Discourse Analysis Of Civic Internet Participation In Emergency Crisis

The arrival of Internet age has enabled the virtual cyberspace to become the main place for citizens’ expression of opinion and requests.Weibo has the most users nowadays endowing citizens with the voice to express opinions and participate in social issues and politics.Cyberspace largely expands the areas that citizens participate and improves their degree of participation.China is currently at the stage of social transformation as well as the peak stage of emergency crisis.Thus this paper aims to study the expression characteristics of citizens’ online discourses.The study chooses the case of chemical explosion in Tianjin Binhai New Area and mainly focuses on the online discourse expression of citizens in Sina Weibo.The paper focuses on the study of the characteristics of the subjects of the discourse,theme,narrative approaches and the theme-building approaches.Based on the analysis,this study points out the problems of the online social participation and raises some recommendations for more efficient and rational citizen online participation from the perspective of government,citizen and media.