The Mutual Construction Of "Categorization" And "Embodied Cognition" In Network Public Opinion

Public opinion has always been an important research area of journalism and communication.Influenced by Habermas,the field of communication seems to have been in a long-term pursuit of the possibility of rational public opinion.However,under the condition of new technology,the network public opinion field increasingly presents the characteristics of "tearing",polarization,irrationality and so on.The possibility of rational public opinion seems more and more elusive,so we might as well turn our attention from the pursuit of "how possible" to the discussion of "how to generate" public opinion.In the current network communication environment,the contradiction between information resources and attention resources brought by information explosion,as well as the relative "absence" of the body,leads to the "story-oriented" tendency of today’s media content.The process of media’s categorization of specific experience as perceptual objects presents a high degree of generality,which reflects the changes of media content under the new communication environment and technological conditions,but at the same time provides an unprecedented space for the dislocation of cognition,and individual cognition is endowed with an unprecedented constructive role and important position.Individuals’ personal interpretation of media content also shows that embodied experience is still playing a foundational role in such a communication environment where the body is "absent",as another way to distinguish it from technology embodiment.Based on this premise,this study draws on the theoretical framework and methodology of cognitive linguistics,which focuses on the field of embodied cognition,and attempts to explore the roles of discourse,cognition,and body in phenomena of opinion reversal and opinion division.We find that cognition plays an extremely important role in both the reversal of public opinion and the split of public opinion.In the process of generating public opinion,there is a mutual construction relationship between the discourse text that causes public opinion and embodied experience,and this mutual construction is reflected in people’s cognitive structure and mechanism.From the analysis of Gou Jing’s event,we can see how,as the main information publisher of the event,Gou Jing completed the categorization of the "causal relationship" of the event structure by means of metaphor,metonymy and conceptual prototype construction,thus weaving the "perfect victim" story in people’s mind and evoking the cognitive framework based on the idealized cognitive model.Once the information release of such a news event is on the road of "story-oriented",its reversal is probably inevitable.The division of public opinion caused by "Ordinary & Confident man" further highlights the important role embodied cognition plays in the generation of online public opinion.Different from the public opinion caused by news reports,which is the concern of traditional public opinion theory,in the process of generating public opinion for reference,what causes public opinion is only a propositional judgment or concept that can arouse the resonance of many netizens.The so-called truth and objectivity of the proposition that "men are ordinary yet confident"(or the concept of " Ordinary & Confident man")makes sense only if individuals relate it to their own embodied experiences.What seems to be an argument around the same concept,in fact the scenes evoked/activated by the concept and the more fundamental embodied experiences that the scene connects to are very different.Since different interpretations of individuals point to the embodied cognitive framework of different scenes,it is not surprising that public opinion is divided.The generative process of public opinion is never the result of unilateral action of content and text.However,many cognitive processing mechanisms,such as idealized cognitive mode,discourse space,image schema,etc.are always left in the discourse text.This is exactly the theoretical significance and methodological reference that cognitive linguistics provides for us to study the mutual construction relationship between discourse text and embodied cognitive mechanism in online public opinion in the current public opinion field built by new technologies full of story-oriented media content.By using this theory and methodology for reference,we can get a glimpse of how cognitive mechanism and body experience participate in the process of generating public opinion.In a word,the difficulty of physical presence does not mean that the online public opinion can be disembodied.On the contrary,the mutual construction of the categorization process of discourse itself and the embodied cognitive mechanism is an important factor that cannot be ignored when we examine why the current online public opinion field presents a series of characteristics such as tearing and polarization.