Frame Construction Of Online Collective Actions

In the new century, with the transcendent development of virtual information technology, network functions as a social safety especially since the popularity of media, online collective actions are on the rise. This phenomenon attributes to China’s macro-political opportunity structure, also to the Internet’s anti-control capability, and the awakening of civil consciousness is an indispensable factor as well.From the perspective of case analysis, through the observation of Lanzhou Water benzene poisoning case, what could be noticed is that online collective actions break the limit of time, space and class, people organized in a form of "free talk". In cyberspace, a mechanism of interactive discourse and free spreading is formed. From the changing development of network comments in terms of the Lanzhou event, online collective action is a process from collective approval to emotion mobilization and afterwards public expression. The collective identity constitutes the actors, as "we", imagination of "the others" constructs a clear object which collective action are against. Together they form the basis of the framework of collective action.Online collective action, in a sense, is a kind of speech in cyberspace, in which emotion plays a crucial role, especially for the construction of the framework of collective action. Psychological factors such as discontentment and threat constitute a part of the social emotions. It is a collective identity, expression of emotion fill the process of constructing framework of collective action. In the internet era, with the technological platform of virtual space, community participation and enthusiasm for collective action have been greatly improved; actors through emotional speech in cyberspace form the shared collective cognition and emotion, through which the framework of collective action is constructed.