Drone delivery resistance: Analysing the formation and circulation of cultural image barriers against drones

Drone delivery is attracting growing public attention, yet the cultural meanings that shape resistance to its adoption remain poorly understood. Innovation Resistance Theory recognises image barriers as a significant obstacle to technology adoption, but it offers limited explanation of their cultural content and how they are expressed in public discussion. Analysing 2323 comments from ten purposively selected Reddit threads using thematic analysis informed by netnographic principles, this study identifies three cultural image barriers: warfare, dystopian future, and loot. These barriers form through associations with accessible and similar cultural artefacts and circulate through four discursive mechanisms: comparisons, jokes, brand disparagement, and imagined scenarios. The analysis links these meanings to interpretations of performance, physical, and privacy risks, as well as provisional moral concerns regarding trauma and militarisation. The latter two concerns involve speculation about distress among others exposed to warfare and unease about perceived military development or coercive uses of drone delivery. This study makes a significant contribution by extending the cultural interpretation of image barriers within innovation resistance theory, whilst also identifying questions for drone-delivery service design and community engagement.