Virtual Community And Imagined Community

For centuries, China is a country, based on the agriculture. The population in the city has a percentage of no more than 15% and the rate of families with telephones is less than 0.1% during the initial period of Reform and Opening policy in 1978. The total Chinese Netizens population by the end of 2006 is more than 137,000,000 with an annual increase rate of 23.4%. In China, the population of ethnic minorities covers 9%, which is about 117,000,000, comparing with the total population 1,300,000,000. Ethnic Netizens have a swift increase as well. With the acceleration of globalization and the extent of internet/information era, more and more Chinese people will depend on internet and utilize it to find resources needed. Ethnic minorities during this unprecedented period will also take the internet as an important tool trying for the development for respective orientations.But in the actual life, ethnic minorities are feeble groups fringing from the mainstream of the society. How about in the virtual world? Are they also marginalized away from the main society culturally? If it is, we are to summarize two results or phenomena: in the virtual space, there also increasingly protrude the inter-ethnic conflict and the ethnic internal identity, which is the extension from the actual life to the virtual world; the other is the strong influence on the development of the social stability and democratic politics. In the field of culture communication and meaning reproduction, techniques with however proficiency can not substitute the functions of the politics and the society for help people spanning the moat. The sensitive information in the internet will be doomed to have some impacts on the social stability, democratic politics development and the construction of the harmonious society, therefore, it is necessary to probe into it, know it and explain it, from which we are able to find out the sticking point of the problem so as to guide the inter-cultures communication in the internet.In this paper, the author focuses on the ethnic identity and inter-ethnic interaction in the internet, in order to refract to readers people's actual social-ecology and psychology from the virtual world, aiming at forcing people to reinforce their attention to the newly developed world. The author carries out the investigation through different approaches, such as the theoretic analysis, the fieldwork and thedata collection from the perspective of culture anthropology, also participant observation and focus interview through internet and the text analysis etc.Although the informants and the target communities are all not real in the internet, yet they to some degree reflect the real life: a society with multi-factors as a whole. If this precondition is affirmatively true, then it is comparatively more convenient to study the ethnic identity through internet. It is fast and easy to collect the internet information, for instance, we can build up our statistical data through searching engines, such as the ethnic website, the amount of forums etc. Meanwhile, we can browse opinions, classify them and study them by contrast. Since 2006, the author spent quite a lot of time every week on browsing the target websites and kept records on the new points relevant to the research, which depended on the approaches of participant observation. As far as the interview is concerned, though network communication facilities, the author frequently interacted with net friends, from which all the contents were well kept, because of the convenient context from the media as well as on facilities.The author also compared the following two aspects: analyzing the cultural backgrounds of interviewees and their opinions on different websites; analyzing differences from different websites. Central University of Nationalities is a unique community in the world perhaps, which is located in China capital city Beijing, and students in which are enrolled in from ethnic areas, as well as managers and teachers, most of them are ethnic minorities. It is convenient for both students and teachers to interact with the main society through internet.The author believed that the following aspects are with the academic values and the actual meaning as well. Firstly, ethnic identities and inter-ethnic interactions in the internet can provide us important references for understanding the process of ethnic construction in our real life. Secondly, Even though the internet is only the technique of information, yet as long as it covers the information of the ethnic identity, it becomes the sub-culture or micro culture in the macro culture. For instance, the author is convinced of the media's function to the construction of cultural identity and the roles of the construction of the harmonious society through ethnic Netizens of their condemning both in speech and writing. Thirdly, the internet endows ethnic communities with mechanisms of culture reproduction and capabilities by creating thetradition. The filtrating mechanism, the ec-centrality and the trans-time virtually molded the special version of "social memory", which also molded the given identities of different ethnic groups. Since ages ago, China main society have been constructing the binary ethnic identity between Chinese and other ethnic groups, and the unilateral concept of development, which have brought pressures of cultural survivorship and mentality. Under this circumstance, the current internet provided the opportunities of the right of discourse, which would inevitably bring the side effect the network of different ethnic groups, also a rebounding effect.Finally, the author expected the Netizens and the internet to comprehend the voice of maintaining the principle and the purity of ethnic cultures, and from the society of academicians to the whole society to set up the correct and sustainable concept of multi-culture, so as to treat ethnic minorities objectively and correctly for their opinions of pursuing for ethnic rights and interests.