On The Development Of Audience's Subjectivity In Internet Communication

The emergence of internet which has become an indispensable part of life is distracting the audience's love of television step by step for its distinctive feature, such as diversity, openness and interactivity. At the same time, the vigorous development of post-modernism and popular culture has fostered inimitable and larruping personality characteristics for audiences. With the combination of internet and the changing of cultural context, the audience opens up a virtual space which is far diffent from reality. And in the space, the audiences are neither passive recipients of information, as they are used to be in traditional mass media, nor objects which are regarded as commodity saled by media to erterprises. On the contrary, they have now changed over to active media users who search, modify, create and publish information by means of modern nachrichtentechnik. And their subjectivity develops rapidly on the basis of strong autonomy and creativity.On the theoretical foundation of communication, psychology and cultural studies, this paper takes the development of audiences' subjectivity in internet communication as the object of study, and makes a comprehensive and systematic research on its background, current situation and impact, combining with specific cases.The paper firstly carries out a macro analysis about the context and environment of audiences'subjectivity at three different angles of communication, cultural studies and psychology. It points out that the development of audiences'subjectivity in internet communication is a result of interior and external factors. The advancement of software and network technology reduces the difficulty and cost of using medium, which provides necessary external conditions. Meanwhile, the deconstructionism and consumerism coming from post-modernism, as well as the popular nature, duplicability and high participation of mass culture change the environment where the psychological mechanism plays, and bring out essential interior elements.Futhermore, the paper compares the different behavior of audiences in traditional mass media and in internet media, and analysizes specific network events which have aroused widespread social concern and strong social repercussions in resent years. Then the author puts fowards that the development of audiences'subjectivity experiences a long-term developing process, in which the audience has changed from passive recipient to initiative selector, then to active publisher, and finally to someone who seeks immediate interests through the use of information. In addition, the development is profoundly manifested in the enchanced ability of searching, processing and using information, which suggests that audiences, as well as communicators, grasp the psychological state accurately and use the mode of communication reasonally, in certain cultural context and communication environment.It is ture that the return of subject consciousness and the promotion of subjectivity are making the internet move close to'free market of idears', which is helpful to healthy media echology. However, because the function of 'gatekeeper' is weakening, there are much negative phenomenon in internet communication, including misleading and overflowing information. Although, the internet communication is both limited by some mechanical factors and under the control of technology, in the long term, improving audiences'media literacy is the most fundamental method to promote the subjectivity towards a more healthy way.