新冠疫情自2019年末开始肆虐全球，与之相关的风险不断刺激着人们的敏感神经。作为中国进入社交媒体时代以来面临的首轮大规模健康危机，新冠疫情成为社交媒体平台上的热点议题，多元社会群体围绕新冠风险展开了积极的意义建构。在风险传播视角的指引下，本研究以中国新冠疫情应急期微博平台上百万级别语料作为分析对象，结合社会表征理论、议程设置理论来回答两大问题：不同社会群体围绕新冠疫情的社会表征结构为何？不同社会群体延循表征展开了怎样的互动？这两则问题紧扣社会表征理论的内在诉求，在关注多元表征共存的基础上进一步探索表征如何促成群体间沟通。分析结果被用以回应既存的风险传播格局是否契合理想的风险传播图景，以及这些结果将如何启迪中国社会的有效风险治理模式。以计算传播取向下的文本挖掘方法为依托，研究者首先遵照社会表征理论的结构化研究路径，使用语义网络分析法探索包括普通用户、认证个人、普通机构、行政机构、媒体、专业群体在内的六大社会群体之表征结构为何。其次，借助结构主题建模方法，在群体间比较的基础上得出各群体的表征偏好。接着，以议程设置理论为指导，依托时间序列分析方法检验了属性表征、情感表征在各群体间的互动态势，并进一步结合网络议程设置考察方法探寻各群体表征共现的相关关系。研究发现，围绕新冠疫情的表征涵盖“作为数字的新冠疫情”“作为情感的新冠疫情”“作为治理的新冠疫情”“作为新闻事件的新冠疫情”“作为疾病的新冠疫情”“作为物质支持的新冠疫情”“作为社会干扰的新冠疫情”七大主要结构，显示出相关表征威胁与效能兼具、事实与情感并重的特质。群体间表征差异和互动检验之结果折射出普通用户对于风险威胁的重视并未获得其他群体的正向响应，社交媒体赋权下繁荣的形式参与和实质性的风险协商之间仍存距离。认证个人在属性表征、情感表征双维度皆扮演“意见领袖”角色，其在正负情感上的双向引导能力亟待重视。普通机构的宽阔视野与表征设置能力使其成为多元风险治理环境中的新兴行动者，其能动性需要在“国家-社会”关系情境中进一步发挥。媒体群体展示出对行政机构的高度依从，且丧失了在新闻事件表征上的固有优势，恰若欠缺引导力的滞后行动者。专业群体虽结合自身特质参与到相关的表征建构中，却未达成风险传播所需要的“知识转译”过程。
COVID-19 has ravaged human society since late 2019, posing considerable risks to mankind. As the first universal health crisis since China entered the social media era, COVID-19 triggered massive attention and became a hot button issue on social media platforms. Pluralistic social groups joined the meaning-making process around the COVID-19 issue, thus creating a diversified representation sphere. Enlightened by the risk communication perspective, the current study adopted social representation theory and the agenda-setting theory to analyze a large-scale social media corpus from the Weibo platform (N = 1,128,303) during the emergency period of COVID-19 in China. Two principal research questions are: 1. What were the primary social representation structures of different social groups toward COVID-19? 2. How did different social groups interact based on those social representations? The two questions echo the main tenets of the social representation theory, which aims to excavate how polymorphous social representations coexist and how the representations contribute to intergroup communication. The results of the questions helped researchers evaluate whether the existing risk communication landscape meets ideal risk communication principles and how they inform effective risk management in the future. Following text mining analytical strategies under the computational communication branch, firstly, this study examined primary social representation structures of each group by employing the semantic network analysis, which is consistent with the structural approach of the social representation theory. Secondly, structural topic models were built to detect the representation preference of every single social group. Thirdly, the agenda-setting theory served as a reference for uncovering the interaction of substantive representations and affective representations among social groups. Besides, network agenda-setting was incorporated to discover the correlations among different social groups’ representation co-occurrence.The results demonstrated that social representations of COVID-19 risk involve seven primary structures, including COVID-19 as numbers, COVID-19 as emotions, COVID-19 as governance, COVID-19 as news events, COVID-19 as a disease, COVID-19 as material support, and COVID-19 as a social disturbance. Those structures consist of threat and efficacy, as well as the combination of facts and emotions. Findings regarding intergroup representation disparities and interaction disclosed that: 1. ordinary users’ attention to COVID-19 threats had not received other groups’ positive responses, indicating a tremendous gap between the seemingly prosperous formalized participation empowered by social media and the authentic deliberation of COVID-19 risks. 2. Authenticated individual users played the opinion leader role in substantive representations and affective representations, their leading ability in both positive and negative emotions calls for more scholarly attention. 3. The broad vision and representation setting power of ordinary organizations made them an emerging actor in nowadays diversified risk management context. However, their initiative needs to be motivated in the “state-society” setting. 4. Regarding media outlets, they were highly dependent on administrative institutions. Besides, they lost their inherent advantages in representing news events, making them a lagging actor without sufficient leading ability. 5. Although the professional organizations actively participated in the meaning-making process with their unique characteristics, there is still a long way to fulfill the “knowledge translation” objective, which is crucial in effective risk communication.
