媒介作为一种研究方法:传播、物质性与数字劳动

Media as a Method:Rethinking Communication,Materiality and Digital Labor

信息技术的发展使传播研究过于关注虚拟层面的媒介传输,却忽视了背后物理性的基础设施和政治经济景观。文章试图跳出传播功能主义视角,来论证媒介在何种程度上可以成为一种研究方法并展现传播的物质性特征。本文以平台经济下的外卖送餐员及其电动车的使用为例,通过田野访谈和问卷调查相结合的方法,探讨了电动车作为一种媒介如何展现物质的传输与交换、社会权力关系的建立与维持,以及政治话语的抗争与赋权。送餐员与电动车所建构的"人""物"关系凸显了中国数字劳动的形貌与内里,并影响着数字经济下的劳动政治和中国的社会转型。

Media studies tend to be dominated by visualized and invisible media effects, while taking less focus on its physical infrastructures and embodiments. This article acts as a modest attempt to explore how e-bikes become both a kind of media technology and an embodiment of communication materiality. Taking platform food-delivery workers as an example, it argues three dimensions of e-bike being material media technology: artifacts, social arrangements, and political discourse. The relations e-bikes has built between people and artifacts indicate the relations and tensions among grassroots digital labor, technology and a transformative China. It is argued that the materiality of communication should not be ignored as it has profound implications in labor politics and social transformation.