Xiao Liu is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at McGill University. Her research focuses on cybernetics, information technology and digital media, Chinese cinemas, science fiction and fantasy, and (post-)socialist media culture and critique. Her essays on cybernetics and digital media theory, melodrama and socialist politics, parody videos and information economy, and contemporary Chinese cinema are published and forthcoming in venues such as Grey Room, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Social Identities, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Frontier of Literary Studies in China, the anthology China’s iGeneration and others. At CHI, she is completing a book manuscript, entitled Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation and Postsocialist Imaginations in China, which focuses on the cultural practices and media imaginations around information technologies, cybernetics and systems theory in China around the turn of the 1980s. By placing this specific history in dialogue with media theory this project rethinks some key issues in current discourses of digital media.