“Why Drones for Ordinary People?” Digital Representations, Topic Clusters, and Techno-Nationalization of Drones on Zhihu

Hamm Hamm,Lin Lin

doi:10.3390/info10080256

Abstract

Unmanned and unwomaned aerial vehicles (UAV), or drones, are breaking and creating new boundaries of image-based communication. Using social network analysis and critical discourse analysis, we examine the 60 most popular question threads about drones on Zhihu, China’s largest social question answering platform. We trace how controversial issues around these supposedly novel tech products are mediated, domesticated, visualized, or marginalized via digital representational technology. Supported by Zhihu’s topic categorization algorithm, drone-related discussions form topic clusters. These topic clusters gain currency in the government-regulated cyberspace, where their meanings remain open to widely divergent interpretations and mediation by various agents. We find that the largest drone company DJI occupies a central and strongly interconnected position in the discussions. Drones are, moreover, represented as objects of consumption, technological advancement, national future, and uncertainty. At the same time, the sense-making process of drone-related discussions evokes emerging sets of narrative user identities with potential political effects. Users engage in digital representational technologies publicly and collectively to raise questions and represent their views on new technologies. Therefore, we argue that platforms like Zhihu are essential when studying views of the Chinese citizenry towards technological developments.

Highlights

By today, China is the country of the largest global consumer drone producer
We argue that multiple representations of drones and what they mean to Chinese society can be understood by critically studying user-generated contents on social networking sites (SNS) which we conceptualize here as digital representational technologies allowing to conclude user’s understandings of technologies
We suggest the understanding of SNS as variations of digital representational technology: Users represent themselves on digital platforms where the content is fully mediated via information technologies

Summary

Introduction

China is the country of the largest global consumer drone producer. We see social changes parallel to the emergence of drone technologies and their marketizations in China within the last two decades. The state utilizes drones for social control and national identity-building, companies gain high profits from the drone consumer market and claim the ambition to keep technological world-leadership, and civic drone pilots become equipped to go beyond everyday boundaries and to craft the tech-enhanced views to larger audiences via social networking sites (SNS) such as Sina Weibo, WeChat, or Zhihu. New boundaries appear to limit and regulate the non-state use of drones and their dissemination. During these processes, drones constitute not merely material entities, and objects of discourse raising clusters of controversial issues through which social changes are made viable

Objectives

Results

Conclusion