Zhan Li

Ph.D. Student, Annenberg School for Communication
USC Provost’s Ph.D. Fellow

“What appeals to me is any kind of radical shift in the perception of how things are or how things should be, or even how we should think,” says Zhan Li, a first year Ph.D. student at the Annenberg School for Communication and a USC Provost’s Ph.D. Fellow. “I am interested in figuring out how these shifts are made, what makes them or can make them successful.”

“I chose to pursue my Ph.D. at USC’s Annenberg”, says Zhan, because “it is one of the premier schools of communication and that was the direction I wanted to take my research in. It is a very diverse school and very eclectic in terms of the research its faculty and students pursue. As I come from an eclectic background myself – I’ve done a mix of things – this suits me very much.”

Zhan moved to the West coast from New York, where he worked for a couple of years as an investment banking analyst at HSBC. But, “getting a doctorate,” he says, “is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.” Before enrolling in the Ph.D. program at USC, Zhan completed a Master’s degree in Comparative Media Studies (CMS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Master’s Degree in Social Anthropology, and his Bachelor’s degree work at Cambridge University, in the U.K.

“The Comparative Media Studies program,” explains Zhan, “is kind of the humanities equivalent of MIT’s Media Lab. The Media Lab is engineering orientated. The Master’s in CMS is more humanities, cultural studies orientated. What they have in common is a focus on addressing media convergence issues. They do so in academic ways, but they also explore industrial collaboration opportunities.”

Zhan’s thesis research at MIT was focused on the official U.S. Army video game named America’s Army (also known as AA or as the Army Game Project). “It’s an online tactical, combat game. It was interesting to me, because it is the first major project of this sort launched by a government organization. It is meant to be a marketing tool, but apart from that, it was of interest to me because of the many different ways in which players use the game. I am referring to uses unintended by the game’s creators. I thought of it more in public sphere terms, even though it’s not traditionally defined as such. I focused on how real-life soldiers, hackers, and evangelical Christians relate to and use the game. Real-life soldiers, for instance, have a different take on the game, because it is much more tied to their reality. Hackers, on the other hand, engaged it more at a technical level.”

Asked whether he will continue his work on online gaming culture while at USC, Zhan says, “yes, to some extent. However, I am still interested in how organizations (government or other) use new technologies and how they adapt to new media technology cultures. One of the things that attracted me to Annenberg is its tradition in rhetorical research. That’s something I haven’t studied much before and I am interested in combining with my other interests. America’s Army is, in a way, rhetoric in practice, because the U.S. Army is using it as a marketing tool, but these player communities are also using it as a means of building community, and other things.”

Zhan combined his interest in organizational rhetoric with his undergraduate work at Cambridge on new media technologies. There, as part of his bachelor’s degree thesis, he looked at how organizations adapt to address the demands put on them by the emergence of new media and technological changes. He studied how the World Bank managed the technological revolution at the turn of the millennium. “My questions,” he says, “centered on how the World Bank, in the late 1990s, tried to adopt the language of the information revolution in order to help support its claims of rejuvenation. The line of reasoning went something like this: ‘because the information revolution is changing the world, this means that this will change the World Bank as well; and this means that all of the criticism leveled against the World Bank in the past doesn’t have the same strength anymore.’ That was the rhetoric at the time. I don’t think it worked and the World Bank actually gave up this strategy about a year after I completed my research.

Looking ahead, Zhan says that he may eventually move back to the U.K. He first moved to Britain with his family when he was three. But he is keeping his options open. As for life in Southern California? “So far,” he says, “I’ve enjoyed my time at USC and Los Angeles, although I must say that my view of the city might be a bit skewed; I don’t know how to drive yet.”

If you have questions or comments, contact the Graduate Student in Residence at: gsir@usc.edu