Power In Network Community

With the fast development of information technology and the vast popularization of internet type of life, the virtual internet community has become a very crucial platform for today’s inter personal interaction. Also, complying with this trend, the internet has gradually deconstructed the previous society mode and pushed us step into a whole new internet age; as well as causing an unexpectedly strong impact towards human civilization, creating a brand new internet civilization.Differing from the past studies, this paper is innovatively based on the sociology theory, utilizing the "Power Perspective" to analyze the power performance in the internet community, exemplified by Twitter. What is more, Foucault’s "Micro Power" theory is used in order to take a deep look towards twitter’s characteristics and power presentation. This study is believed to largely enrich the power theoretical study in sociology, and it can even offer instructive reference to the power management and policy regulation in the reality society.This paper is divided into six parts. The first part just introduces the question under the spotlight; relevant researches and the methodology used in this study are also introduced. The second part is about the research frame work briefing. It explicitly explains the studied object "Twitter", and assorts related theories towards the key word "Power". In the third, fourth and fifth parts, the paper examine the power presentation forms existing in different levels. The third part tries to position the Twitter’s macro power from economic and media aspects, and this is illustrated by the discussion of Twitter’s power body, power types and power relationship. The fourth part concentrates on one important display of power presentation-Conversation Power Switch. Besides introducing the relative theory and combining the Twitter features, this part mainly analyzes the conversation tools in Twitter. Through society heat incident analysis, and comparing the root society’s power presentation with the traditional administrative power, traditional media, this part tries to expose that, with Twitter’s arising, the switching of conversational power is happening, such as the public’s increasing power conversation, the expansion of intellectual elites’power conversation, and the weakening trend of governmental power conversation. The fifth part closely relates to the previous part, because with the growing of public conversation power, the supervision and suspect towards traditional administrative power have definitely been generated. In this part, study of internet community and Twitter is deepened with the theoretical supports from Jeremy Bentham and Foucault’s "Panopticon" theory. In the internet age, Foucault’s "Panopticon" way of regulation can be not only applied to the public, but also to the administrative power owner. And the supervision towards the power owner is more severe. The sixth part is a conclusion, reflecting the positive and negative functioning of power presentation and the power regulation. It also brings out the questions that need to be considered in the future studies.