chinese youth become more comfortable expressing their emotions and reaching out to strangers and participating in online networks, they're adopting a new mentality that is increasingly independent of societal institutions. You know, but we wouldn't know any of this if Chinese youth only presented their prescribed self or if we only saw that part. You know, we would have to look for evidence of the elastic self. And this opening of an elastic self reflects a deep transformation of individual consciousness and an emergence of an entirely new kind of Chinese citizen. One that is highly, you know, skilled at socializing in online environments with strangers. One who's confident in assessing trustworthiness with large numbers of people online. And one who's able to join or create massive networks that use it in order to augment existing social dynamics. Well, many scholars have theorized that the internet would, you know, directly destabilize China's political regime. What I'm seeing happening on the ground is that the internet is mediating a revolution of the self. But to really see this revolution of the self, it requires us to reimagine a new framework for censorship. One that isn't so black and white. And one that places censorship in a wider social, cultural context that accounts for the moral frameworks that normalize it for people who have grown up in it. So others have also started to make similar suggestions. I'm saying up to Fecki's recent piece of medium calls for us to rethink our nightmares about surveillance. It's an excellent piece to read if you haven't read it yet. Clay Scherke has suggested that we stop treating the internet as a tool that empowers activists, but as a platform that strengthens the public sphere, which isn't just about politics. So our current framework on censorship for censorship as a draconian practice that results in the complete oppression of everything, you know, a very Orwellian picture, is preventing us from seeing all the interesting things that are happening in places where censorship is the norm. And it prevents us from seeing how people actually adjust and work around censorship in all these different and very interesting ways. But it's really, you know, it's actually really hard to set aside our own cultural lens because our sense of self and the way we see the world is created through our own experiences and narratives. For those of us who've grown up in the US, we're very familiar with the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and this guarantees extent to all forms of communication, including how we express ourselves online. So broadly speaking, we see our democratic values as being represented in the ways that we, you know, use and think about the internet. To us, the open architecture of the internet has a liberating effect on information. This is a moral framework and it has inspired how the pioneers of the internet conceptualize its role in society and it's informed many of the core tenets of the open web, including Stuart Brand's, you know, popular phrase, information wants to be free. So if you look at the western internet right now, you see what the results of an open model of information looks like. But this also makes us wonder, you know, what does the opposite of this look like? What does it look like when you don't have this whole moral framework of open information? And that's the value we also get by looking at the internet in China because we get a very good idea of what it looks like. But unless we use a different set of lens to understand China, we're going to keep seeing China as this, a bleak place with no access to Twitter, no access to Google or YouTube or Facebook. And implicit in these discourses is that China is behind the US or the West and it's unwilling, because of its unwillingness to stop censoring the internet. And unfortunately, the analysis coming from many Chinese internet scholars and journalists often depict this imagery through causal claims that either the internet is not making China more democratic or it is making China more democratic. Both these claims are rarely productive and they just don't account for the confirmation bias that's inherent in these politically-centric models of analysis. We need a more nuanced framework for discussing censorship. It needs to value and contextualize the importance of apolitical interactions such as self-expression and identity-making. And I think this is really important given, you know, all the stuff that's happened to, you know, that we've discovered in the US recently because it's not just about understanding the rest of the world but it's also about understanding ourselves. For those of us from the West, we have to actually start asking to what extent our current framework for censorship is serving our own narratives about the world instead of helping us deal with the reality that we are living in a society where systemic covert surveillance may be the new normal. So I want to end my talk with a brief discussion with the importance of protecting spaces for informal modes of interaction which I think is very, you know, relevant for the Berkman community of thinkers who are also practitioners. So I've been talking to you about the elastic self amongst Chinese youth but we all engage in some version of this elastic self. You know, we all search, have searched and continue to search for places where we can feel more free to explore a range of possible identities. You know, we do this when we go online and waste our web browsing history. We do this when we install ad blocking extensions on our web browsers. We do this when we become excited to try a new app that allows us to experiment with a little bit of risk like Burner or Snapchat. And we do this when we create anonymous accounts or pseudonyms. And we do all this because like Chinese youth, there are just some things we don't want others to see or to know. Because like Chinese youth, we also value informal modes of interaction where we can be anonymous, malleable with our identities and confident that our actions or words aren't permanent or aren't going to be seen by everyone or every corporation. So whether we are explicitly aware of it or not, most social media users already have a general understanding of some platforms that are ideal for more formal interactions and other platforms are more ideal for informal interactions with