Page 221 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 7. The Yihuang incident

Figure 52. Attitudes towards the Weibo ‘live broadcast’.
To further investigate people’s perception of the Yihuang incident as a social
event, the survey contained a question asking whether the netizens will continue to pay
attention to cases like this that concern people’s livelihood in China or not (Figure 53);

41% of the respondents would like to follow the case but only passively receive infor-
mation through traditional media or internet media, while 33% would like to follow the
case actively by searching for relevant information themselves. However, a different

attitude is demonstrated by media practitioners. Around a quarter of the respondents
looked at social events which related to people’s livelihood in the same way as normal
news without special feeling, and no one tended to ignore such information.

Figure 53. Attitudes of continuing to participate in social events.

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