Internet Discourse In Local Social Contention A Case Study Of The People, Southcn And Sina Weibo

Social contention embodies the power relation between citizens, society and nation in contemporary China, and reflects the conflicts of interests in nation reform. With the advent of social media era, Local social contention tends to transfer from the streets to the Internet. How could the Internet exert influences on the interest game and power struggle in those contentions? It is a hot topic in current communication study.Nevertheless, there exists a level division in the internet discourse on local social contention, which consists of central media, local media and the local public. Using the method of content analysis and interviewing, and Taking examples of the People, Southcn and Sina Weibo, We can find that Weibo, representing local users, focuses on contention community construction and specific struggle demands; the Southcn has more local concerns, focusing on the overall local interests; while the People discourse ascends to social community construction, attempting to employ it as a means to build social consensus.The discourses of the three media on local social contention reflects the power levels of reality in the Internet, which respectively represent the willpower of nation, local government and the public. The interaction between the three reflects the discourse mechanism as follows:to begin with, the Internet create a "Imagined Pressure", which makes its power level pattern different from the reality and even improve the possibility for discourse narrators to get rid of the original power structure:On one hand, depending on the supports from cyber citizens, media could balance the position between ideology and news professionalism by using discourse strategies; on the anther hand, by empowering themselves, the public could transgress their power levels to exert influences on local government. Secondly, the achievement of local social contention results from multi-party discourses. Since there no contradiction exists between different intensions of different narrators, so they can get a possible "win-win" result by specific discourse strategies. Furthermore, there is not a drastic power conflict between these narrators, whose discourses, constrained by their levels, are consistent and function separately but corporately in some ways. Generally speaking, in the Internet situation, different discourse construct different levels of realities, but these realities themselves are not contradictory. In a macroscopic view, multiply realities construct the field domain power and integral discourse space influencing the events, finally to shape the direction and result of social contentions.