Study On The Social Function Of The Media Opinion Leaders In The We-media Age

As one of the classical concepts of communication, the definition of opinion leaderwas originally developed by Paul Lazarsfeld in his two levels of communication theory.Opinion leader refers to the active media user who is often provides others withinformation and also influence others in interpersonal communication. They play anintermediary and link role in mass communication, by which their information arediffused to the audience, thus, information transmission’s two steps of flow model areformed.Opinion leaders increasingly active in we-media and microblog. They havebecome an important factor affecting the audience psychology and behavior, promotingthe trends and development of the public opinion. This paper selects four influentialmicro-blog’s opinion leader as the object of study, combines with communication,sociology and other related theories, use the literature research method, content analysisand case analysis as research method to investigate their function and behavior in thepublic event. This thesis aims to reveal the social function of opinion leaders. Based onthe above research, the author also criticizes the shortcomings of opinion leaders andputs forward some suggestion to promote the development of micro-blog’s opinionleaders.