Social Agents of Technological Change: Dynamics and Divergence of Meanings, Expectations and Sentiments of Emerging Technologies : the case of Genome Editing

Abstract

This study aims to identify social agents and understand their dynamic roles along evolution trajectories of human genome editing technology. We used Twitter public data from 2015–2016 that contain tweets mentioning the technology, natural language processing and sentiment analysis to automatically identify social groups who might be currently shaping the development of this technology, the topics and prevalently expressed emotions by each group over time. The study found four distinct and active social agent groups who actively discussing five topics online in the two years period, and their level of engagement with online discussions regarding the technology were different. While distinct expectations of the technology were found, social agents’ attachment to those expectations was not sustainable. The overall sentiments of Twitter discussions were mostly neutral and gravitated toward slightly positive direction. The technology, despite being in early development stage and being highly anticipatory, was found to be more accepted than feared in discussions on social media. Some similarities and divergence among four social groups were also found. The study provided an empirical evidence for the contrast between two prominent social agents, expert and media, on their involvement in discussions regarding human genome editing.