Preface

This project began on July 27, 2025. As part of my preparation for applying to a Ph.D. in Computational Social Science (CSS), I intend to make it a habit to study literature for one hour each day.

The idea is to take notes on noteworthy points as I read and see how long I can keep this up.

This idea was inspired by Hongtao Huang’s “A Paper A Day”.

Books Reading

1. Communist Neo-Traditionalism Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Andrew G. Walder)

July 27, 2025

  • Read Chapter: P1-P8.
  • A totalitarian society has two distinguishing characteristics
    1. the nature of the tie between the totalitarian party and its active adherents
    2. The second feature is social atomization: “the obliteration of social ties that are not directly harnessed to the party’s aims. Totalitarian societies recognize no legitimate distinction between private and public spheres.
  • The social atomization only exist in a totalistic society? what about the rise of media and internet platforms?
  • he insisted that the modern socialist society became less enforced. Where the totalitarian image places its emphasis on the disincentives and psychological states created by fear and inbred caution, the neo-traditional image emphasizes the meshing of economic and political power on the structured incentives offered by the party.”
  • how the social structured: The result is a highly institutionalized network of patron-client relations that is maintained by the party and is integral to its rule: a clientelist system in which public loyalty to the party and its ideology is mingled with personal loyalties between party branch officials and their client
  • how it maintained: The neo-traditional image stresses the social network, not the group, as its main structural concept.”

July 28, 2025

  • Read Chapter: “Factory as Family”

2. Political economy of communications (Vincent Mosco)

July 28, 2025

  • Read Chapter: 30-47.
  • 传播政治经济学的基本政治图谱：商品化 空间化 结构化
  • 受众商品论：劳工为了回报他们所接受的媒介内容而出卖了他们的劳动力（注意力）;延伸了劳动的外延，扩展了传统的商品逻辑，也许可作为资本注主义的劳动转型过程
  • 劳动（braverman，1974）：概念的统一体：想象于创意能力，设计与执行能力；在商品化过程中，资本的作用是把创意和制作相分离，把技术和执行任务的非娴熟相分离，形成一个管理阶层，同时生产上的新的技能与权力的配置相结合来重构劳动过程
  • 商品化到空间化：信息系统的 出现使得信息转变空间——重新分配产业资源
  • 传播政治经济学的传统是把空间化视作企业权力在传播产业的制度延伸

Paper Reading

2025-7

2025-7-27

  • Nahrgang, M., Weidmann, N. B., Quint, F., Nagel, S., Theocharis, Y., & Roberts, M. E. (2025). Written for Lawyers or Users? Mapping the Complexity of Community Guidelines. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 19, 1295–1314. https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/35873
  • previous problems: As the harmful content fostered many problems, and the social platform conducted content moderation, many users held low trust towards the restrictions. However,  many actors tried to use the community guidelines to restrict the users, but created a vast difference. No more research has put their attention on users’ situation.
  • research questions: focusing on the length, readability, and semantic complexity of the community guidelines.
  • interesting points:
    1. platform typology : chat platforms; creator platforms; forum platforms;  social network platforms
    2. Alt tech platforms:  provide an alternative to Silicon Valley-controlled platforms  like Gab
    3. Platform Governance Archive’s (PGA) GitHub Repository makes historical versions available.
    4. readablity measurment: Flesch-Kincaid Grade Score relies on the average sentence length and the average word length in a given text

2025-8