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Care Space

Created
Feb 9, 2025 8:36 AM
Author

Nishant Shah, Summer Kwong, Bowei Liu

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AuthExExperimental Authorship
Publication year
February 9, 2025

Care Space

by Bowei Liu

In 2020 December, A criminal private prosecution case was discussed in mainland China, a woman sued a convenience store owner for making up “malicious gossip” about her. “Malicious Gossip” comes from a video of a scene taken without her permission, which was filmed by the store owner and posted on WeChat saying she was cheating on her husband when she picked up her delivery in the convenience store (Yan, 2020). As this “malicious gossip” spread virally on platforms like WeChat, this video became a ‘popular video’, and a few days later it reached the company of this woman’s workplace, she lost her job after her company knew the ‘malicious gossip’ (Yan, 2020).

Expect the judicial process, the media noted digital platforms' connive behavior(Global Times, 2020; Wu, 2020; Jing & Shuai Shuai, 2020). Unvalidated hurtful words are widely disseminated on digital platforms. In WeChat, the article about the woman was read by more than 100,000 people when the article was saved as evidence. Her background was quickly recognized, and then she received thousands of malicious comments from strangers (Jing & Shuai Shuai, 2020), the barrier to entry for digital violence is so low that anyone can be targeted. Narratives like this are so broken and feel unrepairable (Shah, 2024). In the ‘malicious gossip’ case, the woman said during the interview “It's like when you walk normally on the road and suddenly get hit by a billboard” (Jing & Shuai Shuai, 2020).In the PRC Supreme People's Procuratorate case study, they described the ‘malicious gossip’ case as a tragedy, a couple of seconds that changed a woman's life (Supreme People's Procuratorate, 2020).

The “Malicious Gossip” case brings us such narratives: Digital platforms are so dangerous, and so broken that everyone on social media is putting themself in an unsafe place. But just pointing out the problem is not enough, when we realize the question, the next step should be how to solve it. If digital platforms are dangerous spaces, could we create a space with safety and care? This is my motivation for introducing Caring Spaces, and before designing a digital caring space, I think it is necessary to understand what Caring Spaces represents in digital.

image

Rumor (HavenMari04, 2022)

Modeling a Digital Care Space

The “Care Space” concept comes from the practice of global care labs. In the hands-on activities organized by the Global Care Lab, people are first encouraged to create a warm and caring space with caring furnishings (blankets, couches, etc.), and participants are required to read and understand texts related to caring research (Leeker, Schütze, 2024). The purpose of doing all this preparation is to allow caring practices to have a caring space, after making sure everyone is familiar with the concept and idea of care, the care exercise can continue. I would like to give an example of a digital platform as a clearer explanation for possible care space elements.

Bilibili is a Chinese video site that focuses on creator content(Ding et al., 2021), the basic function of this website is similar to YouTube. In the early days of this website, they were a website that mainly dealt with anime and they didn't want to let other uninterested users into this website. So they set a barrier to entry, stating that users need to answer questions to be able to speak on this video site. The questions included a lot of anime knowledge, but other parts included community norms and recognizing online violence (Xu, 2023). Dr. Martina Leeker and Dr. Konstanze Schütze described caring spaces as “one of an ambivalent co-existence of intervening and adapting “(2024). Entities in this space need to take responsibility, participate in the setting of the space, and respect the wishes of the collective and other participants (Leeker, Schütze, 2024).  In this description, Bilibili's early community had some elements of caring space, in 2019, users had an 80% retention rate on Bilibili in 12 months (Chen & Wang, 2020). These core users in this period have a common understanding of how they use the platform, which allows them to avoid certain conflicts and respect the ideas of others in their communication. The presence of these users maintains a civilized and stable community (Chen & Wang, 2020).

