Creative Youth’s Social Media Use in China

• In Event: Creative Youth and their Dreams in East Asia

Abstract

“Built on Dreams grounded in Reality”. In the last few years, China has launched a set of policies to promote the cultural and innovation industry, more recently, it introduced the human resources policy to encourage young people to start up their own businesses. In the process of pursuing their own dreams, creative youth had to incorporate their dreams into Chinese Dream to find opportunities in this new social tidy. Along with the capital acquired from personal connections, creative youth had to make full use of the new media nested deeply in their everyday life and career development. China has constructed a fascinating infrastructure of information and communication technologies, resulted in the prosperity of new media based businesses. Among the constellation of China’s new media concepts businesses, social media like Weibo, WeChat, RenRen, etc., acted as an alternative arena for young generation to enact their ideas and dreams. As observed from their social media use, creative youth made use of these platforms sophisticatedly included expanding their social ties, broadcasting their works, exploring job opportunities, and soothing the fractions, etc. Based on these observations, we apply a data-driven method combined with survey and web crawling, to decline the picture of young people social media use, and explore the relationship between social media use and their dream capital acquisition.

Authors

• Jianbin Jin, Tsinghua University

• Yajie Chu, Fudan University