Analysis Of Populism In Network Communication

Populism take people as essence, and emphasize the values and ideals of thecommon people. Since Populism was born in the U.S. and Russia in nineteenthcentury, it wandered like a ghost in the different political and cultural fields ofdifferent countries in different historical periods by various forms. With thepopularity of the Internet and the rapid rise of the social media, populism thoughtsfind a new diffuse platform, and use a more grass-roots manifestation to continue toinfluence people’s thought and behavior, which is called network populism.Network populism advocates civilians and opposes elites, in many social conflictincidents, it upholds justice for the silent majority of the society in the position ofthe little people, and promotes the development of internet public opinion and thefinal solution of the event by some highly-civilianized words.Network populism has aroused the attention and discussion of the academia,however, the current study mainly stays on the descriptive analysis of individualevents and the shallow carding of the related concepts, lacking of the systematicanatomy from the perspective of the communication. Combined with the hot publicopinion events in the development of society, this article attempts to start with thisblank spot, on the basis of the detailed analysis of the network populism’scommunication background, interprets deeply about the construction of thenormalization frame of “sympathize with the civilians”, the immobilized frame of“oppose the elites” and the marginalized frame of “rational reflection”, the updateof the audience frame and the formation of the “binary opposition” field in thisthoughts’ diffusion process. Then the article explores the network populism’stwo-sided influence from two aspects of audience’s psychological cognition andspecific behave. Like opening a Pandora’s box, while the combination of populismand network media relases cyber democracy, it also produces irrational cyberviolence, threating the network’s spatial order and the social harmonious stability.Therefore, we should view this popular thoughts rationally and dialectically,amplify its positive role and reduce its negative effects as much as possible, andfinally build a healthy pure network environment, so as to provide a good publicopinion atmosphere for the orderly development of the harmonious society.