Study On Rumor

Rumor is as old as human civilization. As the development of human society, both the probability of its occurrence and the problems it reflects are not decreasing but increasing. Therefore, the practical significance of its research is not weakened, but strengthened. Then, how can we do our study about such a social phenomenon? In my study, the rumor was taken as a process and result of social interaction between people. However, the ties of this interaction is not "consanguinity relation" viewing from Anthropology or "interest" viewing from Economics, but "discourse" viewing from Philosophy of Language. In another words, the logic of rumor is presented by discourse. Because the rumor would lose its foundation for existence and source of energy, if there's no longer people's discourse. Therefore, the interpretation of the rumor in this study is actually a kind of discourse analysis of the social interaction. Then, how do perform this analysis?It is mainly investigated from four aspects of the people's discourse interaction of the rumor:Firstly, no subject no discourse. It must be studied that the subject who is speaking in rumor? Persons in the real life always exist in the different networks of discourse, thus forming a complex group of subjects. The so-called "Kind words to gentleman, wily words to evil" is a popular description of the complexity of the discourse subject. Moreover, the complexity of discourse subject implies that the subjects are never the same, but the split. This split is presented in two dimensions: internal and external dimensions. The internal dimensions include "the self-conscious" and "the other-unconscious". So we must pay our attention not only to understand the subject viewing from "I think therefore I am", but also to the impact of unconscious when subject interact with discourse. The external dimensions include "The Presence of the 'Speaker'" and "The Absent Existence of the'Other'". Generally, the former express their intention by the latter, the latter strengthen their discourse power by the former. In addition, as the persons in the society, the subject of discourse is hardly influenced by the social network when they interact with each other. Secondly, discourse interaction must have focus. In a rumor, people's discourse interaction is always around a person or a matter. In chapter four, focus people and focus events of rumors, which existed in the history and reality are analyzed with statistical methods. The references about history is coming from 26 history books in china and 9 history books in western, and the reference about the reality is coming from the news website of Google and Baidu(1.1-6.13/2007). And the basic conclusion of this analysis is that the focus of people and event in rumor can be divided into two categories: One is those who have a strong ability to control social resources and thus have enough discourse power. Those people are majority of the focus in rumor. Another is those who were marginized by society and thus they have no discourse power. And they are minority of the focus in rumor. The ordinary people are hardly the focus of rumor. Either those who have enough discourse power or have no discourse power, they all present themselves by negative way, which is generally passive for the former and active for the latter. Therefore, the focus people in rumor always reflect the bipolar of the social structure from the horizontal dimension and the social change in different periods from the vertical dimension. And the focus event is either a distortion of reality or a prediction of the future. In this condition, "truth" becomes a rhetorical method in rumor. Because the truthfulness is close together with discourse groups and the truth is actually what the discourse groups take as. In this condition, rumor is also as a kind of self-fulfilling means. That is to say, something which does not exist becomes a reality by rumors. Either the analysis of focus people or focus event can make us be far form the disturbance of ideology and feel the power of the real, detail and various social structures. In addition, during the analyzing the focus, we find a lot of rumor that its "shadow" can be discovered in history. This indicates that the social memory of a group is very important in rumor.Thirdly, discourse interaction always manifests some forms. According to the standard whether it has variations in discourse, the rumor form can be divided into two types, which are variant form and non-variant form. Why there're variations and non-variant? We think that the media bias should not be underestimated. From the view of discourse, spoken media is easiest to make discourse vary, so it has variant bias. On the contrary, printing media is hardest to make the discourse vary, so it has non-variant bias. And, the effect of electronic media is between the spoken media and printing media, its bias is the average. After discussing the main cause of variation of discourse in rumor, A typical rumor case of "Chinese is murder", which spread during the largest campus shooting in American history, is analyzed with the social network analysis method. We find that the social structure behind the discourse form of rumor has the characteristics of "small-world" and "scale-free" simultaneously. And we also find there are two important "critical point". If there's no the two "critical point" in a rumor, the speed of spread and energy of rumor will be badly weakened. Moreover, we also discuss the importance of social situation in the discourse form of rumor.Finally, discourse interaction is always initiated by some reasons. The discourse reason of rumor spreading is analyzed in chapter six. We find rumor spreading has a bidirectional discourse projection processes from the perspective of discourse: one is from the mind to the world (society); the other is from the world (society) to the mind. Why it is not unidirectional but bidirectional? Because there is an adaptation between the world (society) and the mind according to the theory of speech acts raised by Searle, the rumor is just the means for people to acquire the adaptation between the world (society) and the mind. When do people use the means of rumor? We think that there are two special conditions: "over-order" and "over-disorder". Both of them usually restrict the ability of discourse for people, and then form a strong tension between speech and action of discourse. When it reaches a critical point, such as totalitarian authority or social rebellion, serious imbalance occurred between mind and world (society), and the ability of discourse was further weakened simultaneously, people have to use rumor to acquire a balance between mind and world (society). In addition, we found that ideology is important in a lot of rumor cases, because the basic trend of ideology is to maintain social order.