New Media And Rural Interpersonal Communication-a Case Study Of The Fengmi Village In Heging County

With the development of science and technology and the progress of society, mass media has penetrated into the life of the rural residents. No matter in the everyday communication level or in the social structure level, the arrival of media ranges from newspapers, radios to televisions has brought great changes to the rural society. Along with the advancements of the national project "village-to-village", More and more rural families to install the broadband. the new media has spread across the rural society as a new kind of media power. This paper takes a village of Bai ethnic group in Heqing county as an example aiming to explore what kind of interactions between the new media and rural interpersonal communication has produced in rural community, and what are he influences of these interactions.Two research methods includes participatory observation and in-dept interview are adopted in the study, and through the classification and analysis of the primary data collected in the Fengmi village, two major findings are concluded as follows:on the one hand, the arrival of new media in rural community diversifies the ways of communication among rural residents, which are altered from the traditional oral communication to the modern connections through mobile phones; and the scope of communication are broaden gradually without the the limitations of traditional geography and kinship, which has shortened the physical distance among people; moreover, some of the residents become the the "special person" in interpersonal communication for the reason that they are skilled in shopping online or using computers to copy files. On the other hand, new media become "the outside person" in the family relationships, which makes the effective communication among family members less and less; besides, when everyone is involved into the flood of science and technology, those who are not able to use internet will be marginalized. However, subtle effects of the arrival of new media on the rural interpersonal communication has been found:the traditional interpersonal communicative mode based on the geographical and consanguineous relationships still occupies dominant place in the rural community, but a new kind of interpersonal communicative type is arisen gradually among the young generation on the basis of the network media. Based on the situation, this study also explored the interactions of new media with individual, interpersonal communicative activities and the rural community within the scope of rural interpersonal communication.