The advent of new media technologies and the platformization of media content has changed how people watch, engage with, and share digital media. Conventionally audiences were surveyed selectively, and the results were collated by professional agencies and often kept hidden from public view. Conspicuous ratings of media and cultural products outside the national homeland, their success and failure, however, raises questions about the validity of such methods, particularly when media and cultural products are used as proxies for cultural soft power. 

Welcome to the Cultural Power Metric (CPM) dashboard, which is an outcome of the 2017-2019 Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP170102176): Digital China: From Cultural Presence to Innovative Nation. The primary aim of the CMP dashboard is to capture the circulation, timing and regional specificity of a range of social media and popular and trade press content that is shaping the representation of what can be called “Digital China”. This area features five analytical components from which the CPM is derived. Each of the five components aggregate and display “reputational” data based on amalgamated primary sources (e.g. company-generated data, user-generated comments/content) and secondary sources (trade and popular newspaper articles, academic journal articles) collected by the research team. This site is currently a work in progress.

For a discussion of how this works in relation to other metrics see recent publication in Global Media and China journal by the team