The Commonality Change In The New Media Period: The Reconstruction Of The Public Sphere By The Internet's Transformation

Up till June 2008, the number of netizens in China has surpassed the United States, reaching 235 million, due to which China has owned the largest number of Internet users in the world. From the angle of the number of netizens, new media, especially the Internet, have gradually become a widespread media nationally. Meanwhile with the development of web-based new media technology and the application of these media, people consider it from a trend into a way of life, that is, we have been accustomed to release and accept information, communicate and comment through various media, such as mobile phone, Internet, digital TV. Similar to traditional media, mass media including Internet is an institutionalized social communication for the most extensive commonality with a great impact. The common feature attributes to its important social characteristic—commonality, which is a target it is supposed to reach as a"social instrument". Under the form of traditional media, even if considering the concept of media control as official discourse is widely accepted, the discussions on many public issues have never stopped. In the new media era, the freedom, which is scarce in traditional media, provides the opportunity for the further development of commonality. Recently, new media has played a subtle role as a place and way of communication in discussion on public issues. We find from cases, such as South China Tiger event, Carrefour boycott, that with the spread of many significant social public events through new media, new development has derived from it and the final consequence has been influenced. From what has been discussed above, it is difficult for us to imagine the initial stage of recent media, like net media in traditional media era. It is safely said that non-traditional media has a rather greater impact than ever before, especially to reconstruct the modern social commonality.After a research of the connotation of commonality, this paper reviews the its features in different development stages of mass media and analyses a set of problems existing in public theoretical application under the traditional media. On the basis of research about the features of the net-based new media, this paper probes the new possibility of commonality supplied by new media and new problems, and how to solve these problems under the transition in net media application concept. What is more, how the public sphere is gradually reconstructed in sharing media reality. Media organization takes an important role in the whole social structure, so reform in network communication is not just confined in this area, but it has become an indispensable motive force of the advance of modem society in wide public sphere and improved civil society. In order to amply this positive effect on social development and reform, public powers representing government should be fully aware that healthy and energetic civil society is vital to the development of the whole society and we ought to make use of transition of network media in order to emancipate the mind, adjust policies, reform management method, promote public sphere's development in net and bring positive effect into play. At the same time, as the delegates of civil society, nongovernmental organizations should seize the opportunity of transition to fight against the great variety of interest groups and in the view of practice, to expand public sphere's real function and finally get away from traditional media and get trapped in the initial stage of network media.