College Students’ Network Expression In Public Events

In the era of Web2.0, an increasing number of citizens have chosen to express their opinions on public events by means of the platform of internet. The diversified and concentrated express online has formed an important way of contemporary public to be involved in social and political affairs and it also provides basis for monitoring public opinion through large database. We can know the emotions, desires and needs of the public by their expression online. In many cases, online expression of public affairs forces some social problems to be possibly solved. Among public affairs, although the online expression of institutionalized college and university students has different online expression form with other groups, its potential power can not be neglected. It has shown in the latest Investigation Report on Internet Behaviors of Chinese Adolescents in 2014 issued by CNNIC that by the end of December of 2014, the population of Chinese adolescent internet users has reached 277 million, accounting for 79.6% of the total population of adolescents in China. At present, the number of internet users among college and university students has reached around 40 million, becoming the main force active on the internet. What opinions they have expressed on internet in face of various public events are the main focus of the paper. The innovative point of this paper lies in that the author has studied the expressions of college and university students on internet and also investigated the drive force for them to carry out online expressions.By application of research methodologies as literature analysis, questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews, the basic situation of online expressions of college and university students on public affairs is analyzed from such explicit aspects as subjective motivation, engagement, channel, language style and opinion perception on comments; in-depth analysis can be made on online expressions of college and university students from the perspective of social embeddedness and impact, and from three dimensions as value orientation, discourse tendency and propensity based on the study results and related context considering in-depth interview. It is found in the study that the online expressions of college and university students have a tendency to unification in diversification with appearance of intertwining rationality and irrationality and they have different expressions in different events and different issues. The paper has found out that under current social context, the group of college and university students has concentrated on expressing their opinion online about political events and events concerning people’s livelihood which are of practical meaning, as well as about public events related to their living and study background and also abrupt public affairs. They find a way to remold themselves, bear social responsibilities and relieve pressure by expressing their thoughts online, which could be influenced by leading social psychology, the effect of “silence of spiral” on the internet, and the leadership of opinion leaders. Meanwhile, the author has also noticed that the expressions of college and university students online are of features as value loss and negative and irrational tendency in language and emotions, and the author has put forward with some countermeasures and suggestions in the paper.