Weiyu Zhang

National University of Singapore | NUS · Department of Communications & New Media

Building upon the theories of nested identity and optimal distinctiveness, this study examines the identity structure of Hong Kong Twitter users as reflected in their tweets and how their structure changed over time during the Anti-Extradition Movement. By employing semantic network analysis and discursive historical analysis, we found that the ide...

Online deliberation is one important instance of civic tech that is both for and by the citizens, through engaging citizens in Internet-supported deliberative discussions on public issues. This article explains the origins of a set of symposium articles in this journal issue based on the 2017 'International Conference on Deliberation and Decision M...

Online deliberation is one important instance of civic tech that is both for and by the citizens, through engaging citizens in Internet-supported deliberative discussions on public issues. This article explains the origins of a set of symposium articles in this journal issue based on the 2017'International Conference on Deliberation and Decision Ma...

This study examines discourses in Chinese online discussions of gene editing by multiple social actors on Weibo before and after a significant scientific crisis, the 2018 scandal of Chinese gene-edited human babies. A content analysis of 2074 posts was done to identify frames, emotions, and metaphors. Findings reveal that Chinese social media have...

This study aims to explore the algorithmic imaginations and related practices of China’s independent content providers by situating them in the interaction network in relation to other actors, including algorithms, platforms, peers, and legacy media professionals. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 23 informants who were experienced in...

This Special Issue of Global Media and China responds in part to Stuart Hall’s famous 1996 invocation, ‘Who needs identity?’ – to study ‘specific enunciative strategies’ utilized within ‘specific modalities of power’ so as to consider identity discourses of the present and of the future. This issue draws upon empirical observations presented and de...

The extent to which the deliberative scenario brackets socio-economic inequalities (i.e., functioning as an ideal public sphere) has been long-debating. This study empirically addresses this question in the online setting. We test whether offline advantages (i.e., economic and cultural capitals) can be translated into power in online deliberation a...

Cognitive load is a significant challenge to users for being deliberative. Interface design has been used to mitigate this cognitive state. This paper surveys literature on the anchoring effect, partitioning effect and point-of-choice effect, based on which we propose three interface nudges, namely, the word-count anchor, partitioning text fields,...

This paper takes an alternative approach to understanding theory as description. New theoretical propositions and knowledge practices need to grow out of the comparisons between descriptions, especially comparisons between the Southern cases. Using China and India as two cases, this paper reviews the descriptions of communication technology in the...

Participation takes time in both synchronous and asynchronous communication. To encourage participation, most scholars suggested strategies to change participants’ motivation to adjust the way how they distribute their time resources. We, instead, view time as an evolving environment with specific temporal norms. This study employed a multi-level e...

This study examines messages contributed by scientists and laypeople to an online discussion about genetically modified food in China with the aim to understand whether and how scientists and laypeople apply different communication strategies with regard to framing, interaction features, and writing style. Both answers ( N = 100) and comments ( N =...

Online deliberation offers a way for citizens to collectively discuss an issue and provide input for policy makers. The overall experience of online deliberation can be affected by multiple factors. We decided to investigate the effects of moderation and opinion heterogeneity on the perceived deliberation experience, by running the first online del...

Operating as a commercial business with public functions, Weibo’s pursuit of profits has to be balanced with the demands of citizen users. This article examines how the dynamics between increasing profits and preserving public interest manifests itself in Weibo’s monetization and how the dynamics impacts Weibo’s public functions. Drawn on evidence...

In this study, we examined one key factor in the process of deliberation, namely, perceived procedural fairness. Another important factor, perceived disagreement, which has played a mixed role in deliberation, was used to test its interactive relationship with perceived procedural fairness. A field study utilizing cross-sectional survey data showed...

This article applies a theoretical approach that focuses on the interaction between media, politicians, activists, and citizens to investigate the influence of social media during two recent general elections in Singapore. Taking into account the combination of authoritarian governance and popular elections in this city-state, this article utilizes...

There are billions of internet users in China, and this number is continually growing. This book looks at the various purposes of this internet use, and provides a study about how the entertainment-consuming users form into publics through the mediation of technologies in the era of network society. It questions how individuals, mediated by new inf...

Proceedings of workshop "Crowd Dynamics: Exploring Conflicts and Contradictions in Crowdsourcing ", a part of the 2016 Computer-Human Interaction Conference ISSN 1861-4280

volume 13 , issue 2

There has been rapidly growing interest in studying and designing online deliberative processes and technologies. This SIG aims at providing a venue for continuous and constructive dialogue between social, political and cognitive sciences as well as computer science, HCI, and CSCW. Through an online community and a modified version of world cafe di...

The Gezi Protests, an environmental sit-in that turned into a social movement in Turkey, is often compared to the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement with regard to the importance attributed to social media. This paper examines the role that social media played during the protests, with an emphasis on how trust was built and maintained among the pr...

This paper presents a theory-driven approach for the design of online deliberation platforms. We start with a brief overview of recent trends in deliberative research, capturing in particular 5 salient values of deliberative democracy namely-Impartial accessibility, Reasonable discourse, Epistemic value, Binding Decisions and Dynamicity. These...

This paper investigates Internet studies in two leading developing countries (i.e. China and India) and finds that the Chinese scholarly community relies on the discourse of liberation from the state as a form of critique, whereas Indian Internet studies question the discourse of modernization to contemplate about the success and failure factors of...

