Network Literacy Research Of Chinese College Students Opinion Leaders

As the number of online community users and the user viscosity increasing, the online community can not be seen just as a kind of entertainment applications, it also leads to the formation of public opinion, as well as the citizens' participation in political affairs. Online opinion leaders play significant roles in the formation and guidance of public opinion. Among all the internet users, college students are the most active ones. They have strong commitment to the society, actively participate in public affairs, pay close attention to current events, and take active parts in public affairs'discussion as well. As a result of this, it is necessary to carry a study on the college student opinion leaders of the online community. The research focuses on the network literacy of college student opinion leaders.The author compared all the aspects of network literacy between opinion leaders with un-opinion leaders of Chinese college students in online community, mainly used questionnaire survey to obtain data, supplemented by interview and literature research for further explanation.Self-designating techniques was adopted to filterd out college students opinion leaders in online community, basing on the criterions of their influence and opinion seeking level. On the basis of classification, the author compared the differences of the network literacy of two groups, including the typy of internet communities they participate, the participation level of internet communitiy, the evaluation of online community, the information processing of online community, the internet knowledge, media exposure habits, online community efficacy and online public affairs participation. The Independent-Sample T Test was also used to analysis all the scores of the two groups.The research results go as following:a) College students are more active in the SNS networks (such as renren.com) than in the anonymous forum(such as tianya.cn and mop.com), and there are more opinion leaders in SNS networks, while more un-opinion leaders in anonymous forum.b) Opinion leaders evaluate higher of online community than un-opinion leaders, and learn more knowledge from it in addition.c) Both of opinion leaders and un-opinion leaders show high level of information processing ability, while opinion leaders are more proactive in verifying information.d) Compared to un-opinion leaders, opinion leaders expose to web media more frequently. However, the two groups do not show any significant differences in the master degree of internet knowledge. e) There is still one point to be noticed that, opinion leaders appear more concerned with public affairs and act more proactively on them in online community than un-opinion leaders.