Toward discourse involution within China’s Internet: Class, voice, and social media

Despite scholarly concern regarding the online discussion in China’s cyberspace, research tracing the trends in discourse expression on social media remains scant. Revolving around the concept of discursive power, this study explicates how the voices of different social classes have been represented and expressed in social media during the past decade. Employing longitudinal content analysis on class-based voice in 2009 ( n = 1374) and 2018 ( n = 25,330), the results demonstrate that online discussion in China’s social media has displayed a trend for “discourse involution,” where the increasing appropriation of the Internet among different social classes results in a continued divide of the discursive power in cyberspace. We argue that this discourse involution is achieved through the asymmetry of discursive expression, centralization of voice representation, and polarization in the emotional expression online. The study contributes to the current debate on the social effects of online discussions using a discursive and class-based approach.