The Causes And Countermeasures Of Group Disorientation In We Chat Public Service Activities Communication

After the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008,public service activities in China has developed rapidly,and the types of projects and methods of participating in the public service has continued to increase.More and more people participated in public service activities.With the development of the Internet,channels for citizens to take part in the activities have been transformed from offline to both offline and on-line,so people can help others by new media.As a social media platform with a large number of users,WeChat also begun to promote its function to uphold public service activities,which has become the main channel for many public service associations.However,the participators maintain two different attitudes during their participation,which are named group wisdom and group disorientation.Among them,group wisdom reflects the positive contribution of the group to the public service activities and the positive impact on society;the group disorientation emphasizes the negative impact of the irrational,blind obedience and extreme characteristics of the group in the face of public service activities.In the spread of WeChat public service activities,the phenomenon of group disorientation has appeared frequently,which has appeared in the events of the Luo Er and the Children's Gallery.It has caused negative influence on the development of WeChat public service activities: Firstly,it suppresses individual rationality and causes group irrationality.Secondly,it interferes with group decision-making and leads to wrong decision-making;Thirdly,it damages the correct presentation of the event,and effects the correct perception of the audience;Finally,it has formed the wrong guidance of public opinions,and triggered a crisis of confidence.Therefore,it is necessary to study the causes and countermeasures of group disorientation.Through the investigation and study of these events,it may reduce the occurrence of such phenomena through relevant research.This study takes the "Luo Er event" as a case,and researches on 20 WeChat users who participated in it as the object of study.The author studies the causes of group disorientation by conducting in-depth interviews with them,and put forward corresponding countermeasures.According to the Penguin think tanks of 2016 WeChat Impact Report,18-year-old users to 25-year old users accounted for 45.4%,26-year-old users to 35-year old users accounted for 40.8%,and 35-year-old users to 50-year-old users accounted for 13.8%,and those younger than 18 and older than 50 accounted for less,respectively 2 % and 1.7%.According to the age distribution of WeChat users,the author will select 9 people between the ages of 18-25,8 people between the ages of 26-35,and 3 people over the age of 35 as samples.Due to the small number of users younger than 18 and older than 50 and the limited number of samples,it is not within the scope of the study.Through in-depth interviews,it is found that during the spread of WeChat public service activities,the causes of group disorientation are mainly concentrated in the following four aspects.Firstly,the special emotional attributes of public service activities stimulate individual emotions.When the audience is exposed to public service activities,they will be stimulated by the emotional factors to generate empathy,especially those who have experienced experiences are more likely to be emotional.Secondly,stereotypes mask event differences.Through interviews,it was found that some audiences were preconceived to understand that the economic situation of leukemia families is difficult before they learned about the Luo Er event in detail.They attributed Luo Er to the poor groups and ignored the individual differences of events.Group stress inhibits individual expression.In the case of the Luo Er event individuals who are not caught in group disorientation will be forced to hide their opinions by the pressure of WeChat friends,and result in minority opinion getting fewer and fewer.The audience with the advantage opinion will be more convinced of their own opinions because of their friends' support.The advantage opinions are more and more,and eventually the group will become lost.According to the causes of group disorientation in WeChat public service activities communication,the following countermeasures are proposed: firstly,“common feelings” psychological appeal strategy should be properly used to cultivate netizens' “calm thinking” on public service activities.Secondly,the media and the audience should be integrated to weaken the impact of stereotypes.Thirdly,group pressure should be released to strengthen individual expression.Finally,the media and the audience should joint together to advocate netizens' rational self-realization.