strangers. You know, like on Facebook, we are expected to create one account using our real name and real information. We add people as friends, meaning we already know them in some capacity. But on sites like Tumblr or maybe, you know, Twitter, these platforms aren't concerned with people creating, you know, the real name or real account because they're not concerned. They don't even see things as like, you know, they're such a false identity because all identities are within the realm of possibility. So once we actually start plotting social media on the spectrum, what we start seeing is that the spaces for rich web culture like Tumblr or Reddit to the millions of message boards on digital games, on consoles, computers and handheld devices that are actually dominant in the formal mode, these are the spaces where a wider spectrum of identities emerge. And informal spaces are actually really important because it's where we can meet strangers. And interacting with strangers is a critical form of socialization. But platforms for informal interactions are under threat. Let's start with China. You know, recent efforts from the government to implement real name registration on Webull is threatening the viability of informal motive interaction. While a real name system serves the government, it creates many potential problems for new forms of personal growth that Chinese youth are experiencing. For one, it would definitely make it too risky for people to openly engage in the informal motive interaction in any kind of meaningful way. So all the social and emotional changes catalyzed by the elastic self would no longer persist if the circumstances that allowed them to flourish just disappeared. But this isn't just happening in China. Spaces for informal interactions are also under threat in the West. The U.S. government has been covertly surveillancing and engaging in their own type of real name practices with the help of corporations. And even before we found out about this last year, Facebook and Google's real name policies echo many of the visions of China's real name policy. Can anyone guess who said this? You've quote, you know, I can tell you right now it's not some kind of translation of Communist Party propaganda. For those who can't read it, you have one identity, the days of you having a different image for your work or friends or coworkers and for the other people you know are probably coming to end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity. Anyone? Any guesses? Yeah. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing in the first place. And the only way to manage this misuse of information is true transparency and no anonymity in a world of asynchronous threats. It is too dangerous for there to be not be some way to identify you. If you need a verified name service for people, governments will demand it. It is not Bruce Schneier. It is also Eric Schmidt. So real name identification policies that limit communication to formal interactions can threaten the viability of crucial and formal online spaces where anyone, not just Chinese youth, can freely explore their identities. And just as importantly, they actually threaten critical spaces for civil society. Spaces for informal interaction are where new ties are made and become the foundation for a stable participatory society. So this doesn't mean that we should get rid of platforms for formal interactions or that we should turn the whole entire web into this anonymous space but it does mean that we need to protect spaces for informal interactions. The future of the internet, not just in China but also outside of China depends on the healthy balance of spaces for formal and informal interactions. And in particular, for any society that experiences suppression of information, spaces for informal interactions become sacred places where the truth can emerge. Playwright and politician Vakalov Havel has described the structure of communist rule as a system built on a culture of lies. A really popular quote of this is, if living within truth is an elementary starting point of every attempt made by people to oppose the alienating pressure of the system, it is the only meaningful basis of any independent act of political import. So in such a system, telling the truth becomes an act of subversion. And Havel's comment applies to any society where there are systemic, where lies are systemic to the social structure or in the institutions. And according to Havel, even small acts of honesty destroy the system one truth at a time. So this means that, you know, all these things that I've documented Chinese youth doing like exploring one's sexuality, and finding pornography, pretending to be someone of the opposite gender, shopping for clothes online. All of these are actually inherently political acts because they are based upon individuals being forthright about fulfilling their personal desires. Expressing small acts of pleasure while seemingly superficial are filled with deep meaning. And while these interactions can start with a share, or hashtag, or ad, or tweet, or wable post, that's not where they end. So thank you for listening and excited for questions. Yeah. Can I ask you a question? That was very interesting. Congratulations on your thesis. But I have a question about you. You said that the anonymity of the users is important. And those particular, the Japanese case, for example, where people have cultural bias against really who they are as well. I think some of the paid-on views of social media have a vast, large majority of people who use anonymous alternative names that don't reveal who they really are. You have a very different case of internet surveillance and limitation in Japan. China, how much do you think this is cultural? And how much is political? And to what extent does the social aspect reign? So your question is that we see that you're aware that other places also have similar practices like Japan, the internet culture there. People also use a lot of anonymous... The argument is that this is for personal privacy reasons. This is an issue of privacy and data protection and cultural. Well, I don't think that they're... It's like they're engaging in these... What anonymity allows them to do is it gives them more flexibility to engage in a wider range of expression. So it's not like they're engaging because they want to... It's not like they're