A Study Of Audience’s Non-rational Expression In The Micro-blog News Report

For the purpose of emerging with new media and forming a diverse journalism and communication system, traditional media are gradually perfecting their micro-blog platforms, which includes publishing news reports, extending hot-spot period and receiving audience’s feedbacks more efficiently. Netizens could join Weibo spreading process via following public account, viewing news posts and even reposting or commenting. During that period, non-rational speech and extreme internet actions appear. Therefore, it is valuable to study how to lead a literally ‘right’orientation for public opinion and create a harmony online circumstance for public expressions under an increasingly open and complex internet condition.This research will analyse those non-rational expressions of netizens under the micro-blog news context. More specifically, People Daily’s public Weibo news posts from January 2014 to March 2014 will be chosen as a samples. First, the statistics of those contents, topics, reposts and comments will be generated, then those comments will be chosen as examples for both qualitative and quantitive researches. Second, a questionnaire will be adopted to gather the information of psychological motivations for those people who are irrational. This research shows the common phenomenon of non-rational expressions in micro-blog news. Also, audience usually have different levels and forms of non-rational actions to the news with different topics and from different press organisations. Among those topics, government policy, legal cases,social elites involved reports would attract more attentions meanwhile trigger more extreme situations such as violence incite or ‘human flesh research’. Theoretically,non-rational expression is motivated by social environment,network technique and the psychology of netizens, while audience’s participation in Weibo are mostly spurred by anonymous expression and affective identification.At last, this article suggest some practical strategies for ruling non-rational expressional actions and give some further thoughts for public expression and political participation in the Internet.