A Study On The Weibo Public Sphere That Constructed By Visibility

By exploring the Weibo protest against the education and household registration system launched by a 15-year-old girl Haite Zhan, this dissertation aims to discuss how does sina weibo construct the public sphere by "visibility". Different from most of present researches which still adopt traditional theoretical framework to discuss new media, this paper take visibility, which is at the heart of social media, as the angle of view and respect social media’s own logic so as to discuss the relation between weibo and public sphere. This paper argues that, on one hand, weibo has extend and strengthened the classic functions of traditional media, such as enhance the sense of citizenship and encourage showing and actions. On the other hand, weibo has presented the special role of new media: firstly, weibo provides individuals the possibility to bypass the medium and directly be the body of public sphere, moreover, it help to open the publicity from the aspect of the way of the existence of human being. Secondly, different from present uniform mainstream media discourse, weibo directly show the differences and even cracks among multiple narrations. Although it’s hard to reach a consensus, it set a basis for real communication on controversial issues and changes the way of public participation. Finally, weibo has rebuilt our understanding of communication and media, for example weibo has broken the traditional differentiation of real and virtual space. However, it is still worth to mention that weibo has the exclusive power to direct public visibility and its data processing design directly contains assumptions about people’ s interactive and cultural behaviors. In this way, it can make people discipline their behavior without knowing it.