Page 142 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Feasibility Study of New Media Technology
on Constructing Online Public Sphere

care.

• The internet as a social space has generated potential that no previous media
form was able to achieve, as it removes boundaries of time and geography in
terms of information sharing.
• The internet gathers people with diverse experience and arguments, which
accumulates the collective social capital. In return, it presents more opportu-

nities for public participation in new ways.
For these reasons, ICT-mediated participation can be feasible in cyberspace and
may become a negotiable method between the public and the government. In recon-

structing the Sun Zhigang incident, to investigate the interaction between the public
and media (both traditional and new media), three periods should be discussed. At first,
in March 2003 when Chen Feng (a journalist for the Southern Metropolis Daily) was
trying to find news stories, he joined the discussions with other journalists and media
professionals on Xici Forum and came across the story, his editor approved it and Chen

began to prepare coverage of related news. This indicates how a traditional press jour-
nalist makes use of the internet to get stories. Traditionally, it used to be very difficult
for citizens to attract the press’s attention to follow a normal person’s story – the public

has limited to the traditional media industry. However, in the Sun Zhigang case, the
BBS/forums, a new and popular social networking site at the time, had fewer restric-
tions and a much wider readership than print media, and Sun’s story could be spread
widely and promptly. As a result, it is the forum that provided an online space for the
development of the Sun Zhigang case at the hands of the public, which finally made the

journalist pay attention to the incident and dig deeper into the Sun Zhigang case. It is
the first stage of how the case moved from new media (cyberspace) to traditional me-
dia.

Secondly, on April 25, the Southern Metropolis Daily first published a detailed
report on the death of Sun Zhigang which was picked up by other outlets and reached
the national stage until it became the stuff of daily headlines. These print media outlets
spontaneously collaborated with online media, such as Sina, Sohu, People’s Daily On-
line, and Xinhua Net and began to publish large-scale and follow-up reports.

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