Research On Information Sharing Behavior Of Friends Of Friendship

In the era of Web 3.0, a new revolution swept the world, the Internet reached its third climax, and Mobile Internet emerged as a new force. As the most representative standalone messaging app, WeChat has become a killer app whose integrated functions has greatly influenced information dissemination mechanism, transforming offline interpersonal relationships into a complex social networking map.In this map, sharing information serves as the channel for human communications and information dissemination.Sharing information redefines how information is produced, providing new methods to acquire, save and reinterpret information.Taking WeChat as a case study and applying the methodologies of communication studies, psychology and information science, this thesis aims to analyze information-sharing patterns in this era of mobile social networking. WeChat, the largest standalone messaging app in China, is used by 61.9% Chinese netizens, and 74.5% wechat users installed "WeChat Moments", a sharing platform.This thesis accomplishes literature review, designs questionnaire and arranges interviews to analyze the main features of information sharing in order to sparkle some new ideas and insights.The results show that:most WeChat users are highly educated and young people, female users are more inclined to share information than male users; it is widely believed that "Moments" is a social networking platform containing massive information; refreshing frequency is positively correlated to sharing frequency; stable sharing behaviors of individuals can be found; information content shared on WeChat is different from that on traditional social networking websites, with the former closer to daily life.This thesis uses Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to unravel the intrinsic motivation of information sharing and applies SPSS 19.0 to process data and analyze questionnaires. The results show that several postulated motivation factors (social networking and approval seeking) have positive correlation with the act of sharing information, and security concern is the only negative factor hindering people from sharing.