actually saying, well, I'm trying to be private. No one ever uses those words with me. And so I never bring up the word privacy in my research because it's just not how the youth that I see it or the way they express it to me is that they want it to be more open and the way to be more public was to be anonymous. And I think a lot of this is very cultural and social because it's Japan and China... I'm not a Japan scholar, but they share very similar kind of social conditions that there's risk and emotional expression that's seen as a sign of weakness. So I think that we see many... the same kind of forces kind of producing these similar outcomes. Yeah, and you can see this in the test case because you see this in the U.S. also. Based on my research in the U.S. and also Dana's and Mary Gray's, like anyone who's done research in the U.S. has seen that also that youth will go and they don't always necessarily only want to be on Facebook. They find it limiting and they want to be anonymous and that they want to engage in identities that they can be disposable. And oftentimes they're just trying to get away from people they know. It's not always for political reasons. And I think in the China case, it really shows that because even when there potentially is a political reason to get away, it's like that's not why, that's not the thing that's driving them. Presentation. So many points you have brought out here. I understand that there is a phenomenal change in the behavioral pattern of the youth. Maybe in the middle-aged people also. I only wonder what is the social acceptability among the parents and the elders how this is being accommodated, the behavior of the youth. Have you looked at that point? So your question is how are parents and elders... Responding to this. Yeah, how are they responding to this? So I spend a lot of time with parents. In order to even get this context, I spend a lot of time with parents, government, officials. I spend a lot of time also within the equivalent of the FCC, which is internet policy officials. And so I get a wide range of reactions. And what's happening is that most of them don't really first understand that this is happening. And when they do see it, they're completely bewildered by it. They're just like, why would you want to do this? Because they think that it's unsafe. And that's where the paternalistic part comes in. And that's why I don't call it information censorship. I think when we think of censorship, it's this very black-and-white thing. But it's very paternalistic the way the government even approaches censorship. And it's very much like the parents where they say, we're protecting Chinese, we're protecting our youth. You know, why we want them to be anonymous. But this isn't talked about publicly. I mean, it's taken me many years to get to this point. Because it's not like you're just going to sit down and people are like, they're going to tell you, yeah, I have all these other anonymous profiles. And even if there's one, the more I hang out with them, it's like, then I find out they have 15 to 20 to 30 profiles. And they keep track of all of them. Then they throw some of them away. And they're like, oh, yeah, that was a profile I used. I was a girl on this platform for this relationship. And then they merge some. But it's not something that's like, I think the important job of what an ethnographer, what ethnographers do, you know, are training Jews, you look for things that aren't explicit. And none of this is explicitly acknowledged. I don't, I'll just say this, you, back there. And we'll take questions there. I was curious. It's an authoritarian government. So if they really didn't want internet cafes to exist, there wouldn't be internet cafes. And yet the government is sort of putting out this discouraging people from using these things that it's supposed to be allowing. What is that all about? Well, I don't, I don't, in China, it's not like there's like a sense, like this is an authoritarian government, and then you know what you're not supposed to do. Like you really, there's not this sense of like, when you go to China, it's actually very unclear what you're not supposed to do. Because it often seems like you can do more there in many ways than you can do, like I can download whatever I want there without any fear, you know, of violating IP rights. But the point is that they don't, they don't, they're not saying don't go to internet cafe. They're just saying be careful, stay away from certain types of information, you know. So you're in the internet cafe and there's posters right there, like don't look up pornography. And like everyone around me, it's like watching porn along with a second screen of movies and they're multitasking what they're watching and talking to their friend at the same time. And so it's, that's the kind of like society, like the texture of what it's like to walk into. So I hope that gives you an idea of like, when we say authoritarianism, that doesn't really actually show the complexity of that, you know, there may be something that's said and there may be purges, and yeah, they may throw some people in jail, but what's really happening on the ground is very different. Yes, I think I had a question. Then Ivan. You talked a lot about the, the bright side of the elastic self, the ability to go and be yourself through not anonymity, which is very familiar to me, especially over the years. What do you encounter as far as the abuse in terms of like the dark side, are there groups of youth, you know, attacking one another and like all these other things that we see happening with anonymity here, happening there, or is that not that kind of thing? Well, first of all, I don't think it's totally the case that's been settled on what happens to anonymity even here. There is a lot of studies that supposedly claim that anonymity is very bad, but I think what a lot of research shows is that it's not always the case that it can actually, you know, give people more opportunities to, it's not always like negative things, but in China, what I see happening is that it's not, it's, you don't see, you see it being sometimes used like in cases of human flesh search where you see like, oh, someone, in my dissertation, I actually talk about the case where things do go wrong with anonymity, where people get attacked and it's just, it goes, it's completely crazy what happens, but