Audience Participation As Reflected In Weibo Hot Comments On Public Event

Weibo, as a representative of the new media, distinguishes itself from traditional media because of its participatory and interactive characteristics. The audience of Weibo can participate in public events on Weibo more actively because they are given more powerful discourse right than traditional media’s audience who are relatively passive. However, the inequality of discourse rights among different Weibo users hampers the audience participation in public events on Weibo. This inequality reflects in the great disparity of discourse rights between ordinary Weibo users and users with a "V" title such as media, celebrities and renowned organizations. Under this circumstance, audience participation can be realized through audience leaving comments on heated tweets posted by users with a "V" title. Thus, a large number of comments aggregate under those tweets and become a strong current of information. Besides, the function of "like" on Weibo comments gives users the rights to vote for opinions they agree with, making heated comments emerge as the representative of the mainstream of public opinion and influence the development of public events. Therefore, Weibo comments, as an important way for audience to participate in public events, have great research value.The scandal of Prof. Wu of Xiamen University was chosen as the study case as it was a heated representative of public events. This paper conducted a content analysis on the Weibo comments related to the event.This paper analyzed the hot comments on the scandal of Prof. Wu of Xiamen University and brought up two major research questions:1. Did the emergence of hot comments promote the market of public opinions or empower the spiral of silence?2. As the representative of the mainstream of public opinion, did the hot comments embody rational discussion or emotional expression?In order to answer these questions, this paper conducted the analysis from the following angles:the characteristics of comments’ aggregation, the frame, agenda, standpoint, rational and irrational expression of the comments. This paper reached a conclusion that the introduction of hot comments facilitated the development of market of public opinions, but the spiral of silence still existed in part. Hot comments, as the representative of advantaged opinions, were more of rational discussion rather than emotional expression. Based on these findings, this paper discussed audience participation in meaning construction, agenda setting, audience’s free expression of standpoints and their help in promoting rational discussion, and reached the conclusion that Weibo comments, as an important way of audience participation, helped realize more active and effective audience participation through promoting the expression of various opinions, the forming of consent and more rational discussion. Although Weibo comments also has the deficiency of being superficial, partial and emotional, it helps the audience participate more actively in public events on Weibo and have a great impact on the development of public events.Currently, most studies focused on users with a "V" title and ignored the participation of ordinary audience. This is a deficiency in this research field. Besides, the large amount of comments becomes a major difficulty because they are hard to handle in the research. The few existing researches on Weibo comments are usually based on a small amount of comment samples and lacking in comprehensive and systematic analysis. Now, the function of "like" on Weibo comments and "hot comments" comes into being and provide a possibility for the research. This paper entered into this research field through "hot comments" and studied Weibo comments from various perspectives and conducted a more systematic research to gain an insight into the audience participation in public events.