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Chinese Face Culture and the Spiral of Silence on Website: A case of PeoPo

Based on the theory of Spiral of Silence from Noelle-Neumann, the main purpose of this research is to figure out internet users how to express their opinion
after evaluating opinion climate and whether the characters of the Internet make their opinion- expression arbitrarily. Moreover, this research focuses on Chinese ¡¥face¡¦ culture to examine the cultural context how to influence opinion- expression of internet users. This research chooses ¡¥PeoPo¡¦ citizen journalism platform as research field, and adopts in-depth interview to analyze the opinion- expression of 9 PeoPo citizen reporters. As for the research topic, it¡¦s concerned with the issue of village migration of Taiwanese aborigine after the disaster caused by Typhoon Morakot in 2009. Therefore, this research attempts to figure out the PeoPo citizen reporters¡¦ inner process of opinion- expression and the influence of Chinese face culture.
This research finds that the opinion-evaluation of internet users mainly rely on the Internet, and the fear of isolation that the spiral of silence theory emphasizes don¡¦t predict their willingness to speak up alone, but Chinese face culture does. Furthermore, the characters of the Internet don¡¦t prevent the spiral of silence effect. Although PeoPo not only accepts diverse viewpoints widely, but also inspires more citizens to voice local issues, the results show that actually PeoPo citizen reporters express their opinion with great pressure mostly lowering their willingness to speak up such as the foundation idea of PeoPo, reference group, threat of opposition, objective principle of journalism, and Chinese face culture. In sum, getting one¡¦s own way is discouraged on PeoPo; in other words, the characters of the Internet still unable to relieve PeoPo citizen reporters of speaking up.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0729110-155621
Date29 July 2010
CreatorsHsiao, Ru-chun
ContributorsBing-chiang Jeng, Feng-yang kuo, Hong-zen Wang
PublisherNSYSU
Source SetsNSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
LanguageCholon
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0729110-155621
Rightsoff_campus_withheld, Copyright information available at source archive

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