Research Of Behavior Differences Among Cyberspace Groups In Public Crisis

In the information age, Internet has become an indispensable tool and activitiespeople’s production and living. Internet enables people to enjoy live with services ofconvenient and fast communication, mass information sharing and real-timeinformation, etc, which attract a huge number of Internet users. Besides the situationthat rapid increase of the number of Internet users and utilization in China, thedrawbacks of Internet revealed, one of the more obvious is the influence and destructionof public crisis on the Internet significantly increase. In public crisis situation,cyberspace groups and their behavior becomes the focus of research of the scholars.How to distinguish the Internet users, the differences between different cyberspacegroups, What measures should be taken to appease the Internet users and fulfill theirrequirements, all above become an important issue of management of Internet in publiccrisis situation for government.In this dissertation, the rainstorm disaster to occur in most parts of China inmid-July2012has been researched as instance. Base on the classification of cyberspacegroups, and using the survey method, the research of the behavior of differentcyberspace groups in the public crisis has been finished. The results prove that in publiccrisis, different cyberspace groups have significant difference on concern over event,information diffusion strength and information diffusion breadth in spatial dimension,on sensitivity and behavior time in time dimension, on stress response and emotioncontrol in behavior and emotion dimension, on group identity and group emotion incluster tendency dimension, on trust degree of information source in informationselection behavior dimension. According to the results of the statistical analysis, somerecommendations have been proposed for cyberspace management in public crisis forgovernment.1, change the old classification by a particular feature to a more rationalmethod for cyberspace groups.2, rationally allocate the attention of differentcyberspace groups, not ignore any cyberspace group’s existence, and always payattention to their reaction.3, Keep alert all the time, especially when public crisis eventsnear the end, government should handle the finishing work.4, Let Internet users in politics into the regular part of government, provide a fixed platform in politics, so thatthe problems of Internet users could be solved and replied in time, which can avoid theoccurrence of network cluster for accumulation of the problems and upgrade.5, Directlyenhance the credibility of the government information, and against false reports at thesame time, indirectly reverse the situation the government explain passively, and forma effective information guiding mechanism for cyberspace groups.