Suchergebnisse

The internet provides a free and convenient platform for the public to obtain political information and participate in political life. Meanwhile, there occurs fierce confrontation of various values and ideologies, shaping a complicated and changeable field of public opinion. The strategies of civic participation and the generation of public opinion show quite different characteristics in such a mediatized society. This article aimed to study civic participation in Chinese cyberpolitics and to find its patterns and the logic behind it. Due to the natural advantage of the environmental issues in its commonality, the internet events in the last decade related to the PX (para-xylene) project were selected as the research object. This study used grounded theory as the method and conducted a cross-case analysis on the original data captured on Weibo&mdash ; one of the most popular social media sites in China. Finally, four patterns of civic participation in internet events were found and summarized, as well as the intervention and influence of media logic in different modes. However, it is political logic, rather than media logic, that reveals greater vitality in the civic participation of cyber deliberation. Mediatization does exist but is far from dominance. It has certain significance for the supervision and management of public opinion and the rational and harmonious development of civic participation in public issues.

The rise of the Internet brings up a debate about its role in eroding or strengthening national identity. Taking the perspective of media ecology, this article saw the Internet as a context and explored its impacts on social context in which national identity is constructed. Using the data from the World Values Survey (2010–2014), this article carried out multilevel analyses with 50,240 respondents in 36 countries. The results illustrate how online distribution of information, power, and freedom affects cognition, affection, and action of national identity. National identity is eroded by information distribution but is strengthened by power distribution. Power distribution and freedom distribution work together to neutralize and regulate the effects of information distribution.