The observation that visual images on social media help young people to express themselves better actually extends to the entire population of rural migrants. In many cases it is not just a question of improving the ability to express oneself: some of what we find is unprecedented offline. To see this more clearly we can start from one particular trag-edy. In 1993, 87 young female rural migrants lost their lives in a large fire in a toy factory in south China. A researcher managed to get access to 77 personal letters that the victims had received from friends and relatives, as well as to the letters they were about to send.38 Those letters revealed for the first time the hidden inner world of Chinese migrant workers. The main topics mentioned in those private letters were 1) wages; 2) work conditions; 3) problems related to physical well- being; and 4) loneliness and isolation. Money is the biggest con-cern, and a few workers mentioned they felt lonely in cities. Curiously, two decades later, the common topics of phone calls and other offline conversations among rural migrants remain much the same. The most common subjects in today’s phone calls were ‘how much one has earned or saved so far’, ‘whether one can find a better paid job’, ‘whether the children can get into the local schools’ or ‘whether one can help a rel-ative or a fellow villager to find a job’. Generally speaking, how best
to get by remains the dominant concern within these phone calls, just as they were in letters and personal phone calls at that time. Even in these communications, personal feelings are subsumed by pragmatic concerns. Topics such as thoughts about life or personal aspirations seem to be ‘unspeakable’. Ke Li, a factory worker, put it in this way: ‘It is not something you will talk about on a phone call or in front of people you know – it’s just weird, you only talk about what needs to be done or what’s wrong, rather than those daydreams.’
By contrast Chi Hui, a 24- year- old factory girl, used ‘giving ideal-istic speech’ (jiang dadaoli) to describe the memes about romance that she constantly shared on her Qzone.
Well, you won’t call your friends and give them those ide-alistic speeches (jiang da dao li), people must think you are insane . . . When you share those online that’s normal, because everybody does so.
As Chi Hui observed, social media has become the ‘normal’ and ‘proper’
place in which people can talk about their (day)dreams, their aspirations and what they think about life, rather than what they want to have for tomorrow’s dinner. The easily shared and ubiquitous visual material on social media certainly facilitates such new forms of communica-tion. Besides this, the one- to- many nature of social media postings also encourages people to be more focused on their own feelings, rather than addressing specific daily issues to particular individuals. Furthermore, communication on social media is usually asynchronous, which enables people to manage their self- presentations more strategically, without time pressure. On Ke Li’s Qzone there are many shared postings about how to become a successful businessman. He also regularly posts pho-tographs of luxury night clubs which he collects from the internet, both representing the kinds of personal aspiration that would not have been expressed in phone calls.
This chapter started with a description of the 15 genres of visual images that rural migrants commonly post on their social media, fol-lowed by an analysis of the motivation behind them. These highly diverse and sometimes unexpected images are like a treasure trove to outsiders trying to understand the feelings and aspirations of a margin-alised but massive population – one whose voices can hardly be heard in mainstream media, and which has kept its feelings and thoughts to itself over the past three decades. The chapter then proceeded to examine the difference between the visual languages shared by rural
migrants and those of the urban population in Shanghai. Only through such comparisons does a unique ‘visual grammar’ appear. Rather than being a digital memory which records offline life, the evidence suggests that images on social media can illustrate complementary aspects of life. Before social media we used to see photography as a historical effort to represent or duplicate life.39 However, the situation here can be the opposite. Certainly in visual genres such as ‘children’, ‘food’,
‘events’, and ‘travel’ we see continuity between traditional photos and visual postings online. However, in other cases visual postings in the genres of ‘chicken soup for the soul’, FZL and ‘fantasy’ detach people from their offline situation and construct a whole new world online.
People talked about what is happening on their social media in their offline life – in a manner that suggested that it was their online lives which for them represented a colourful and interesting world con-structed around aspirational images. So online space has now become the world that people truly enjoy, dream about and want to replicate in their offline lives (Fig 3.37).
Fig. 3.37 The colourful online world of rural migrants. (A partial image of a traditional Chinese painting booklet ‘Field Note’, 31.5 × 384 cm; painter: Xinyuan Wang)