Resilient Growth Through Cultural Empowerment: Mediatized Reading Practices and Constrained Agency Among Older Accompanying Migrants in China — An Audio‑Mediated Reading Case

Abstract

With the integration of big data, algorithms, and platform infrastructures, mediatized reading is increasingly shaped by platform rules, social relations, and content ecosystems. Audio-mediated reading has become a low-threshold and highly companionable pathway for older adults to access cultural resources, and it is now deeply embedded in short-video and news-feed platforms. Focusing on older accompanying migrants in China, this study draws on in-depth interviews with nine older accompanying migrants in Chengdu and a 30-day micro ethnographic follow-up of one typical case. Using a dissemination-reception analytic framework, we show that older migrants enter audio-mediated reading through the intertwined mediation of adult children, peer word-of-mouth in weak-tie networks, and platform recommendation and incentive mechanisms. In reception, they develop stable preferences for family-ethics narratives, local cultural materials, and nation-centred political and historical content, while constructing a platform-based hierarchy of trust as an everyday risk‑governance strategy. We further find that their agency is not limited to passive exposure: through tactical domestication of time-space arrangements and small scale recreation, some participants shift from receiver to producer. We conceptualize this process as “resilient growth through cultural empowerment”, while also highlighting its structural limits under algorithmic distribution and commercial incentive logics.