Bolin Zhang's Blog

Bolin is a 2nd year graduate student at Duke University, pursuing her Master’s degree in liberal arts and a specialization in international development policy. Prior to her graduate studies at Duke, Bolin was a part-time production assistant at Beijing TV Station during the school years, where she became interested in media literacy, transitional institution, and legal linguistics. A Pre-law senior and freelance media developer/analyst, she is working on her master's thesis concerning a convergence of media literacy, environmental justice, and social network analysis in the context of ubiquitous and 'cloudy' computation. This will be a digital ethnography project that configures the original spirit of openness, e.g. Confucius's styles of musicality and scholarship versus polity and courtiership in Chinese intellectual history and its compatibility in today's virtual discourse, social code and institutional design.
As the first-born (Bao #1) in her family, Bolin had her first personal computer, an old-fashioned Lenovo Family Pack PC, in 2002. And she was not that into it. Her little brother Haowen (Bao #2), who was born in 2001, still in Beijing's elementary school, has already been able to navigate Internet search engines, play online games e.g. the Zombie Farm, and send virtual gifts via IM apps to his school buddies.