for most cases, you don't see that. What I actually see are more signs of the potential constraints of an elastic self where everyone's anonymous, and my, you know, something that I'll be keeping a pulse on or just watching for the next decades is that, you know, the potential constraints that happen when everyone is exploring all these identities and don't feel any kind of obligation or moral, have any moral guidance is that they're not embedded in any one community and when you're not tethered into any one community, it feels very free, but also it means that you don't have a community that you can always just rely on and that can create more of a sense of instability and that I think will, you know, that's some of the constraints of elastic self that I see is that, you know, but then I think, you know, maybe eventually some of them do start revealing themselves to emerging identities. So the time, the period that I'm sampling of their lives are from 18 to 28 or 29, which is for in China that's a definition of youth. I'll take Ivan and then there were some questions here and there. So in my experience working in China over a period of years it seemed to me that it was possible to say pretty much anything you wanted to in China, in the right room. So that was explicitly an offline phenomenon that the question was how you were contextualizing the thing you were saying. You could say the most radical things that you could possibly imagine if you said it in the right context. And this in some ways is something of a virtual iteration of that phenomenon and I'm wondering if you find that to be the case. That's the first question. The second is it seems to me that people always got in trouble in the right room and saying that is not always clear in terms of what that dynamic is. And I'm wondering and that's always a response to a perceived kind of authority. I think authoritarianism is kind of a wrong word in China too, but I'm wondering to what degree in your experience with officials who are also playing this very same game as individuals they perceive this also to be the truth and this is something that they're managing actively in terms of their understanding and the question is is this something similar to where maybe a decade ago where you can say anything you want but it just has to be in the right room and yes, the right rooms here are the right informal platforms. So yeah, you shouldn't probably say something on Nernering that's like really too politically sensitive and it's not like someone's going to come at you but what you start feeling is the pressure from your friends being like hey, why did you say that and that's the kind of pressure they're dealing with it's not like somebody's going to come but yes, it is about figuring the right room and the right way to say it and it's so fascinating to see the kind of culture that's coming out of China there's no context for people to understand it in the US which is like the interesting memes and the word play and the symbolic stuff that's happening it's like so crazy because they're able to come up with all these new methods to kind of figure out what the right way to say something and your second question about was about our officials so the whole room is obviously based on a downward pressure but officials are also part of society they also participate in this kind of polymorphistic behavior to what degree are they when they're monitoring or controlling the internet or thinking about that as a question are they aware of this kind of proliferation of informal language and okay with it and monitoring or managing it so one of the interesting things happening with social media it doesn't mean that there's individuals who are getting online it's what you were just suggesting that officials are also getting online we've seen a resurgence of police unit, local towns getting on creating way more account government officials have way more accounts and this is because we see this new unprecedented level of what I see as a feeling that the government feels like they have to at least be responsive to some degree before they didn't even feel like they had to respond and now they actually so local officials are creating actual individual accounts and a lot of the people I spent time with interacted with officials there was always this back channel conversation of being like okay well can you post that like your interaction with us wasn't that bad and this was like a police person telling people can you do that and they were very aware that they had a public image that someone higher up in the government would see it's a level of response that wasn't there hasn't been there before because everything is much more in the public I think I have a question about the what do you think about the social media and the limited freedom of speech and to the new social media in chat particularly towards the conservation of this harmful social society and the social realist who would be the stuff and the proactive participation in the authoritarian nature um so wait what's the question that's very complex the political influence of the the chat and the people what are the political influences of the chat and the people well I think it echoes some of the stuff that I just responded with I've been saying that the influence is very big and that it's creating this pressure among among political officials to actually be responsive to respond and know you before they didn't have to respond to crises or any kind of people saying that there was corruption but now they're actually being like okay we have to respond and we actually have to get online and deal with these rumors and sometimes they squash them and like just censor them we're seeing um you know and I think Rebecca McKinnon has talked a lot about this is that she says that we are seeing a Cybertarian kind of authoritarianism in China where you allow people to be more expressive online but you actually are restricting offline freedoms and I'm I'm still not sure that's I mean I don't that's not the angle that I'm looking at so but that's one I know one area that I think we want to look more into youth in China work to keep their different profiles separate and preserve their anonymity oh my god it wouldn't be that I don't know like it seems like a lot of people if you're using the same computer it probably not be that difficult do they really