Page 217 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 7. The Yihuang incident

From the standpoints of media professional, the dynamics of participating a social

event include two reasons: useful and interesting.
‘Useful refers to the effectiveness in appealing for help, e.g. safeguarding one’s
rights; interesting refers to a psychological need of being existent, one wishes
to find a sense of self-identification and self-achievement through participating
online activities, e.g. there are many grassroots “senior users” in Weibo and Zhi-

hu (Chinese version of Quora, a Q&A website) who wish to be the influential
accounts “Big V” (users with their identity verified and have a huge amount of
followers) or the intelligent group of the community, therefore, they use these two

sites as a platform to exhibit their knowledge to gain a sense of self-achievement
and even to gain some business opportunities’ (Interviewee 1) .
55
Figure 49 illustrates people’s motivations in engaging the Yihuang event. Accord-
ing to the survey result, 55.50% of respondents wanted to help more internet users to
understand the incident comprehensively. These respondents firstly got information

from the internet, then edited and forwarded the secondary information spontaneously,
which represents the communicator or disseminator of the microblogging fission effect.

Figure 49. Motivations of participating in the Yihuang event.
There were also 45.50% and 35.50% of respondents who believed that the motiva-
tion of their online participation was to feel sympathy for the Zhong’s family and want
55 Translation provided by the author.

201
201