抄録
Recent studies on the relationship between media culture and populist mobilization generally considered media contents rather as an instrument for social movement, than for its own end. This methodological assumption led to the ignorance of so-called “pre-movement” period. This article investigates on the change of online expressive culture with the example of an Internet meme called “Golden Monster Card”. The motif of “monster” first appeared in an anti-censorship protest in Mainland China in 2008 and later reused in Hong Kong in 2011. The paper unraveled that this meme captured the emergence of Hong Kong boundary consciousness before the said rise of localist camp after 2014. This article concluded that there are linguistic and cultural rules of using two modalities in the language game that creates the “Golden Monster Card” meme. These two modalities include 1) the Chinese characters used to name the monsters, considering the decoupling of script and sound; and 2) the captions and the illustrations of the monsters that are derived from the naming. These two components are governed by the conceptual metaphor of “Godly Monster” (神獣). The language game of “Golden Monster Card”, while defending an effective linguistic boundary against Putonghua speakers with complex replacements of Cantonese homophones, showed an ambiguous stance towards different actors related to different modes of Chineseness, i.e., Chinese government, Chinese people, Chinese cultural traditions, as well as the recent resistant culture in China. By reading these monsters as “icons” in Peircean semiotics, this paper also provides an alternative theoretical framework to reconsider the transcultural and transregional resonances of media discourses between different social movements appear in near simultaneity around the globe. This kind of transregional reference can also be traced as early as in Benedict Anderson’s periodization of “early globalization”, when print media and telegraph were used to transmit affective political messages by the virtue of similarity and iconicity.
