A Study On New Media Communication And Group Image Construction In The View Of Framing Theory

In recent years, the troubles occur frequently between HK and the mainland. Underneath these events, Hong Kong Goldon Community,which is one of the representative new media in Hong Kong, is the main battlefield of the war of words. What’s more, the new media has paly a role in some events such as march. Therefore, this paper chooses forum posts from Goldon Community since the HK-mainland Carping in 2012 for text analysing, to study mainlanders’ image in Hong Kong Goldon Community based on framing theory. Then summaries its communication characteristics and finds the resons behind.The research finds that the image of mainlanders in Golden Community is tend to be negative,and the new image such as ―synthesis of native image‖, ―menacing invaders‖, ―local moths in Hong kong‖ etc has arisen. At the same time, as a kind of new media, the framing characteristic of Golden Community has led to amplify mainlanders’ negative image. First of all, Goldon netizens’ stereotypes of mainlanders dominate the image framework construction, which determine they tend to report mainlanders only the bad but not the good. Secondly, under the effect of spiral of silence, positive image of mainlanders has become ―aphasia‖ gradually. Thirdly, the new media framing effect leads to negative emotions overlay, which makes the mainlanders’ negative image more serious. Last but no the least, the image fram in Goldon Community and some behaviors offline can influence each other.However, the formation of such image expounds profound social ideological reasons. In a macro context, the main reasons are economic problems in Hong Kong caused the anxiety of local people, frequent negative events in China leading to a low level of identification of mainland, and the culture differences between mainland and Hong kong. On a micro level,Golden netizens, the representative of the Hong Kong Youth are takers of negative effects in the process of mainland and Hong kong fusion. As a consequence, the ―Hard Plastice culture‖ in Golden can be ready to casue Goldon netizens’ negative emotions of mainlanders, even trigger counter-actiont offline.