The New Media and social culture demoralized and demoralizing in China

Since sometime in the 1990s, the Internet- and digital technology-based New Media has been on a rapid increase and is now profoundly affecting the daily life of contemporary Chinese people, who are at once enjoying its various benefits and suffer constantly from its problems. It is no surprise that the New Media should have its peculiar liabilities, but in China, in particular, its downsides are extensively and acutely felt. Based on close-range observation of current Chinese life, an in-depth interview and a discussion of a few typical ‘media events’, this paper reviews the disordered and demoralized Chinese social culture, proliferated and amplified by the New Media, in perspectives of media biases, ‘media events’, and communicative strategies and their functional inversion, to explore the correlation between the New Media and cultural derailment and disruption. It suggests that amorality, the absence of deep thinking, and the ever-demoralizing mass culture that mark contemporary China can be, to a large degree, attributed to the technological revolution embodied in the New Media. In short, the demoralized New Media culture is demoralizing the whole social culture.