The Spread Of Astrology Knowledge As A Way Of Knowledge Production And Reality Construction

In the late 1970 s,astrology began to attract Chinese public's attention as something of a novelty through translation,simplification and reports by traditional media.At the beginning of its spread,astrology,based on its fatalistic and predictable feature,was continually connected with Chinese traditional numerology discourse resources like "zodiac","feng shui" and "fortune telling",and successfully achieved its localization.With the help of mass media,the novel and unique astrology continues to win the hearts of people and is known,accepted and pursued by more people.After nearly 40 years of propagation,from the era of the publication to the Internet era,astrology has become a daily topic of high frequency in interpersonal communication.It changes people's way of thinking and their living habits,with young people being obsessed at different levels,and even evolved into a kind of empirical knowledge to guide the daily life of the astrology sub-cultural group.In the view of sociology of knowledge,people's subjective understanding in life is transformed into objective fact through the construction by society.That is to say,"knowledge" is actually shaped by society.With the rapid development of communication technology nowadays,the threshold of information being shaped by society into knowledge has been continually lowered.And astrology has become knowledge conforming to the shallowing and entertainment tendency of new media communication environment.To observe the propagation process of astrology in the new media platform from the perspective of sociology of knowledge,a basic point of view is that astrology is a kind of knowledge by the social shaping.Then,the shape of the astrology of knowledge in the process of communication continue to construct the astrology sub-cultural group subjective reality,to participate in the guidance of the group's daily life.This paper takes Sina astrology blogger "Uncle Tongdao" as a case,and knowledge construction theory in the field of sociology of knowledge as a narrative framework,makes a detailed content analysis of astrology knowledge production in Uncle Tongdao's microblogs,and clarifies the social impact after the wide spread of his astrology knowledge.The basic finding of the study is that in the early period of uncle Tongdao becoming popular,first of all he visualized his own-made constellation symbols and continued to strengthen the impression of the "astrology-uncle Tongdao" towards his fans in the dissemination process.Then by using the topic microblogging function in the new media platform,he invited the audience to participate in the setting of astrology knowledge production agenda,thus achieving efficient interaction and gaining high popularity.As for the narrative style of the microblog text,he expresses himself by teasing and spoofing.On the choice of the content of knowledge production,he takes satisfying the emotional appeal of the audience as main the main target and tends to combine it with cultural elements.As to the presentation of microblog text,he adopts the combination of graphs with words,audio ordering,short video shooting and other means of multimedia communication.At the beginning of the spread,astrology knowledge combined with traditional Chinese numerology discourse resources achieves its localization,then continues to expand its spread in the entertainment communication context,and finally ensures the continuous attention and high frequency participation of the audience based on the new media platform interaction,lottery and other online functions.At the end of the paper,it is pointed out that in the social reality of astrology constructing for its sub-cultural group,the sense of group identity is continually deepened.The knowledge of astrology guides people's daily life in maintaining friendship among groups,knowing unfamiliar people,dealing with interpersonal relationship and relieving pressure in real life.