just think the government or companies won't really bother and they just care about their friends and coworkers or do they really put a lot of effort into that I think it's important to understand it's like when you grow up in a society where surveillance is the norm you don't care about the government looking because you already know they're looking so there's no way to avoid it it's not even like will the government see this it's like you already know everything about me so wide there's nothing I can hide but the pressure is to hide it from people you know so I think your question is really good at something I didn't get to in my talk is that you know they spend so much work doing profile management and identity management which is keeping these profiles separate and they craft these identities for certain people and for certain situations and context and they're experts at this and part of this comes from you know a lot of my analysis is based on how they take a lot of the you know what Confucianism creates is that it Confucianist ideals say that you have to a good Confucianist would know how to interact in each situation with each person you know how to adjust yourself and it's this constant like rejiggering of like okay this person I have this vision but this person's cut to my mother who then was born by my like other father and grandfather and so I will just in this way to save face for this person who might connect and it's like that's the kind of level of like thinking and like you know that you're working with and so they apply I think they apply very well to keeping all their multiple identities separate and then and then you do see what happens when sometimes they accidentally collapse but then sometimes they actually purposely collapse or sometimes it just the identities no longer become useful or they grow out of it you mentioned that the lack of trust or a lack of trust in China is one of the reasons that anonymity is so desirable between you so that they can hide themselves or the unfitting part of it can you speak louder I can't hear you the lack of trust in Chinese society as you said is one of the reasons why Chinese people keep an anonymous or anonymous identities on their internet so that they can't hide part of themselves from their families and friends and I wonder I don't know if you have addressed this in your book whether you have considered for example cultural norms or moral norms in the sense that the lack of toleration on the part of the parents and families or certain moral attitudes say homosexuality or practices such as celebrity gossiping is actually also one of the reasons they want to keep themselves and be part of themselves separate from their families and friends yes I do in my work write a lot about the moral and the cultural stigma that is enforced on Chinese youth from parents and that create this and on top of the historical legacy of communism and Confucianism that yeah parents youth have a very set of limited identities that they can choose from and if you don't fit in that then you are seen as Qi Guai and weird and I use that word Qi Guai a lot because that's the terms my participants use and that's a very difficult thing to be called Qi Guai and so that's I do consider all that I think we now get a question In our low trust society where you seem to be able to combine these mirror online strangers do you find it somehow problematic where over time you develop trust and confidence in the analog format and maybe the quantity and quality of information they want to share with you might actually not as good because they actually know you but if you have an actual relationship with them so your question is did people stop sharing that they share less with me and the more they became like no as I move into more familiar relationships with them right at the time so I think this question is very interesting as an ethnographer because this gets to kind of the ethnographic methods and my technique for a lot of people are curious like how did you get people to share so much with you and how do you get people to talk about all these profiles that they don't want to show people they know and I think one of the interesting roles that I think as an ethnographer or any kind of researcher you play is when you walk into a situation you're really an outsider and I leverage my role as an outsider to get to you know that to create this kind of closeness that youth would be able to trust talking to me and so for them in a way I was the internet like I was a stranger and so as long as I was a stranger in the beginning they could keep talking to me now the more I got to know their networks I didn't see people pull back but I think it's important that one of the things that I did was I always made sure that I didn't become too involved in their formal and like their lives where they have formal interactions like I always hung out I went home to their families and I did everything but I was very careful about managing you know to what degree I was in their lives formally and informally so it's a constant relationship management and it's um and I think always I had the privilege role of an outsider that I was able to leverage is that I never was a full insider for them and that's why they could continue sharing it's like you know I was not born in China so that's why they could share so much I think you did a really great job showing ethnographically how anonymity affords different types of interactions via these informal networks so I have kind of like a two part question about those networks and anonymity itself do you find do you find sort of any sort of variation across different types of anonymity and what I'm thinking is that like we've seen in here in the states that you have moved away from the formal sort of reformative network at Facebook to more informal networks but there's a lot of rise of things like Snapchat for example where it's a lot about like a tight-knit group of friends and you're not being exposed to the wilds of your entire network but you choose you know a more sort of an intimate and I guess it may be wonder that okay what are the things that are possible from the anonymity of an anonymous question site versus an anonymous sort of video chat site and what specific things do you see as values of one over another and sort of related to that you described how there's a lot of