Anticipatory Futures: Framing the Socio-technical Visions of Online Ratings and Reviews in Wired

IF 1.5 3区文学 Q2 COMMUNICATION

Communication Culture & Critique Pub Date : 2021-01-18 DOI:10.1093/CCC/TCAA034

Ngai Keung Chan

引用次数: 1

Abstract

Drawing insights from the sociology of expectations and recent studies on future visions in communication studies, this article traces and analyzes how Wired—a technology news provider and socio-technical vanguard whose vision is to uncover technological innovations—anticipated socio-technical visions of online ratings and reviews over two decades (1998–2018). The qualitative textual analysis of Wired’s coverage revealed two socio-technical visions, namely, promissory futures and problematic futures. The former embraced neoliberal discourses of consumer empowerment and accountability, whereas the latter entailed a pessimistic evaluation of the manipulation of online ratings and the potential of adopting online ratings beyond e-commerce platforms. The visions represented in Wired largely followed the logic of “technological solutionism.” This study affords opportunities for thinking about the role of popular media discourses and temporalities in shaping imagined futures of emerging technologies.

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预期的未来:构建在线评级和评论的社会技术愿景

从期望社会学和最近对传播研究中未来愿景的研究中获得见解，本文追踪并分析了wired -一家技术新闻提供商和社会技术先锋，其愿景是揭示技术创新-如何预测20年来在线评级和评论的社会技术愿景(1998-2018)。对Wired报道的定性文本分析揭示了两种社会技术愿景，即期票未来和问题未来。前者接受了消费者赋权和问责制的新自由主义话语，而后者则对在线评级的操纵以及在电子商务平台之外采用在线评级的潜力进行了悲观的评估。《连线》杂志所呈现的愿景很大程度上遵循了“技术解决方案主义”的逻辑。这项研究为思考大众媒体话语和暂时性在塑造新兴技术的想象未来中的作用提供了机会。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Communication Culture & Critique COMMUNICATION-

CiteScore

2.50

自引率

5.90%

发文量

期刊介绍： CCC provides an international forum for critical research in communication, media, and cultural studies. We welcome high-quality research and analyses that place questions of power, inequality, and justice at the center of empirical and theoretical inquiry. CCC seeks to bring a diversity of critical approaches (political economy, feminist analysis, critical race theory, postcolonial critique, cultural studies, queer theory) to bear on the role of communication, media, and culture in power dynamics on a global scale. CCC is especially interested in critical scholarship that engages with emerging lines of inquiry across the humanities and social sciences. We seek to explore the place of mediated communication in current topics of theorization and cross-disciplinary research (including affect, branding, posthumanism, labor, temporality, ordinariness, and networked everyday life, to name just a few examples). In the coming years, we anticipate publishing special issues on these themes.