Page 218 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere
P. 218
Feasibility Study of New Media Technology
on Constructing Online Public Sphere
to offer a help, or that they may have encountered such incidents themselves, hence
they think the Yihuang incident relates to their own interests and feel like they are part
of the case.
However, there is also an irrational side of online public participation via Wei-
bo. As seen from the data, there are 31.80% and 30% of the respondents respectively
chose the options of ‘resistance emotion towards the government’ and ‘satisfy personal
curiosity’. The first motivation is because the Chinese government does not have a sus-
tainable satisfactory performance in such demolition cases, and violent demolition has
often occurred over the last three decades. Negative emotion has accumulated to a high
level in Chinese society. Therefore, when people learned about the Yihuang incident on
the social networking service platform, they intuitively get involved to forward infor-
mation and comment on the incident before validating its authenticity.
Figure 50. Forms of public participation in the Yihuang event.
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