Empowerment And Choice: A Study On Media Use Bias And Its Impact Of Urban Mobile Vendors

The emergence and use of any new media may bring about changes in the structure and relationship within the group.This study attempts to enter the group of mobile vendors from the perspective of communication,focusing on the construction of their social relations and the communication practice of broadening the social network and obtaining social capital through the use of media."Media" is the main perspective of this paper.This paper attempts to explore the changes that a new media technology brings to a group's life after it enters the group.The research mainly adopts the qualitative research method,follows the research path of "subject-practice",puts the research object into the specific situation to investigate the reasons for their media choice and the mode of their media use.The paper starts from the subtle and empirical phenomenon,pays attention to the communication practice such as inter personal communication and group communication.At the same time,the paper focuses on the interaction scenes and interaction modes with other groups,and then reveal the social relations,social networks of the mobile vendors,as well as the process of their social capital acquisition and self empowerment in urban life.In the introduction,this paper introduces the related concepts and defines the research object.In the first part,the author introduces the basic situation and social interaction of street vendors to present the social relationship and survival difficulties they are facing.The second,third and fourth chapter is the main part of this paper,which goes further along the idea of "media and new possibilities" : Firstly,it discusses whether the new media has provided new possibilities to the research objects;and what new possibilities,new relationships and abilities have been given to them by new media in the business scene,social scene and leisure scene.Secondly,it discusses how do they choose according to different situations when facing these new possibilities,and what are the reasons for their choices.Finally,the conclusion is drawn that the research objects' selective use of possibilities given by media has brought expansion to their social relations to some extent,but compared with the strong kinship,this expansion has little effect on the reconstruction of their social relations,and may deepen their inner circle.Their situational media use is mostly to meet the current business needs,or is the transplant of their original media experience.Their limited initiative makes it difficult for them to fundamentally fill the motivation gap of media use.At the same time,in the face of media empowerment,their preference of some functions also reduces their desire to integrate into the mainstream society to a certain extent.