Microbloger’s Social Circles, Values, And Forwarding Communication

“Social Circle” is the key concept in Simmel’s interpretation of society and groupdynamics, of which the pattern shift was deemed as an aspect of the modernization. Asa popular social media, the microblog sphere also comprises social circles, which arethe fundaments of microblog’s power in disseminating information. This paper opera-tionalized the individual structure of microbloger’s social circles as a feature of itsego-centric network, and studied its variance of overlap, namely the pattern shift from“concentric” to “intersecting” in term of Simmel’s theory. Microbloger’s “collectiv-ism-individualism” values were examined as the antecedent of the individual socialcircles’ overlap, while the probability of forwarding within microbloger’s ego-centricnetwork was examined as the consequence of the overlap in both overall and localperspectives. Meanwhile, the paper also examined the effects of microbloger’s “collec-tivism-individualism” values, as well as the shared interest topics, on the probability offorwarding. In order to analyze the microblogging data in large scale, this studyadopted probability sampling of microblogers’ ego-centric networks, and classified thetopics of forwarding texts by machine learning (topic modeling). Meanwhile, thisstudy combined survey and data mining, which jointed the psychological and beha-vioral data. Finally, research questions and hypotheses were answered and tested, whilefurther discussion and interpretation of the results were also presented.