From Individual Memory To Mass Communication:A Study On The Narrative Mode And Communication Ritual Of Acknowledgements In Doctoral Dissertations

The tradition of gratitude in the Chinese culture has a long history.The old adages such as "the grace of dripping water should be reciprocated by the spring" and "it is not a gentleman to know the kindness without being reciprocated" are familiar.Acknowledgments of doctoral thesis are the special scene of inheriting Chinese traditional gratitude culture,which implies the cultivation of implicit moral education.Since April 2021,People’s Daily,CCTV News,China Youth Daily and other news media have reported on a number of moving doctoral dissertation acknowledgments.Relevant news has swept the screens on various platforms,and netizens have been touched by the stories of personal struggles told in the acknowledgments.The super-high degree of topic discussion reflects full public participation,which can be regarded as a media ceremony.The purpose of acknowledgements for doctoral dissertations is not to create a powerful power of communication and influence,but to perform rituals among specific groups.However,due to the intervention of mass media,the individual memory of doctors is shared by the society,and the academic community is expanded into a social and cultural community,which turns the group ceremony into a media ceremony involving thousands of audiences in the new media environment.This study takes the communication ceremony view as the theoretical perspective,takes the popularity event of doctoral dissertation thanks as the research object,adopts the research methods of narrative analysis and content analysis,analyzes the ceremony construction and meaning construction of the media ceremony of the popularity of doctoral dissertation thanks.Following the thinking of ritual research process analysis,this paper analyzes the three aspects of media ceremony,namely,the gratitude ceremony,mass media news report and audience participation ceremony,and tries to present the main aspects of the ceremony in detail.It includes the narrative mode and ceremony construction of the ceremony of gratitude,the story selection mechanism/ceremony role/reporting characteristics of news media,and the meaning construction of audience participation in the ceremony interaction.In the first part,through the narrative analysis of the acknowledgments of 7 doctoral theses collected,it is found that the contents of acknowledgments,namely,the individual memory of doctors,show the following narrative themes:suffering narrative,ideal narrative and academic community narrative;The narrative time characteristics of flashback narration and pre-narration narration;There are two classic narrative plot modes:"The son of a poor family" and "the success of a man through hard learning".In the dimension of narrative characters,the family is a community of honor,and the high praise and respect for the mentor crowns the authority of the mentor.In the second part,when news media select news stories,they will choose interesting character stories of role reversal.Under the guidance of traffic logic,they will continue to track the Huang Guoping event and find similar news stories in order to achieve maximum traffic in a short time.Secondly,the news media plays the role of guide of meaning and store of memory.By analyzing the content of 92 original news reports,it is found that they show four characteristics of uniform reporting in multiple forms,multiple reporting themes spread out along the reporting cycle,"personal presentation,media representation",and positive typical reporting strategies.The third part mainly explores how audiences construct a sense of meaning in media ceremonies.The ceremony achieved the awakening,connection and coronation of the audience’s emotional memory.In addition,the doctoral thesis thanks to the popular media ceremony to realize the emotional problems of externalization and healing.This media ceremony creates an atmosphere for the whole society to reflect on suffering,to be grateful to others,and to believe in personal struggle,which is conducive to the externalization and healing of social individual trauma,and the construction of a national spiritual community of active struggle.