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      My research’s dominant areas of inquiry rest in four main components: digital media, technology, culture, and thinking. Within these research components, I want to explore how digital media and technology play a role in informing people’s thinking, cultural perspectives, and social relationships. I want to examine how the rapid development of information and communication technology contributes to constructing simulated virtual communities. I also want to explore how digital media influences the social decision-making process and individuals’ conceptions of certain regions, religions, cultures, ethnicities, politics, and even materiality itself. My research interests have stemmed from an understanding of how digital technology plays a quasi-autonomous role in users’ affections and actions, as well as in the arrangements of power within which individuals’ perceptions of the world are redirected and modified. One of the most popular forms of media, TikTok videos, which serve as a strong mediator between smartphones and minds and have multiple layers of messages embedded, create tension-filled discursive spaces which may be worth discussing in order for the embedded messages to be reconstructed. More immediately, I want to explore how digital media can empower communities always under suppression. I am also interested in learning the application of computational or machine-driven media, such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and algorithmic systems with artificial intelligence and machine learning, and how these applications further have influences on users’ cultural perspectives and critical thinking.

      My inquiry is informed by digital media theories, semantics, and critical cultural studies. Much research has been done on digital media constructing hidden messages that haven’t been analyzed in detail. In the intersection of semantic and critical cultural studies, Roland Barthes, a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician, developed the idea of semiology and extended the effects of semiology into an analytical framework of the variety of sign systems that are manifested by pop culture. His book Mythologies discusses how contemporary social value systems create modern myths by constructing different signs in visual culture. I intend to use his framework of mythologies to deconstruct the messages current social media apps like TikTok. By studying how modern myths can be found everywhere in the sphere of digital media and how these myths can impact the behavior of certain users, I intend to understand more fully how digital technologies have masked the importance of the deconstruction of social messages.

       My research would mainly focus on how digital media and technology may challenge cultural and social perspectives and individuals’ thinking. TikTok is the central social media platform I want to explore in my future research inquiry. As the latest form of media, TikTok videos have received huge attention by recent research in 2021 and 2022. There are huge potentials of TikTok videos, as a solid short-form video, which haven’t been revealed by previous research.

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