Page 124 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Feasibility Study of New Media Technology
on Constructing Online Public Sphere

These BBS posts contained different content with varied purposes. Some of

them focused on disseminating accurate information about Sun’s case, and
some made great efforts in appealing for attention and public participation,
while others had posts written from a personal perspective to express feel-
ings and emotion. Memorial posts have kept appearing and prompted more
Tianya users to recall the case, reminding people to use history as a mirror for

evaluating government policy and performance. Compared with the afore-
mentioned web portals, the Tianya BBS can be considered as an online public
sphere in the sense that it has a relatively higher level of freedom as the con-

tent is directly generated by users.
This shows that the Sun Zhigang case is a milestone social event in China’s inter-
net age. Commercial and state-owned media sites have an extensive number of posts on
various aspects of the Sun Zhigang case. More importantly, the censorship system did
not raise any troubles for these posts. The topic of legitimate rights is rising on the me-

dia sites, which maintains the popularity of the Sun Zhigang case and it is continuously
discussed in the online communication space. This reflects the high level of spontane-
ous public participation and demonstrates the early phase of public sphere in China’s

cyberspace.

Easily accessible technology – the raised possibility of government-public communi-
cation

As discussed in the previous section, technological conditions are a vital factor in

the Sun Zhigang case. One noticeable advantage of ICT is that it enables an immensely
greater volume of information flow than other forms of media, and at a much lower
cost and faster speed (Bimber, 2003). With this insight, Tai (2006) pointed out that the
internet, as a new media format, compensates for the weaknesses of existing media

forms and fundamentally changes the types of conventional media, bringing new op-
tions to the market.
Shao, Lu and Wu (2012) stated that:
‘New media may function in breaking information asymmetry, offering alternative

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