I am a PhD student in Communication and Media at the Institute of Communication Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I hold an MA Degree in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University. I am a digital media scholar interested in how digital technologies shape participation and inequality across digital society, from individual experience to online communities and platform structures.
My work has appeared in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Game Studies, Media International Australia, and the Asian Journal of Communication. I am a recipient of the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship and multiple Top Paper awards from the NCA (2022, 2023, 2025) and AEJMC (2023). I currently serve as Student and Early Career Representative for the Game Studies Division of the International Communication Association.
Why These Questions
Digital technologies are often described as engines of progress. New platforms promise creativity, connection, and endless possibilities for communication. Yet the benefits of technological change are rarely distributed evenly. Some people gain new opportunities through digital systems, while others find themselves excluded from them.
This tension is what drives my research questions. I am interested in how digital technologies shape who is able to participate, whose voices are recognized, and whose experiences are dismissed or ignored. These dynamics often become visible in everyday online interactions, where technological differences, social norms, and community expectations shape how people relate to one another.
Much of my research explores these issues through gaming environments. Games provide a vivid setting in which technological conditions, social interaction, and digital participation intersect. They make visible how people encounter new technologies, how communities form around them, and how inequalities can emerge within these spaces.
Games were the starting point of my research journey, not its destination. They opened a path for me to think about broader questions of digital participation and inequality. By studying these environments, I seek to understand how technological systems shape belonging, opportunity, and everyday social life in the digital age.
Why Me
I grew up in Chongqing, a city that often feels like a glimpse into the future. Skyscrapers rise from the mountains, trains pass through residential buildings, and roads and playgrounds appear on the rooftops of large structures. Living in such a city made technology feel both ordinary and extraordinary. It was simply part of daily life, yet it constantly expanded my sense of what the future might look like.
My understanding of technology, however, was shaped just as much by experiences far from futuristic skylines. I have volunteered as a teacher in underserved communities in Thailand and rural China, where access to digital technologies can be limited and uneven. I have also spent time helping my grandparents learn how to use smartphones, try AI tools, and experience virtual reality and digital games for the first time. Watching their curiosity, and sometimes their frustration, reminded me that technological progress does not automatically reach everyone.
These experiences made me increasingly aware of the uneven ways technology enters people’s lives. Some people encounter it through powerful computers and immersive digital worlds, while others meet it through a shared phone or not at all. My research grows out of this contrast. I am interested in how digital technologies promise new possibilities while simultaneously producing new forms of inequality across regions, generations, and social positions.
A line from the Chinese writer Lu Xun has stayed with me for many years. He wrote that the infinite distance and countless people are all related to us. It reminds me that technologies are never abstract systems. They shape the lives of real people in different places and communities. This belief continues to guide my interest in studying digital inequality and participation in a global context.
How I Study Them
My research combines approaches from media psychology, digital media studies, and platform research to understand how people experience and negotiate digital technologies in everyday life. Because digital participation unfolds across multiple levels, I use different methods to explore these dynamics from complementary perspectives.
At the individual level, I conduct experiments and survey studies to examine psychological processes such as trust, empathy, stigma, and attitudes toward emerging technologies. These methods help me understand how people perceive and respond to digital systems.
At the community level, I use thematic analysis and digital discourse analysis to study how users describe their experiences and interact with one another in online environments. This allows me to examine how legitimacy, participation, and technological differences are negotiated within digital communities.
At the industry and platform level, I analyze how technological infrastructures, economic models, and platform structures shape participation and interaction in digital environments.
By connecting these levels of analysis, my work seeks to understand how psychological experience, social interaction, and platform structures together shape participation and inequality in digital society.
Nansong Zhou 周楠淞 