A retronym is a linguistic term that describes the “newly necessary modification of an old noun”. It is a concept most of us use without realising it. If you have ever said “acoustic guitar”, “film camera”, “human intelligence”, or “print media”, you have used a retronym. Once a new form of something becomes common—electric guitar, digital camera, artificial intelligence, online media—the older form suddenly needs a qualifier.

I want to propose that social media now needs its own retronym: analogue social media.

Social media feels like a 21st-century phenomenon. From Facebook to TikTok, Sina Weibo to Douyin, online platforms dominate our attention and increasingly organise our public lives. In the United States, Pew Research Center’s 2025 survey found that 84% of adults use YouTube, 71% use Facebook, and 50% use Instagram. In the UK, Ofcom reported that in May 2023 91% of online adults visited YouTube and 90.7% visited Facebook.

China is often treated as the ultimate proof that social media is a modern, platform-driven reality—scaled, accelerated, and deeply embedded. And in one sense, it is. But some of the headline numbers commonly repeated about “China’s social media users” can be slippery, because sources sometimes count accounts/identities rather than unique individuals.

DataReportal’s Digital 2025: China report estimates 1.08 billion social media user identities in January 2025, equal to 76.5% of the population.

And of course, China’s social media ecosystem is distinctive. The Great Firewall blocks many global platforms, but the domestic environment is “highly dynamic, diverse, and fiercely competitive” (a fair shorthand for a landscape where scale, regulation, and ruthless product competition coexist). WeChat sits at the centre of daily life, but it is far from the only arena. One platform familiar to many outside China is Xiaohongshu—often branded in English coverage as RedNote—which made headlines in January 2025 as US “TikTok refugees” experimented with it ahead of a possible US ban on TikTok.

Yet for all this digital dominance, the concept of “social media” is not as new as we tend to imagine. 

In this post, I want to talk about the original social media in China: physical sites and shared media practices where users exchanged information, ideas, personal messages, and public-facing content—building audiences, engaging communities, and (crucially) exercising a kind of agency within a political sphere that typically allowed very little room to do so. 

Beyond Mao posters: from vertical propaganda to horizontal participation 

When we think of propaganda in China, what often comes to mind are the iconic Mao-era posters—utopian pastoral scenes, heroic workers, radiant futures, and, during the Cultural Revolution, stark images designed to mobilise conflict and discipline. These are typically read as vertical propaganda: top-down messaging from leader to led. 

But there is another propaganda ecology, one that looks surprisingly like what we now call “platformed communication”: horizontal propaganda—propaganda produced inside a group, sustained through collective participation, replication, and public display. 

Jacques Ellul, one of the best-known theorists of propaganda, describes horizontal propaganda through the small group: intimate meetings, discussion, and a form of equality in participation. He uses China as a prime example, describing a group setting in which each member is expected to speak and to form, through speech, the group’s shared convictions—while the group simultaneously guides the individual toward the “correct line”. 

Read through a 21st-century lens, it is difficult not to see a familiar structure: a participatory communications environment that produces social pressure, conformity, shared language, and collective “takes”—not in an algorithmic feed, but in embodied public space. 

The point here is not to romanticise coercion. It is to notice the mechanics: sociality, repetition, audience, performance, and norms—the core ingredients of social media—were already being engineered and lived, offline. 

Templates, standardisation, and the meme-logic of the Mao era 

One way to see this analogue social media system in motion is through the Propaganda Poster Reference Materials (PPRM)—a term used by John Crespi to describe widely disseminated booklets of “ratified” poster and manhua models that could be reproduced locally. Crespi argues that such materials helped enable mass authorship by supporting a broader “community of like-minded artists”, including amateurs, by providing replicable visual models. 

If that sounds modern, it should. A standardised, easily reusable image set—distributed at scale—functions rather like today’s widely shared visual shorthand: clipart, reaction images, meme templates, GIFs. The aesthetic may differ. The logic of replication does not. 

This standardisation effect is also emphasised in a contemporary museum essay by Jennifer Wong, who notes that the overall effect of such manuals was standardisation—making visual language conform to a state-approved set of norms.

My own forthcoming book, The Massification of Everyday Propaganda in Maoist China, takes these booklets seriously as sources—treating them not as minor ephemera, but as evidence of how propaganda became “everyday”: portable, reproducible, collectively owned, and locally performed.

The “platform” was a place: clubs, schools, libraries, walls.

The booklets were often purchased as communal property and held in clubs, libraries, and schools—not only as toolkits, but as social spaces where people gathered, borrowed, copied, and created. Your translated editorial notes (presented as examples of intended use) make clear how explicitly they were aimed at grassroots creators and local display. 

What matters here is the social arrangement: prearranged sites + shared templates + collective production + public posting + community viewing.

That is a platform logic—minus the app.

Blackboard newspapers, noticeboards, and big-character posters: posting before posting 

We can also see analogue social media in the visual culture of public posting itself: blackboard newspapers, noticeboards, wall spaces, and big-character posters (大字报). These were not just passive surfaces. They were interactive interfaces—places where people congregated, copied, argued, performed, and policed. 

If you want a contemporary analogy, think less of “broadcast television” and more of a comment thread that is also a town square: participation is visible; reputations are local; the audience is embodied; the cost of saying the “wrong thing” is real. 

In many depictions from the period, viewers are shown clustered around boards, reading, discussing, copying text, and producing their own contributions—what we might now call engagement, amplification, and remix. 

Why “analogue social media” matters 

Calling this analogue social media is not a gimmick. It forces a more precise question: what, exactly, is “social media”—the technology, or the social form?

The Mao-era ecology I’ve described was a purposeful horizontalisation of propaganda: a system that allowed ordinary, offline, pre-digital citizens to participate in micro-negotiations of their political environment—usually within tight constraints, often by sticking to approved messages, sometimes by finding room for emphasis, performance, and local meaning-making. 

The social elements are unmistakable: people congregating, discussing, posting, sharing, copying, and being influenced. A public sphere—shaped by power, certainly—but also lived through participation and collective practice. 

Which brings us back to the retronym. If “social media” is treated as something that began with the internet, we miss a longer history of how publics are made: not only through platforms, but through places, templates, rituals, and the social need to be seen participating. 

Analogue social media helps us name that older media ecology—so we can recognise what is genuinely new in the digital era, and what is not.