Page 244 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Feasibility Study of New Media Technology
on Constructing Online Public Sphere

cal cost. It further extends the space in which rumours are spread (Ding, 2012).

Psychological factors can be interpreted from two perspectives. From the stand-
point of service providers, commercial companies may intentionally ignore the spread
of rumours or even promote their dissemination for profit considerations. From the
standpoint of the rumourmonger, creating and spreading rumours helps gain social at-
tention, which gives a sense of satisfaction. Secondly, for the pursuit of profit, they are

willing to make fake news to fulfil their personal goal. As for the audience, people tend
to choose and receive the information that they care about. However, such negligence
in selecting information may be taken advantage by rumourmongers. In the Yihuang

incident, the initial statement was ‘mother of the Zhong family burned herself and
jumped off the building’ (Kdnet, 2010). However, it turned out to be a quilt that had
been burned. Many audiences on Weibo believed the initial rumour and forwarded the
information.
The ‘grassroots’ feature of Weibo has changed the culture in content generation.

Prior to the rise of We Media, ‘elite culture’ had the leading role in content generation
and consumption. Only the ‘selected’ qualified ones could create, distribute and access
information. Weibo became popular because it embraces the general public’s partic-

ipation by creating a public culture – everyone is provided with a microphone. The
public culture enables people to fight against the mainstream media, and to change the
inequality in the rights of speech and information acquisition. They are eager to find the
dark and opaque information when a social event takes place. Because of the layered
censorship system in traditional media, Weibo gradually became the first source that

disseminates information of a social event. Without the investigation and validation
procedure in traditional media, Weibo users have to rely on their own knowledge to
judge the authenticity of distributed information, which leads to a common situation

that lots of rumours are accepted by Weibo users (Yang and Zhang, 2010). Reposting
and commenting of the rumours further promote the spread of rumours, which increas-
es the difficulty in making judgement for Weibo users.

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