The International Communication Configuration And Its Influencing Factors In Social Media Pace

Since the birth of the Internet,the debate whether information monopoly and cultural hegemony existed in the Internet space has been active in academia.Some people think that Internt will help developing countries’ step out of peripheral status,and then establish new world information and communication order.However,other researchers think it will maintain and even strengthen the dominant power of Western countries and media in international communication.This paper analyzes the international information flow,the network relationship of communicators in social media,and their influencing factors from three levels-state,media and individual.We try to transend the simple argument of "media centralism" and discuss the landscape of international communication with more rich and multi-level empirical evidences in the new information technology environment and the background of contemporary international power relations.This study includes three parts and analyzes the characteristics of intenational information dissemination and relationships among communicators based on the empirical research methods of secondary analysis of open-source data,big data mining and analysis of twitter,social network analysis and visualization based on NodeXL,and content analysis.Firstly,we conducted diachronic research of multi-dimensional digital divide among more than two hundrend contries all over the world and visualized it in a map,and explore the information amount,information interaction,topic relevance and their influencing factors in the discussion about "Ebola epidemic" on Twitter.The results show that the United States is still leading in technology development and diffusion,the construction of transnational information platform,the "universal participation",and agenda-setting of international hot events,which makes it become the "super country" in social media.And other developed countries began to differentiate in the space.The United Kingdom,France,Australia,Canada is still influential,however,other developed countries like Switzerland,Japan were chanlleged by the "BRIC countries",the Arab countries,Kenya and so on in different aspects.In addition,,geographical location,cultural dimensions,democratization degree are also significant variables influencing information amount and interaction in social media discussions as well as the economic development.Sencondly we compared the numbers and types of the news media accounts on Twitter within 12 sample countries,and analyzed the structural network,interactive network and their influencing factors from the relational perspective.The results show that some multinational media groups has extended their power from the traditional media space to social media space,such as BBC,NBC,New York Times,Associated Press,Reuters,Financial Times and so on.Their structural centrality and interactive centrality are relatively high in the networks.And media organizations of Australia,France and Switzerland are struggling to maintain their "middleman" role.Moreover several media agencies in China,India and South Africa are outstanding in the media network,but the number of media accouts and overall influence are still up to be improved.In addition the economic development,the diffusion of Internet technology and the strategic social media use are the significant variables that affect the media centrality in structural and interactive networks.Thirdly,we took "global warming" discussions on Twitter as example,and focused on the "elite users" and "ordinary users" in international information dissemination network.The results show that twitter users in United States,Canada,the United Kingdom,Australia,India,China,Ecuador,Nigeria,Morocco,South Africa are more active than other countries’ participants,and influential user accounts are mostly the US media institutions or celebrities in politics,economics,and entertainment,only a few ordinary individuals’ original tweets have got lots of comments and retweets.More importantly,transnational connections and interactions occur mainly between the elite users in international communication.Though ordinary individuals are far more than elite users,they are still peripheral in the international information dissemination network due to non-stategic account use and low network centrality.That is to say,ordinary users are more likely to rely on elite users to participate in discussion of international hot events by commenting,retweeting,liking or voting.The study shows that there is still unequal or "hierarchical" phenomenon in international communication on social media platforms,but it can not be described by the simple phrase of "dominanted by American-led western world" which we usually used in traditional media space.This paper indicates that social media provides more opportunity for less developed countries to step out of peripheral and achieve center postion in actors network and information network.At present,the United States and Britain still occupy a dominant position,but several indicators of India,China,South Africa,the Arab countries,Kenya,etc.have gone beyond Japan,France,Germany,Switzerland and other developed countries at different levels,further more they are exerting influence in their own subordinate area based on the geographical proximity advantage.Theoretically,this research has prompted us to reflect on the traditional international communication paradigms,and view the interaction of actors in social media space from the perspective of social relations,and predict the digital divide and communication competitiveness of coutries not only by economic and social development factoes of the nation,but also by the geographical proximity,cultural dimensions,policies,social media operating strategies.In practice,this study provides advices for China and other developing countries to seize the opportunity of social media development to improve international voice and promote public diplomacy,national image communication and soft power construction.