value to having these anonymous interactions that may or may not lead to some sort of civic participation, some sort of activist causes so if you're like many books in here sort of a researcher practitioner you identify as you have that a lot of good work happens in anonymous spaces and you want to as you said somehow encourage those spaces encourage you to use them well what would you actually practically do to sort of to protect anonymity and sort of what sort of things would you value in platforms would you say there needs to be another rise of anonymous forms because forms are very important but now we have these other types of platforms too so the second part of your question is how do you protect those spaces for informal interactions and part of my publication I have a section just on design principles that for people who want to build who want to actually build platforms that encourage informal interactions and I identify several conditions or features that you would want to make sure that you protect for or that you build in and one of those features is anonymity that allows people to use pseudonyms and the second is the malleability and identity and we see this with Tumblr where you can create multiple profiles and the third one is that you want to allow the identity to be disposable and it has to be impermanent and momentary and so I think that hopefully that helps and I list a bunch of other stuff and then the first part of your question was I'm just kind of wondering of the different types of informal spaces like where do you see is there any any sort of transformations or anything that is the most valuable for you of the different types of things like forms or not just chatting or things like that I think it's the forms that are I see happening are like a mix of forms and social networks but what's really interesting is that this kind of anonymity isn't just I think what I may have presented a very an idea that like all of this is happening virtually but some of the most interesting stuff happening is that it's happening very locally and these groups that you join they're called meetups where people go to concert together they go see a celebrity you know sighting together or a conference or anime you know meetup and I think that's some of the most interesting stuff to look at and to me those are the those invisible kind of we ties that form the civil society that we usually forget to look at because they're not as exciting or they seem kind of mundane or superficial okay better be good think about it just kidding this question is a a big one but it gets to the to the issue of elasticity and I sort of what I'm wondering is is how permanent is elasticity is it meant to be a permanent state essentially or is it is it a strategic pathway toward something else and is there a threat I guess that and you mentioned rituals as a way of thinking about this that it seems like there are rituals to arrive at elasticity but the rituals once they're once they're established then would create a kind of structure that would allow that would allow some normative behavior within those elastic identity so can you just say a little bit about where does it end where are people leading with this well first that is an excellent question that's the last question so where is this like a permanent ongoing thing and is it going to end and so I think a useful way to think about it is a rubber band where you start out in the exploratory phase and then you're expanding into the trusting phase and then you go potentially sometimes into the participatory phase but like rubber bands, rubber bands they contract they're not always getting bigger they also snap back but usually when you snap back you don't ever snap back to completely the original form because it's become more loose from the expansion and what I see happening is very could be similar to you know because I'm that's the limitations of ethnographic approaches is that you don't you know right now I only have a 10 year span of data and what I really need is a 30 to 40 year span of data and that's a value of also looking back in time of like what happened with the hippies of the 60s and that as life events happen you know they were very revolutionary yes we're going to do all these crazy stuff but then as the realities of supposedly becoming adult setting and they actually became more conservative and they had to raise the family and then they became the yuppies that we have the 80s and so I think it's interesting to maybe look at other other kind of movements where people have also become very free and then other social constraints have stepped in and one of the constraints that I'm looking at I think particularly for China will be interesting is that Charles Taylor who's written a lot about his concern around the expressive individualism that we have in America and the West we value individuals so much that it's prioritized above everything right and he says this can be a good thing because it means that we value expression but at the same time he says that it can actually create such a difference that everyone is so busy being individualistic that you don't see people who are at the same table or willing to sit with people at the same table who are very different from you and to see them as actually fellow citizens which is a process that you need to have or a relationship that you have for a democracy is that you need to be able to work out differences with people who you see as fundamentally different from you and I think this is very we see this happening in the US with you know the bipartisan politics of Tea Party, Republicanism and Democrats is that it's like you see this unwillingness to even speak to each other and that speaks to some of the expressive individualism that Charles Taylor's with me so I think that self-control and he also says that consumeristic society can also limit that because people are so obsessed with being unique in shopping that it can also contract it but again you know these things are never as black and white so we'll have to see what happens over time and just to be clear I don't think this is like the majority of Chinese youth I want to be very careful about my claims here is that I think it is a sizable amount that they do have the potential to transform Chinese society but we'll have to see what happens as life pressures you know happen thank you