Chapter 2 Literature Review: Cultural Politics of User-Generated Encyclopaedias: Comparing Chinese Wikipedia and Baidu Baike

Abstract

Chapter 2 will introduce a number of observations and theories on the link between national boundaries and information/communication systems from various disciplines. The literature review covers the role of language and media technologies and thus paves the way for a theoretical framework to be developed which accounts for the ways in which elements of cultural-political boundaries have been reintroduced into the design and processes of information and communication spaces. The aim is also to review various research approaches so as to develop a feasible research design and methods to identify the factors and workings of such reintroduction of cultural-political boundaries to the Web. Special attention will be paid to the ways in which the research bias of relying too much on a national framework and/or unit of analysis, or “methodological nationalism”(Wimmer & Schiller, 2002), can be alleviated. This general research concern is especially important for this specific research on Chinese boundaries online because of the ambiguous yet complicated cultural-political boundaries among Chinese-speaking regions such as mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

2.1 National boundaries and communicative spaces 29 2.2 Chinese national boundaries and media technologies 38 2.3 Boundaries of media-language systems 51 2.4 Summary and implications 63

Keywords: boundaries, information/communication systems, media-language systems