New Media As Risk:Examining Online Content Production And The Public Culture

Since new media continuously deconstruct traditional media production,the uncertainties that contemporary governance culture and online participants face consist of a risk system.Risk ant the public can not be separated from each other.Risk pressures from new media enhance the need of online content producers for external cooperation,and promote the public culture in contemporary media practice.Through examining online public sphere from the perspective of production,this paper attempts to explore the relationship between media practice and risk governance in a new media risk context,so as to provide an alternative theoretical framework to understanding media ecology and public political culture in digital society.Based on the division of professional news production and users' content production,the study employs multiple case studies to analyze news organizations,public relations as content providers,self-media and entertainment productions.Faced with the revolutionary challenge of new media,a large number of news organizations began to develop their online career through social media platform,which leads to a competitive network involved within different professional media.A social network analysis used to discuss the co-opetition of different media typologies in an integrated relationship network found that,the demassification trend unites specific media accounts and improves the cooperation of online news production.However,traditional mainstream media still dominate the core discourse position of professional news production and the whole interactive structure between media account in social media manifests significant media bias.Because the boundary of traditional news production become blurred,in order to response the media resources access risk,public relations has used social media as a dialogue tool to pursue the public flow.By creating content independently,public relations practitioners participate in user community and also influence the select of online news production.Meanwhile,PR practitioner's attitude to social media use turns to be rational.They tend to emphasize the importance of employing different media forms to maximize the contact surface between PR and the public,which means their content practices are involved in a complex interaction with news media,opinion leaders and public opinion in online community.Since PR faces its dilemma in social media platform and professional news organizations still have powerful discourse influences,PR practitioners also have maintained the cooperation imagination about traditional journalism.On the other hand,in several cases,we find new development possibilities for self-media operated by organization or individuals,which may interact with professional news media in some specific contexts.High autonomous content communities are shrinking to sub-cultural areas relatively far away from political discourses.And those group norms and moral system built by community members are influenced by national politics and capital market ideology.Although users'content production has greatly improved public participation,there are also risks of sustainable development behind the widespread participatory culture:it is hard for individualized self-media to achieve media operation unless they keep attracting and absorbing community members' knowledge contribution.In addition,content competitions in social media environment squeeze the stability of users'individualized production.Popular culture creates alternative space for the public,but combined with entertainment consumption stimulus,the public voices become decentralized and in-group.How to the dynamic between popular public sphere and mainstream political public sphere is an another important issue worth to be considered.With public sphere turning to a fragmentized structure made by different online content producers,the identity crisis in political public sphere,professionalism recession in media public sphere and anti-political culture in everyday life public sphere construct internal dilemmas in modern multi-agent governance network.Besides,public participations also face the complex contexts of sub-cultural public sphere and external pressures from transnational risks.Therefore,online public politics studies need to employ risk governance perspective,actively apply increasing big data analysis to deduce the inherent relevance of contemporary public culture,enter into the real-life background to identify actor's online logics,and create possible"risk scenarios" to maximize future predicting for public sphere evolution,so as to further develop new interdisciplinary,converged and collaborative method paradigm.Overall,the process of content producers breaking through their own online development risks improves public connectivity.Nevertheless,their interaction boundaries lead to small-world community groups.The multiple and overlapping online content productions develop many empirical discussions about public culture.Compared with criticism on various limitations or optimistic outlook of digital environment,a more appropriate point is to treat it as a fluctuated intermediate state,focus on the uncertainties new media provide to contemporary social order as a risk system and how could it be possible to result in diversified governance institution.Researchers also should go deep into different details of public culture in everyday life,find the alternative formation of online public practices,and re-examine the process of fragmentized public sphere being integrated into a specific context,so as to establish vital theoretical explanations for the conflicting and changing technological communication environment between old and new values.