Motivated by the theoretical debate on whether everyday talk qualifies as part of the deliberative system, this study employed 2 middle-range concepts, perceived speech conditions and disagreement, to theorize the deliberativeness of everyday talk based on a proceduralist perspective. Perceived disagreement is incorporated into the definition of de...

Since the early stages of public opinion research, nonresponse has been identified as an important threat to the degree to which our sample can represent the population we are interested in. Researchers have documented a trend of declining response rate over the years. However, the nonresponse rate becomes a concern only when it introduces error or...

This study examines the relationships among learning variables, multitasking, and academic performance. Based on a survey with 176 college students, zero-order correlations were first tested between multitasking behaviors and grade. After identifying the relevant multitasking behavior (i.e., multitasking with laptops in lecture halls), the multitas...

This study examines the communicative grounds of democratic legitimacy in a hybrid political system, Singapore, by applying Habermas's theory of communicative action. The theory holds that citizens will be more likely to accept the rightfulness of a political order to the extent that they recognize its orientation as being communicative, oriented t...

This study utilized lab observations with 49 subjects to observe what users encounter and how users behave in real-time Internet news browsing. We analyzed users' selection of news platform, exposure to different topics of news content, and usage of different presentation elements by coding the screen videos. In addition, survey data with the subje...

This paper examines the quality of online political discussions from the perspective of deliberative democracy. Reason-giving and mutual respect are two important principles of deliberative democracy and, therefore, deemed indicators of the deliberative quality of online discussions. A content analysis of discussion threads about the 2004 US presid...

This article examines the relationship between youth, digital technology and civic engagement, within the context of the authoritarian democracy of Singapore. In-depth interviews with 23 young activists were conducted to provide information regarding the emergence of digital activism. The findings are presented in three parts. First, the article ex...

Henry Jenkins, in Convergence Culture, argues that “[p]opular culture may be preparing the way for a more meaningful public culture”. This article examines this argument in the context of online translation communities in China, which originated from fan groups interested in foreign comics, games, movies, and television dramas. Drawing on evidence...

This article utilizes two national representative surveys to examine the roles of political news use, political discussion, and authoritarian orientation in shaping political participation in two democratizing societies: Singapore and Taiwan. The regression findings show that in both societies, the effects of political news use and political discus...

This study tries to test the theory of uses and gratifications and the theory of situated action as explanations of multitasking in computer-mediated communication. Based on the data collected from an online survey (N = 234), we find that as hypothesized, different gratifications and situations are connected to different types of multitasking in di...

This article provides a focused analysis of perceived procedural fairness, including both its predictors and effects, within a context of moderated online deliberation. The article starts with a theoretical discussion about the concept, procedural fairness, against the background of deliberative democracy. Furthermore, the potential competitive rel...

The purpose of this work is to develop a theoretical framework to examine virtual community participation using the concept of subaltern public spheres. The theory of subaltern public spheres directs attention to the internal dynamics and external interaction of virtual communities. Internal dynamics first refers to the inclusiveness of participati...

This paper examines how participatory inequalities are (re)produced in eDeliberation, a practice that purposely fosters open, fair, and rational discussions among citizens over the Internet. Relying on the theoretical traditions of Bourdieu's capital and actor–network theory, this paper proposes that technical capital, along with social, economic,...

This paper examines interest-oriented vs. relationship-oriented social network sites in China and their different implications for collective action. By utilizing a structural analysis of the design features and a survey of members of the social networks, this paper shows that the way a social network site is designed strongly suggests the formatio...

Abstract Based on a media diary method, this study examines the prevalence and patterns of audience behaviors that combine media use withother media (i.e., multiple media use) or non- media activity (i.e., multitasking) among high school and college students. Consistent with previous research conducted with adolescents (e.g., Roberts,2000), this st...

This study investigates how multitasking interacts with levels of sexually explicit content to influence an individual’s ability to recognize TV content. A 2 (multitasking vs. nonmultitasking) by 3 (low, medium, and high sexual content) between-subjects experiment was conducted. The analyses revealed that multitasking not only impaired task perform...

Martin Fishbein, Ph.D., the Harry C. Coles, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Communication and Director of the Health Communication Program in the Public Policy Center of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, died on Friday, November 27, 2009, while traveling in London. He was 73 years old. Dr. Fishbein is the auth...

Deliberative democracy emphasizes the process of deliberation, i.e., an open, fair and reason-centered procedure during which various preferences are rationally exchanged and reflectively re-shaped. However, whether procedural rationality alone can grant the disempowered an equal status in deliberative democracy remains critical, especially conside...

What is the democratic potential of the Internet? Using subaltern public spheres as the theoretical framework, the Internet is expected to empower the subordinated social groups and extend the inclusiveness of democracy. Rear- Window to Movies is a Chinese online discussion group, which focuses on the topic of movies. I used this case to answer my...

The Internet has become one of the public spaces in which people discuss with each other about political issues. However, we know little about the quality of these discussions. Specifically, are online discussions deliberate? Deliberation is the core concept of Habermas' theory of public sphere. I examined the degree of deliberation of a Chinese on...

Thesis (M. Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 170-177).

In post-Handover Hong Kong, one sees an influx of cultural products from mainland China, from increased radio and television programming in Mandarin to the adoption of simplified Chinese characters in some publication venues. These are symbols of the `resinicization' of Hong Kong. Meanwhile, Beijingers proudly assert that the Chinese capital is the...