When a Bridge Becomes Unfindable: Algorithmic Erasure, Vernacular Heritage, and Community Consciousness in Heshan’s Gulao Water Town, China
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.71204/q0csz648Keywords:
Algorithmic Erasure, vernacular heritage, Digital Findability, Platform Visibility, Search Pollution, Gulao Water Town, Stone Slab Bridges, Community ConsciousnessAbstract
Digital heritage projects often assume that putting cultural materials online improves public access. The case of Heshan’s Gulao Water Town complicates that assumption. Its stone slab bridges, once part of the everyday infrastructure of a water-based settlement, remain physically present and digitally traceable, yet they are difficult to encounter as heritage. Based on a theory-driven interpretive case study, this study combines a multi-platform visibility audit, official and tourism texts, local media narratives, field materials, and a supplementary survey of 221 respondents. It introduces algorithmic erasure to describe a condition in which vernacular heritage is not removed from digital platforms but becomes functionally unfindable through platform ranking, framing, query matching, and engagement-driven visibility. The audit identifies three mechanisms. First, thin presence: the Baidu Baike entry for Dian Tiandeng Bridge had only 386 total views at the time of audit. Second, framework misalignment: across major platform results, the bridges were mainly presented as scenery, tourism, or leisure content rather than as cultural heritage. Third, search pollution: searches for the specific name “Dian Tiandeng Bridge” returned large proportions of homonymous auction, entertainment, violent historical imagery, or unrelated content, with pollution rates of about 80% on Xiaohongshu and 68.4% on Douyin. On Douyin, polluted content attracted roughly 30.4 times more visible engagement than heritage-relevant content. Survey evidence further shows a gap between general support for heritage protection and concrete knowledge of the bridges. The study contributes to critical heritage studies and platform studies by conceptualising search pollution as a mechanism of heritage marginalisation and by showing that heritage protection in the platform age must include not only the preservation of stones and stories, but also the governance of the pathways through which people arrive at them.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Guangming Gao, Yushan Li, Xiaoxin He, Yunfei Lin, Musen Wang (Author)
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