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Abstract
This study explored how COVID-19 survivors construct their digital memories of the pandemic by analyzing 110 online memory narratives of COVID-19 survivors on Zhihu, China’s most popular question-and-answer platform. Social media grounded theory was used to identify themes and interpret the results. Four recurring themes emerged from the data: life during treatment, life after treatment, the role of bio/informational technologies, and the motivation for remembrance. The results show how COVID-19 survivors activated the affordances of Zhihu to record the life stories neglected in the state-led memory-making process and transformed them into prospective memories aimed at justice for such survivors. This study contributes to our understanding of how the politics of memory and the politics of platform entangle with each other in the Chinese context.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor Donna Chu, Professor Saskia Witteborn, and Professor Lokman Tsui for their patient guidance and generous feedback on this research. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers of Chinese Journal of Communication for their insightful suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Yi Yang
Yang Yi is a PhD student at the School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include digital memory, digital labor, and digital platforms.