Social Media in East Asia

3–5 credits · Undergraduate

This course examines East Asian social media through an anthropological lens and explores how popular platforms like WeChat, LINE, and TikTok shape identity and sociality. Topics includes viral phenomena such as moppan, beauty filters, and oshi-katsu. Students will explore how these practices intersect with platform labor, state surveillance, and digital activism. Students will engage in ethnographic case studies, examining how digital technologies create new sociality, self-fashioning, and political life, and transform local cultural values and power dynamics. This course provides critical frameworks for understanding the increasing hyper-connected realities of contemporary East Asia.