Pubic Discussion In The Social Media And The Spiral Of Silence

The rapid development of social media, resulting in transformation of thenetwork environment from a purely anonymous condition to a pseudo-anonymous and anonymous symbiotic situation, which means that the network environment getting similar with the reality gradually. This paperis trying to focus on the social media, based on "spiral of silence" perspective, giving an explanation of people’s behavior during the discussion of public issues, and trying to understand the psychological motivation behind the behavior.This paperdiscussed the theme in the following logic: describingthe complexity of the new media ageenvironment- Compared with the web 1.0 era,there are some new features of web 2.0 era, iesocial media era- the new features of social media have impact on the receipt and output processof public issues discussion- certain social media’s mechanism and individual coping strategies. Following above-mentioned logic,I would give a deep explanation of the decomposing and entertaining of the public discussion on social media from the "spiral of silence" theory perspective.This paper would firstly explain the complexity of public opinion environment in the social media, and compared with the mass media age,in the new media era, the role of the media changes. Thus I would clarify the different atmosphere of public opinion in different social media, and emphasis the social media ‘s significance and value. And then give a further explanation of the social media’s new features: filtering mechanism, pseudo-anonymous environment, information flows, and the new opinion leaders.It would offer a big picture of the difference of social mediaera,web 1.0 era and reality environment. And, Iwould discuss the public discussion from 2 aspects:receiptand outputof public issue information, and providing the selfexpression selection and the possible interpretation. In the information receiving part, due to the filtering mechanisms and informationflow of social media, individuals tend to get individualized and fragment information from social media, which resulting in the asymmetric information between individuals, which directly affect the subsequent output, ie, topic discussion session. In the information output section, due to the atmosphere of public opinion in the social media, there are three response options of self-expression on the pubic issue: positive expression, negative expression and refused expression. Due to the atmosphere of public opinion and media features are different on different social media, I would focus on three social media, Weibo, Wechat and Zhihu, to analysis the different media expression mechanism and the individual and the individual coping strategies.According to the study, we found that the public opinion environment in social media is much moresimilar to the reality environment. However, the perception of opinion environment in the social media is more difficult to the reality environment, thus self-expression on public issue would be more cautious. At the same time, also because of the special nature of social media mechanisms, when self-expression, there are more ways, rather than just accepting and denying. As a conclusion, there are still the spiral of silence in the social media, because there’s still difference between expression opportunity and expression influence, between different individual interests area, between construction of social media and reality for public discussion.