Evolution Of Network Public Opinion For Public Emergency

With the popularization and development of the internet, the ways of people obtain information have been changed. Nowadays, people can use their mobile terminals to access the internet wherever and whenever. Virtual and real world become so interconnected that the daily human behavior can be recorded stored and spread. The emergence of internet platforms let people getting more opportunity to express and share their opinions. The actual human social behaviors and relationships can be peered through the internet. With the diversification and facilitation of network communications, the national boundaries become more and more blurred; the internet has accelerated the process of globalization. At the same time, the human society has entered into a high risk period. The occurrence of various public emergencies has become a prominent issue for affecting the social stability, and during the current environment, network society and real society is deeply interconnected, the emergency network public opinion has been deeply involved in real life, which are formatting a new network public opinion field and influenced the trend of the events, for example:"Wenchuan earthquake","Hangzhou drag racing case","Hide-and-Seek event","7.23Wenzhou train crach","Guo Meimei event" and "Li Tianyi rape case" etc. The whole emergency network public opinion evolution process can be found in web news, weibo, forum and blog, and emergency network public opinion appears from the initial intermittently into frequently, which brought the unprecedented pressure for the government to respond and manage the emergencies. These phenomena affect the normal social order and arouse the government official, scholar and public concern.For the reason above, this paper analyzed the network public opinion evolution process in time of crisis. Throughout the study, the author first illustrated the inner factors which make these phenomena happened and answered how they work; after that, the author from macrocosmic to microcosmic dimension to analyze the evolution process. At the end, the author provided the suggestions for the government to guide and manage the network public opinion..Except the introduction, conclusion and prospect, this paper can be divided into other five parts: In the first part:the author systematically reviewed the whole theories and methods of netwok public opinion and summarized the existing research findings. Then the relevent concepts are defined, the feature, type, subject, object and information flow were generalized. And the research methods were introduced.In the second part the author dicussed the current theroies of public opinion. And the new information communication modes which used to illustrate the emmergency network information diffusion process in the network media, network organization and social network were proposed respectively in this chapter, then the role which network media, network organization and social network played in public emmergency were summarized. After that the interactive relationship between different information flows were eleborated.In the third part:this paper analyzed the network public opinion about public health emmergency from meso demension. In this part, survival analysis method was used to analyze the online news which the author collected. The results show that in all kinds of public health emmergencies, the shortest sustained time of online news reported was about the enviornment polution event and the infectious dieases event had the longest sustained time. The main factors which affect the sustained time of the online news reporting include the event type, the type of liability subject, impact scope, affected population, lethality and the amount of the network reports. At the end of this chapter, from the microcosmic view, using the focus event framework to analyzed the impact of the mass media and network media for the "Inferior Capsule Event", as well as their impact on public decision making.In the fourth part:the author analyzed the network public opinion about accidental disaster. By using the survival analysis methods to analyze the online accidental disaster news, the results showed that among all kinds of accidental disaster, mine accidental had the longest sustained time of online reporting, on the contrary the explosion accident had the shortest sustained time. Subsequent studies show that the main indicators which affect the sustained time of the online news reporting included the following:the type of liability subject, economic losses, death toll, injured people and rescue difficult. Then from the microcosmic view, the author toke the "7.23Wenzhou Train Crash Event" as a focus event, by using the method of focus event framework, to analyze the impact on the focus even through mass media and network media and their impact on public decision making.The fifth part discussed the role which government, media, opinion leader and public play in network public opinion of emergency. To ensure the sound development of network public opinion of emergency, first, government should improve the management mechanism for network public opinion, build up the authoritative information release system, and develop the effective measurements for network rumor. Second, media should urge the government to publish the information to the public timely, guarantee the authority and accuracy of the information in the reporting process, meanwhile, maintain the core values and embody the humanistic care. Third, opinion leader should identify and interpret the crisis information correctly, give appropriate suggestions and practice what they preach. Last but not least, government should not neglect to train the public’s sense of reason.Finally, this dissertation is one of the achievements and component of "Study on the emergency decision support system for smart city"(Code NO:13&ZD173), which is granted by the Major National Social Science Foundation of China.