The Interaction Between Traditional Media And Internet-based Public Opinion Sites From A Rhetorical Perspective

In2003, the incident of Sun Zhigang marked the starting point that the Chinese internet users had began to play a significant role in addressing social issues. The recent years have witnessed a further development of the Internet in China in which lots of public communication platforms have emerged and thrived. Various internet-based debates over hot social issues have been exerting greater and greater impact on the society. What is more, we find that the Internet discourse often goes against the mainstream discourse (that comes from traditional mass media) and forms a competition to and sometimes even outcompete the latter in authority and influence. Often much of the exposure of the truth and release of information seem to come from the internet rather than from the traditional mass media, which ought to have been the main source of information. The interaction and competition between the two has plunged the public discourse space into chaos.Concerning this issue, scholars and experts at home and abroad have a lot of studies and researches, among which, however, most are from the perspective of mass media and communication, and few of them have analyzed the topic from the rhetorical perspective--a perspective which provides us a different and sharp vision to find out the rhetorical mechanism behind the interaction between the two. This thesis aims to explore the reason for the rising of the internet discourse, using some cases and examples to better illustrate the projection of the Internet authority during the discourse circulation and the rhetorical mechanism behind it. What’s more, flaws in the internet-based public discourse will be also analyzed.