We are Elites and Losers : Constructing Community Identity and Seeking Social Capital in an Online Subcultural Group in China

Sammanfattning: This thesis focuses on the combination of youth subculture and online community in the contemporary Chinese context. It aims to explore the characteristics of the Chinese online youth subculture and how members construct their collective identities and gain alternative social capital in an online subcultural group. To exert the power of a good example as Flyvbjerg (2001) emphasizes, this thesis chooses an atypical case—an online group “985 Feiwu Plan” in China. The number “985” means “Project 985” universities, which can be considered as “the Ivy League” in the Chinese context. The Chinese character “Feiwu” roughly means “loser”. This online group brings together individuals who come from Chinses top universities but self- proclaim as losers. The self-mocking expression has reflected one increasingly popular online youth subculture in China—the Sang culture, through which the Chinese youth express a set of gloomy emotions towards their personal life. The thesis asks three overarching research questions: 1) In what ways do members perform a subculture in an online community? 2) What community identities do the subcultural group members construct? And, 3) how do members seek alternative sources of social capital through their expression and interaction in the subcultural online community? Through qualitative text analysis of data from semi-structured interviews with members of the group, this thesis has three key findings. First, the similarities of Sang culture performed by the group members include powerlessness, self-irony, and weak resistance; the variations are the group members distinguish themselves from “real Sang” people by their outstanding educational background and their use of the Sang culture as “defensive pessimism” to vent emotions. Second, the two conflicting social narratives “Involution” and “lying flat” in contemporary China, and their obsession with the halo of prestigious universities, have caused the group members to be torn between the two identities “985” and “Feiwu”. Third, the group member has gained a valuable but fleeting sense of belonging as an alternative social capital that is generated by the conversions of subcultural capital and emotional capital. Overall, this thesis shows how Chinese youth use the Internet as a tool to express a weak resistance against the powerful official discourse and the role of new media play in the formation process of youth subculture identities. Also, this thesis has contributed to the literature on social capital by discussing how alternative social capital can be generated in an online subcultural community.