| China is currently in a transitional stage of social double transition. The rapiddevelopment of economy and technology has brought the improvement of people’sliving standards, whereas, many universal social problems also arise, such as inequalityof benefit distribution and serious polarization of rich and poor. The gradual awakeningof civic consciousness lets public people have significantly increasing activity toparticipate in political activities to safeguard their legitimate rights and interests, toexpress political views and to supervise the public authorities. In practical environment,the traditional political participation mainly contains participating in the elections,letters, hearings and council and so on. While, these participations involve in highbarriers, high cost, time and energy costly and the overall situation shows the problems:the relative shortage of participation channels and the poor effects of participation. Thisis in strong contradiction with the demands of public political participation.The rise of Internet technology has changed the way in which people exchangesand information transforms, and provides a new path to ease the contradiction in thepublic political publication online in the practical environment. Discourse politicalparticipation online rises gradually against this background. In short, discourse politicalparticipation online means that, around certain public incidents or issues, Internet usersuse the Internet and related technologies to express their political demands directly tothe state power, to supervise operation of the public authority, to affect the formulationand implementation of public policies in the form of discourse, in order to achieve theirown interests and value. Under network environment, network public incidents are setto be carrier by Internet users in the discourse political participation online, which ismainly because that Internet public incident almost involves to governmentmanagement, public utilities, community livelihood, official words, and justice and soon. This not only directly relates to civil rights, but also is the specific performance ofpublic power operation. During the development of a network public incident, thepublic and the government interact easily, express arguments on both sides, impact ondecision making and behavior with each other. Additionally, information of publicincidents can be received and feedback quickly, across time and space constraints,which improves the efficiency of political participation. For these reasons, this paperstudied discourse political participation online of Internet users on network public incidents.This paper argues that the rise of the discourse political participation online in ourcountry has a profound political, social, technical background. The opening andlimitation of political system provide the opportunity and motivation; accumulatedcontradictory and political participation fervor brought by social transformationbackground and the awakening of civil society constitute public psychology bedding;massive information and virtual identity brought by the development of Internettechnology provide "knowledge base" and "protecting umbrella" for discourse politicalparticipation online. In short, the rise of the discourse political participation online inour country has inevitability and necessity. In addition, the paper also analyzes thecurrent situation of discourse political participation online of Internet users in China.Conclusions are as follows: from the political participation environment, discoursepolitical participation online mainly occurs in the discourse space of public network;from the way of political participation, typical network public incidents are theimportant carriers for discourse political participation online; from the scope of politicalparticipation, social and livelihood areas become the main concerning areas in discoursepolitical participation online; from the process of political participation, emotional andgroup polarization performance are significant during discourse political participationonline; judging from political effect, discourse political participation online to Internetpublic incidents has significant impact on government actions and decision-making.Through analyzing and summarizing these15typical network public incidentshappened during2009to2013, combining with agenda setting theory, this paper focuseson the operation logic of discourse political participation online. From the participatingsubjects, the subjects of discourse political participation online include three groups:direct proponents of interest demands (incidents witness), agenda promoter (ordinaryInternet users), issues improver and integrator (opinion leaders). And these three groupsare not completely fixed, but can transform with each other according to the role andinfluence in the development of public incidents. Through empirical analysis andsummarize, this article summarizes the four major ways of discourse politicalparticipation online: the "presence" information release, pressure onlookers, rationalrebuttal, and entertainment deconstruction. Based on this, it was proposed that discoursepolitical participation online promotes the development of public network incidents andimpacts government decisions through the "shared situational build","define theproblem","Construction and collective identity formation issues,""the policy agenda and the government decision-making" and "extension and proliferation issues" thesefive aspects. And the detailed analysis was demonstrated combing with the "hide andseek" incident. Finally, some problems existed in discourse political participation onlinewere summarized, which mainly performed with network rumor prevailed, grouppolarization, and irrational participation and so on. And recommended measures wereproposed to strengthen the authority of targeted information dissemination, to guide thepublic to express rational and to response timely to public questions, and to enhance thegovernment’s ability to handle unexpected incidents. |
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