The role of social media in the anticipatory governance of GM technology :
[Thesis]
Chen, Tuo
a comparative analysis of Chinese and English-language social media
University of Warwick
2018
Ph.D.
University of Warwick
2018
Anticipatory governance-an up-to-date strategy of science governance-provides a forward-seeing option for policy-makers to govern emerging technologies in contemporary society. The present research serves as an explorative study attempting to introduce the great value of social media (Twitter and Weibo) to the implementation of foresight and engagement capacity, arguing that social media are able to play as a supportive forum for anticipatory governance. A comparative analytic study scheme is also applied considering the different backgrounds of social media. The user-generated content arising from the GM future related spontaneous discussion is collected respectively from Twitter and Weibo and later on analyzed with qualitative content analysis under the assistance of QSR NVivo software. The results of this research show that Twitter and Weibo are playing the role of a supportive forum for anticipatory governance, where GM future, which turns out to be a globally controversial issue in this research, is intensively conceived and debated via the wide participation of individuals in spontaneous discussion; GM future-related spontaneous discussion can be identified as an incomplete transition from the deficit one-way communication model to a two-way dialogue model; the appearance of quiet engagement suggests more possible formats for online engagement, which led me to a reconsideration of the definition of public engagement in an Internet environment; the term mid-politics is proposed to justify the unique style of sub-politics rooted in China, which is led by public intellectuals and pushed forward in the form of public debate by controversy or movement leaders.