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bilibili TV (Yxh1433, 2017)

In Dr. Martina Leeker and Dr. Konstanze Schütze's (2024) exploration, care is a form of life that people use as a cultural technique to deal with unstable and unbalanced societies. At the same time, caring is a way of life that operates in the form of intermingled and reciprocal relations, a way of organizing society that is beneficial to all participants (Tam et al., 2024). When we go through the development of Bilibili, care is a basic element that users demand, people will be accretive by care space characteristics. However, these elements become invisible or neutral during digital practice, and even platforms themself forget their existence. Many free subtitle groups on Bilibili add Chinese subtitles to non-Chinese movies, but when they massively disbanded due to the platform change, Bilibili had to spend its budget on translation work. What we need to do is discover and summarize these digital care features.

As Bilibili went public on the NASDAQ, its design of answering questions was simplified to expand its user base and monetize (Zhou, 2022). Today Bilibili is a digital video platform company with a high-value market capitalization (Xu, 2023), but its caring space character has disappeared. When the Bilibili CEO went back to speak at his alma mater in 2021, he was verbally assaulted by Bilibili users who were dissatisfied with the discourse environment(NetEase, 2021, October 24).

Change Our Digital World

Digital practices unavoidably harm us. With the growth of the global Internet and various digital applications, digitization has become embedded in our lives. Not just social media, digital technologies we design also have the same negative narrative and cause substantial harm. German customs can determine whether an asylum seeker can be recognized as a refugee solely based on spoken Arabic entered into the database (BBC, 2017). If asylum seekers do not have accents from a specific country like Syria, they will not be recognized (2017). In American police departments, algorithms are deployed to identify crime rates (Benjamin, 2019). Black neighborhoods are recognized as high-crime neighborhoods by algorithms because algorithms rely on data that have systemic discrimination (2019). The result was that the police deployed more patrols into black neighborhoods and arrested more black people because the algorithm drew a danger zone for police (2019). These cases point out that the real harm was caused by digitalization. Also, you cannot solve digital harms by eliminating digitalization, because digitalization already has deep interaction with our society.

Every participant in digital practice has a stake in digital care. The “malicious gossip” case tells us everyone's at risk on digital platforms where care is failing, and The early-stage Bilibili proves that a safe and caring space is possible on digital platforms. we need to look for solutions when designing and applying digitization, we need more care space elements embedded in platforms. Social media and digital technology should not become one of the most dangerous social imaginations, we need to remain cautious as we engage in the digitalization process.

Reference:

  • Benjamin, Ruha. (2019),  Race after Technology : Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Polity Press.
  • Chen, X., & Wang, Y. S.. (2020). The Ecology of Media Content Production and Consumption in the Transitional "Non-mainstream" Teenage Social Video Website Beili Beili. Art Review, (8), 58-70.
  • Ding, N., Yang, Z., Li, S., & Zhang, A. (2021). Where translation impacts: The non-professional community on Chinese online social media – A descriptive case study on the user-generated translation activity of Bilibili content creators. Global Media and China, 6(2), 171–190. https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364211000645
  • Germany to use voice recognition to identify migrant origins. (2017, March 17). BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39307155
  • Jing, Shu & Shuai Shuai, Wu (2020, December 16) A “joke” triggered by network violence - Hangzhou woman to pick up the courier was rumor incident investigation. New CN. http://m.xinhuanet.com/2020-12/16/c_1126868414.htm
  • NetEase. (2021, October 24). B station chairman Chen Rui went back to his alma mater to give a speech, and met “Mongolia on the single.” https://www.163.com/dy/article/GN3OL5JQ0535J138.html
  • [New Era Procuratorate Stories] Nine seconds! Woman's life rewritten after picking up courier_Supreme People's Procuratorate of the People's Republic of China. (2022, February 10). https://www.spp.gov.cn/spp/sp/202202/t20220210_544062.shtml
  • Pick up the courier was rumored to be derailed! Hangzhou woman says she is “socially dead”: I will never reconcile! (2020, December 13). Global Times. https://www.huanqiu.com/article/4154ep5M6ml
  • Rumor by HavenMari04 on DeviantArt. (2022, October 11). https://www.deviantart.com/havenmari04/art/Rumor-932686472