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(Digital) tools as professional and generational identity badges in the Chinese creative industries

Liboriussen, Bjarke

Authors

Bjarke Liboriussen



Abstract

Animators, architects, designers, and others active in the Chinese creative industries are expert users of tools, both analog and digital. Performances of expert tool use (the wearing of professional identity badges) are strategic ways of signaling creativity understood as sets of skills and character traits essential for attracting work projects but also for professional identity formation. Analogue tools are generally associated with creative openness and fluidity whereas digital tools are discursively constructed as a technological other to the analogue. ‘Older’ creatives (born before 1980) tend to apply some of the media-inflected discourse around the balinghou generation (born 1980–1989) to their younger competitors, including an assumed affinity with digital media and technologies (the pinning on of a generational identity badge). Such generational assumptions can have the effect of reinforcing project hierarchies and denying expert users of digital tools their claims to creativity.

Citation

Liboriussen, B. (2015). (Digital) tools as professional and generational identity badges in the Chinese creative industries. Convergence, 21(4), https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856515579850

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jan 1, 2015
Online Publication Date Apr 24, 2015
Publication Date Nov 1, 2015
Deposit Date Oct 16, 2017
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Convergence
Print ISSN 1354-8565
Electronic ISSN 1748-7382
Publisher SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 21
Issue 4
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856515579850
Keywords Animation; Architecture; Balinghou; China; Creative industries; Creativity; Design; Generational differences; Sketches; Tools
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/762483
Publisher URL http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1354856515579850
Additional Information © 2017 by SAGE Publications

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