{"title":"Anticipatory Futures: Framing the Socio-technical Visions of Online Ratings and Reviews in Wired","authors":"Ngai Keung Chan","doi":"10.1093/CCC/TCAA034","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n 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.","PeriodicalId":54193,"journal":{"name":"Communication Culture & Critique","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5000,"publicationDate":"2021-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Communication Culture & Critique","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/CCC/TCAA034","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
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.
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.
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