Anthropological Perspective Microblogging Interactive

Twitter launched the global boom of micro-blog, a new form of internet application, in2006. Since then, a number of internet service providers have started their micro-blog service. The number of micro-blog users in China started to soar from2009, and reached250million in October2011. Micro-blog has become a part of many people's life.Micro-blog is a new form of social network which attracts a huge number of users by its low requirement and high instantaneity. There have been done a lot of researches on micro-blog, most of which are from the perspectives of internet technology, communication studies, and marketing. However, few researchers have ever considered micro-blog as virtual community and studied micro-blog users by their online interactions. This research classifies the text-based interactions by sina micro-blog users and attempts to find out the patterns and functions of the internet-based interactions among the sina micro-blog community.This research attempts to study the internet-based virtual community by the approach, and do the field works in the internet-based virtual community by focusing the internet-based textual interactions instead of real people in the society. At the same time, the analysis of the social significance of the internet-based textual interactions by content analysis is provided in this research.The texts studied in this research are selected from the retweets of hot topics in sina micro-blog. This thesis firstly makes a brief introduction about the development of sina micro-blog, functions and features, secondly an observation on the main body, the interaction forms, symbols, and content of the interactions in sina micro-blog, the internet-based virtual community, thirdly a discussion on the significance and value of the interactions in micro-blog community.This thesis argues that the interactivity of micro-blog bases on the process of texts' releasing,tranferring and commenting. The emergence and development of micro-blog changed not only people's writing habits and modes of expression, but also influenced the political, economic, cultural and other social aspects of varying degrees by its own characteristics and functions.According to the social effects caused by the spread of micro-blog, the social functions of micro-blog could be divided into two kinds——the positive function and negative one. The convenient and openness of micro-blog promoted civic consciousness, enhanced public's political participation and supervision.Internet users on the micro-blog platform expressed their voices and emotions freely, which played a social safety valve function mitigating social conflict; In addition, the interaction of micro-blog promoted the development of non-governmental forces in certain degree. Nevertheless, the micro-blog's shortness, convenient, multi-channel transmission made the discrimination of illegal information from a large amounts of information more difficult and the production of trash information easily. The fast and wide spread of micro-blog provided a breeding ground for the rapid spread of Internet rumors; Within a platform with freedom of expression like micro-blog, personal information and privacy had the risk of exposure at any time, which may result in network violence. In a word, we should attach importance to the positive social effects of micro-blog as well as the negative ones.