The Path Of Virtual Community Affection To Government Decision-Making

Virtual public sphere, a domain to regulate a nation and its society, is an important field in Social Study. With the advance of the network technology, virtual community provided a new media for the exchange of public opinions and expressions in the virtual society, and the study of which caught eyes of many scholars. This study analyzed the structure, identity, and functional realization of virtual public community, by utilizing web data mining, data processing and event analyzing method, etc. and through case studies. The study found that, compared with the real public sphere, virtual public sphere has its unique structural characteristics and operational mechanism.Virtual public sphere, as the public sphere, has three key elements: virtual communities for participants, virtual community media and debate consensus. Virtual public sphere reflected in the three main characteristics of constituent elements, the freely participants, muti-channelled media, and consensus on diversity. There is a specific model between virtual and real public sphere. These two form a strong force in public sphere, and thereby influence government decision-making process. There are ways to model the influence to the public decision-making from virtual public sphere, direct impact trails model and indirect impact trails model. The key difference lies in the area of virtual public consensus and action is affected by the realities of the public sphere in the decision-making process. Direct impact trails model is the ideal model in theory, but it needs the support of a mature e-government. Indirect impact trails model, on the other hand, realized the integration of the virtual and real public sphere, has more effectively influence the public decision making.Future study will further identify the path model for the impact to the public decision-making from virtual public sphere, with the gradual maturity of the latter. And a general theory will be result of such study. In the practice sense, the study of virtual public areas could provide favorable basis and theoretic support to the scientific decision-making for public decision making system and to the regulation of internet development.