Embedment And Conversion:Domestication Of Rural Women’s Short Video Practice

Network technology shapes the daily life of the public and forms the living environment for people.Media behaviors such as short video practice constitute a part of daily practical activities of human beings,which further breaks the barrier between political discourse,cultural activities and daily living space.Using the ethnographic investigation path and domestication theory as the analytical framework,this study examines how short video media is embedded into the daily living space of rural women,and analyzes and describes the mutual domestication process between media users and short video technology in combination with individual’s unique life experience.The study takes H Village in Shanxi Province as the field point and uses purposive and snowball sampling methods to obtain a total of 28 rural women as the research subjects.The study focuses on the daily living space of the research subjects,and records the media usage behavior of rural women through participatory observation and in-depth interviews,attempting to examine how rural women understand,use,resist,and adapt to short video technology.The study finds that,first of all,rural women and short video media need to go through the pre-domestication stage of commercialization and imagination.Designers take the time of users and trigger psychological resonance as the basic logic of digital product design,and complete the transition from commodity market to family space.Secondly,through domestication processes such as appropriation,objectification,incorporation and conversion,short videos are woven into the daily life of rural women and occupy a dominant position in the internal competition of the media system with a strong force,thus realizing the embedment and meaning construction of media technology in the space-time structure.Short videos also provide a new space and place for rural women to re-present and understand family,neighborhood and other series of relationships and show intimate emotions.Third,short video breaks the boundary between traditional society and virtual network,affects rural women’s experience and construction of "time and space",and expands the dimension of time and space.Through short videos,individuals,families,villages and society can be connected in series to maintain interpersonal relationships,connect private space with rural public space,rural villages and external society.To a certain extent,short video media has accelerated the weakening of the male-centered rules and institutions established under the traditional patriarchy,allowing women to step into the "foreground".But unfortunately,limited by traditional social norms and other realistic factors,rural women have been unable to escape from their families and break through the structural dilemma.Finally,the domestication process is not linear,but dynamic.With the change of individual life stage and the needs of actual life,they will readjust the meaning of short video technology to achieve"re-domestication",or take the initiative to reduce the dependence on short video technology to achieve the purpose of "de-domestication".In the process of embedding short video into daily life,rural women and media technology construct and negotiate with each other,and finally form an inseparable digital community.