The Influence Of Network Media Information On Individual Social Cognition

In the mid-1990s,the Internet began to spread rapidly around the world,and at the beginning of the 21^st century,the mobile internet is rising more rapidly.The revolution of communication tools has been realized by Internet/mobile Internet.In just over 20 years,network media has formed an unprecedented large audience and become the most important social information access channel for the public.Especially,the coverage and influence of network media have surpassed that of traditional media,rapidly.Nowadays,the Internet/mobile Internet has become a social information platform with nearly 4 billion users worldwide.Therefore,the impact of network media information on public social cognition has become a common concern of sociology,communication,psychology,political science and other disciplines.Which prove that,network media has been playing a positive role in social progress in the course of its development.At first,the Internet/mobile Internet may be a very good medium for public social awareness due to the ability to overcome many of the limitations of traditional media.However,the network media and the mass media already have the positive and negative function proved by the facts.These days,the network information space is chaotic,and the vast number of users are in the seriously polluted media information environment.What the effects of social cognition and social evaluation are,what the formation mechanism of these effects are,how to suppress negative function of network media by effective governance.Which has become an urgent and important issue for the sociology of media.Especially,in China,the theoretical thinking and empirical research that based on the current network communication phenomenon and social facts should be carried out.The social information provided by the media can be divided into facts and opinions.Factual information reports the current social environment and its changes to the public;opinion-type information provides the understanding,judgment,and call to action of social situations and events for public.The factual information that is conducive to the public correct cognition of the society should be authentic,complete,important and representative;opinion-type information should be objective,fair,rational and balanced.In addition,due to the widespread existence of social cognitive traps,those two types of information should be considered in the prevention of cognitive bias.That is,the information environment created by the media should help people avoid errors or biases in the process of social cognition,and help people correct erroneous and biased ideas.In accordance with the above ideas,theories were developed based on classical theories in this study.Based on the theories of social psychology,the characteristics of individual social cognition were analyzed,especially,under what circumstances cognitive bias is prone to occur.On the basis of the classical theory of media effect,the role of media information in individual social cognition,and the differences between the information environment of mass media and network media were analyzed.The potential specification of the technology realization mode to the attributes of network media,as well as the characteristics and formation mechanism of network media information environment were analyzed.Then,the beneficial and adverse effects of social information environment that shaped by network media on the public social cognition was analyzed.As theoretical analysis shown,network media bias has a negative social information in the current information production,selection,and dissemination.That,negative information often takes the advantage of dissemination and has greater social influence to the social problems that the public is generally concerned about.Which make the public's social cognition deviate from the objective reality to some extent easy.Finally,the research hypothesis is proposed and empirical research is carried out based on the above theoretical basis.Based on survey data of Chinese Social Survey 2017(2017CSS),the social overall evaluation,social security overall evaluation and social equity overall evaluation of the public took as the explained variables;the network media information contact took as the explanatory variables,and Ordinary Least Squares(OLS)was used for the statistical analysis.OLS model shows that there is a significant negative correlation between online media information exposure and overall social evaluation,overall social security evaluation and overall social equity evaluation,which means that the negative bias of online media social information has a negative impact on the public's social cognition.Subsequently,8 subterms of“social security”and 8 subterms of“social equity”were taken as the explained variables,the“specific application type and frequency of the network”is taken as the explanatory variables,and Structural Equation Model was used for the analysis.The results show that,although the exposure to network media information has a significant impact on the public's overall cognition of social security and social equity,in most cases,all kinds of network application types and their frequency of use have no significant correlation with those 9 subitems of social security and 9 subitems of social equity.These findings reveal the complexity of network media information ecology,indicate that the influence of network media social information on individuals cannot be added up linearly.Therefore,the comprehensive governance of network media information is needed.