The front cover of Social Media and Ordinary Life is telling, especially when compared to Wallis’s earlier Technomobility in China (New York University Press, 2013). The earlier cover featured a lone female migrant worker in a train station, standing still with suitcases as she checked a mobile phone amid a blur of travellers. In contrast, the new cover turns to a collective scene: commuters, women and men alike, lined up on a metro platform, each absorbed in their smartphones – a banal device no longer requiring visual emphasis.

Social Media and Ordinary Life unfolds the “big” transitions visually evoked by changing covers through “small,” mediated, polarized experiences. The book grounds its inquiry in “ordinary ethics” and “ordinary affect,” examining their entanglements with social media in “neo/non-liberal China” – a paradoxical configuration of neoliberal marketization and authoritarian control that reconfigures ethical norms and mobilizes affect towards the “Chinese Dream.” Affect, as a “motivating force and an emergent flow” (p. 12), is understood as embodied and relational. Ethics, meanwhile, guide context-specific judgments about decisions and actions. Together, affect and ethics form the integrated analytic of the ordinary – shaped by history, structures of power, and digital mediations, while enabling action and change.

Indeed, “ordinariness” is subject to idiosyncratic interpretations – anyone might claim it while enjoying extraordinary privilege or success. In China, performing ordinariness can be an ethical act (chapter two). Attuned to this slippery potential, Wallis presents ethnographic accounts of four groups: young creatives in Beijing (chapter two), rural micro-entrepreneurs in Shandong (chapter three), female domestic workers in Beijing (chapter four) and young feminist activists (chapter five). Their positions are often marginal – excluded from or at odds with state-sanctioned discourse. Based on multi-sited ethnography (2011–2020), Wallis combines formal/informal interviews and online/offline observations to draw a “messy web” of digital and lived spaces (p. 34), allowing everyday ethical-affective negotiations to play out dynamically and relationally.

Chapter two navigates the self-making, aesthetic labour and digital practices of young creatives who had migrated to Beijing. Though excluded from elite innovation spaces dominated by formally educated peers, they were influenced by the state’s “mass innovation” discourse to pursue alternative creative careers and personal aesthetics, often through pedagogical, representational and commercial affordances of digital media. Their creative expressions could contest commercialization, cultural homogenization and political control, thus becoming sites of ethical engagement for personal and social betterment. Yet this pursuit frequently sacrificed economic stability, leading many to leave Beijing. Hence, ordinary ethics and affect unfold through their negotiations of tensions across material and meaningful, global and local, online and offline, and personal and political domains.

Chapter three examines micro-entrepreneurs in Shandong villages, tracing their engagement with technological progress over time – from early ventures like internet cafés to recent e-commerce – under waves of political and commercial initiatives gearing toward “rural revitalization.” While villagers explored new economic opportunities using digital tools and skills, the scale and speed of technological diffusion were often fractured by infrastructural limits, financial constraints and “relational obligations and affective ties” (p. 92). Consequently, the rural technological landscape weaves formal development with alternative and unconventional uses. These non-linear processes afford rural women a sense of participation, balance and control. Yet patriarchal norms remain entrenched in household finances, reproductive labour and communicative chances. The complexity marks the ethical and affective contours of digital inequalities.

Shifting focus to in-home female domestic workers in Beijing, chapter four extends to the commodification of ethical-affective performances. For domestic workers, the labour–money exchange was far from equal: they entered the city as informal workers and entered the households as outsiders. Hence, enduring devaluation and exploitation – while performing positive sentiments – became part of the job itself. This created an affective disjuncture between veiling negativity and exhibiting positivity. Social media became a vital outlet to share altruistic content, record self-development and seek emotional recuperation. These practices transposed the ethics of care in labour and allowed emotions to circulate and foster passion and kinship, but online expressions are recalibrated by state-endorsed ethics of harmony and positivity. Ultimately, their affective trajectories were marked by struggles – yet from within that struggle, they created fleeting moments for recovery.

Chapter five explores how young feminists constitute “networked feminist killjoy assemblage” – an affective formation primed for actions through dispersed networks. Young feminists confronted violence and injustice from patriarchy, often crystallized through discovering “feminism,” a term frequently vilified in the name of political stability, ideological purity and demographic anxiety. In neo/non-liberal China – where patriarchy and misogyny endure – any feminist presence was labelled as a “killjoy,” disruptive to the affective comfort of those privileged from gendered injustice. Accordingly, Wallis examines livestreaming, fansubbing and video production as ethical reworking of gender politics from below, with risks of marginalization and exclusion. Consequently, their ethical impulses yield affective ambivalence – anxiety and burnout coexist with solidarity and hope.

Taken together, the four chapters demonstrate how ordinary ethics and affect articulate expressions, movements and actions intersubjectively and are inflected by gender, class and urban–rural divides. In neo/non-liberal China, economic self-responsibilization and political disciplining of ethical norms and affective performance often produce contradictions between structural inequalities, ethical judgments and affective expressions. Hence, the frictions of official discourse, state agendas and corporate imperatives – whether mass innovation, rural revitalization or female empowerment – expose key fault lines in Chinese society while opening creative spaces for agency. Marginalized subjects both inhabit and negotiate the cracks in national teleologies. Specifically, social media, as an evolving techno-assemblage, channel affective-ethical governance but are repurposed in idiosyncratic ways that unsettle normative orders.

Just as I completed this review on 22 September 2025, a new directive appeared on my WeChat feed: the Cyberspace Administration announced a two-month national campaign: “Clean Cyberspace: Special Campaign to Curb Malicious Provocations of Negative Emotions.” Targeting online expressions of antagonism, anxiety and pessimism, the campaign arrives amid a worsening post-Covid economic downturn. What deeper feelings might such interventions stir? Could changes emerge from suppressing affect? As Wallis shows, ethical-affective struggle is never a one-off event. This timely book is thus highly relevant to students and scholars of media, gender, labour and affect in China and similar non-Western contexts.