Zheng, Ken;
(2025)
The Backstage of Social Media: High Tech, the Aspirational Generation, and China's Big Factory.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Based on an ethnographic examination of one of China’s most prominent Internet corporations, this thesis presents the backstage practices involved in the production of social media platforms and algorithms that are generally hidden from the public. The thesis enables an assessment of the many factors involved, including organizational structure, quantification methods, various IT discourses, the people employed by the company and their relative contributions to platform creation. This study specifically examines the role of technical jargon, tools, and discourse in shaping the practices and ethos of these IT professionals. Each chapter explores how the actualization of a distinct technical model is mediated by local values and characteristics of Chinese society, while also documenting the discrepancies, slippages, and unintended consequences in actual practice. For example, developers claimed to improve the technical efficacy of recommendation systems but impose their own cultural references in the design process. Through many similar cases, the thesis creates a circularity, showing how technical language and social backgrounds produce the individuals who produce the technology. By proposing "backstage ethnography" that traces the social implications of digital technology back to its design processes, this thesis demonstrates that social media is not merely an entanglement of humans and technology. It reveals how Chinese IT professionals are positioned in various roles, such as designers versus developers within corporate structures that prioritize numerical growth in user engagement through the OKR system. It also illustrates how they materialize an “informatic cosmology” through platform design and internalize the growth mindset embedded in agile development models by changing their demeanour and subjectivities, which align with the state's goals for national economic development. Furthermore, it highlights the broader societal forces that influences the designing process including the one-child policy, political climate, and the AI hype in China.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | The Backstage of Social Media: High Tech, the Aspirational Generation, and China's Big Factory |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Anthropology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10215933 |
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