A Study Of The Role-Playing Phenomenon In Blog Spaces

This dissertation presents both theoretical and empirical analysis of the role-playing phenomenon in the blog spaces.We first studied the different theories about role-playing and their origins, and then used them to analyze and compare the differences between blog spaces and ordinary Internet spaces in the information structure and information intercommunication mode. Then we concluded that the role-playing phenomenon could exist in blog spaces owing to the integrity and relative authenticity of the individuals, as well as the continuous reconstruction and re-confirmation of their images.In order to verify this assumption, this thesis designed the experiments done to analyze the HeXun blogs. First we composed datasets representing the function and position of the blogs with some of the different information available in the blog spaces. Then we used automated text classification and vector space model to evaluate the semantic similarities between the blogs; besides, we used social network analysis and complex network analysis to see the social structure's similarities between the bogs. We measured the correlations between the two groups of results and detected that there were significant correlations between the results. So we concluded that we can find a role-playing phenomenon in the blog spaces.Meanwhile, this thesis also analyzed some characteristics of the content and structure of Chinese blog spaces such as the topological structure of the blog spaces,the evolution mechanism of the blogospheres,the topic distribution of Chinese Blogs and the correlations between these topics. The results are listed below: the complex network, which has been established on the common relationships between users of these blogospheres, accords with scale-free network, and its evolution can be simulated by a modified BA model; a few blogs which join massive groups may greatly influence the degree distribution of the whole network and cause a huge tail; the topic distribution of Chinese blogs remains relatively single. Generally speaking, in a given blog, most of the articles belong to the same category. It is now proved that the blog network, no matter it was established on common interests or social relationships, exhibits both small-world and scale-free properties.