Research On The Changes Of Mother-in-law Relations In The Internet Age

In family relations, the mother-in-law relations have been a permanent subject. In old china society, a strong culture of the mainstream values of society protected the rights of the mother-in-law, creating a strong reality of the disadvantages of the daughter-in-law. Along with social change as well as the rising status of women, mother-in-law relations also show some different characteristics. It varies much in the internet age.In recent years, a number of portals set up "the mother-in-law relations" column on which so many posts created an evil mother-in-law image, so that "evil mother-in-law" phenomenon has become a hot topic. Faced with this new social phenomenon, this study put aside the reality of the mother-in-law relations but focuses on the posts on Sohu internet forum. Through analysis of those posts, this study mainly researches on the network construction of evil mother-in-law image as well as the power lying behind to achieve the perspective into the relation changes between the family and inter-generations.With the construction theory of the society as the basis, the study adopts participating observation and textual analysis to analyze the messages about mother-in-law relationships on Sohu internet forum. The study deduces the many factors for the image of"evil mother-in-laws", including languages, description of typical cases, situation simulation, repetition and reinforcement. Those"evil mother-in-laws"are shaped under the combination of the above factors as a striking social phenomenon.Meanwhile, the paper, by the shaping of"evil mother-in-laws", renders it possible to present a potential social transformation in reality that mother-in-laws are losing their control in their relationships with their daughter-in-laws. To be specific, this transformation conveys the change in the discourse power of mother-in-laws as well as the manipulation of the ciber space by daughter-in-laws. Mother-in-laws have been considered as evil ones with less support from the society, and they don't have much discourse power. This reflects the marginalization of the old in the ciber society.