【About the Author】Gu Zhijuan, Undergraduate Student, School of Journalism, Chinese Min University (Beijing 100872); Ge Qinan, Undergraduate Student, School of Journalism, Chinese Min University (Beijing 100872); Liu Ya, Undergraduate Student, School of Journalism, Chinese Min University (Beijing 100872); Maona, Undergraduate Student, School of Journalism, Chinese Min University (Beijing 100872).
【Summary】This study surveyed 345 college students from five universities in Beijing by questionnaire method, mainly studying college students' attitudes towards speech on social media, including the degree of belief, the influencing factors of the degree of belief, and the impact of speech on themselves. The findings found that college students are currently paying more attention to the content of the message itself and the person or media that sent the message. Overall, college students don't think that social media speech will have much of an impact on their lives, and that the impact is mainly on changing their attitudes or perceptions.
College students; social media; rumors; cognitive attitudes
【Medium figure classification number】G210 【Document identification code】A
1. Research background and significance
From forums and communities in the Web 1.0 era to Weibo and Renren in the Web 2.0 era, the development of social media in China closely follows the trend of the world. In 2012, McKinsey published a survey report that China's social media users had reached 300 million, which is equivalent to one in every five Chinese using social media. Social media breaks through the static situation of traditional network communication, realizes dynamic links between individuals, and each user may also become a disseminator of information while receiving information, which makes the dissemination of information in social media extremely efficient. However, the characteristics of interactive and efficient information dissemination also provide a breeding ground for the proliferation of rumors on social media, and the harmfulness of rumors has also increased rapidly. It is in this context that this article targets college students, one of the main social media users in China, to investigate their attitudes towards social media rumors and analyze their influencing factors.
Most of the current research is online rumors at the macro level, while there are fewer targeted studies on social media rumors at the meso level. Online rumors are increasingly coming from social media, and the spread of rumors on social media has its own unique communication characteristics. Based on the previous research on online rumors, this paper further studies the characteristics of social media rumors through the study of the attitudes and influencing factors of college students in the face of social media rumors, and provides a reference for the study of social media rumors and their coping strategies.
There are two main research issues in this paper: one is the degree of college students' belief in speech in social media, which can be used as a basis for speculating the probability that rumors in social media may be believed by college students; the other is college students' attitudes towards speech on social media, including the influencing factors of the degree of belief and the impact of speech on themselves. These two questions are also the main body of the questionnaire.
2. Literature discussion
(1) Research on rumors
Overall, foreign research on rumors is relatively mature: from the early theoretical research to the modern trend of empirical research, a relatively complete system has been formed. Relatively speaking, the domestic research on rumors started late, and is currently mainly concentrated in the study of online rumors.
1. Research on the emergence and development of rumors
The founding work of foreign rumor research is the 1947 "Psychology of Rumors" by American sociologists Allport and Bosman. On the basis of examples of wartime rumors, Allport conducted a large number of psychological experiments, and discussed the strength formula of rumors: R =i×a (two major factors that affect the spread of rumors, one is its importance to the relevant personnel, and the other is the ambiguity of the evidence on the subject). [1]
In 2004, he published "The Goddess of Rumors" by the German scholar Hans Joachim Neubauer, which depicts the figurative "image" of rumors and their emergence and development process through the analysis of a large number of historical materials and cultural phenomena such as representative historical events, myths and legends, and famous works. He associated the socio-historical background in which the rumors were located with the emergence of rumors, arguing that rumors could only be truly revealed if they were placed in the corresponding cultural context. [2]
2. Research on the mechanism of rumor dissemination
In the 1960s, research on the model of rumor spread gradually appeared in academia. Existing rumor-mongering models borrow heavily from infectious disease models. The more typical infectious disease transmission models include SIR model, SIS model, etc. (SIR model, a susceptible population, recovers health and is immune after being infected; a SIS model of an infected population is infected and then returns to a susceptible state). Daley and Kendall proposed a mathematical model of rumor propagation that analyzes the rumor problem through a stochastic process approach, known as the D-K model. On this basis, Maki and Thomson M, as well as Murray, have successively studied the rumors using mathematical models. Since the description of the rumor propagation process by the mathematical-based rumor model is not intuitively described, and its communication link can be represented by a mathematical model, but it is not solvable, these studies mainly focus on theoretical analysis. [3]
On the domestic side, Cai Jing's book "Rumors: Social Communication in the Shadows" belongs to the relatively mature research on rumor dissemination in China. From the perspective of communication science, the author takes the generation, dissemination and disappearance of rumors as the meridian, and the dual attributes of rumors and opinions as the weft line, orients the overall research of rumors in the process of social communication as the localization development of rumors in China, which has special significance for the study of rumor dissemination under the transformation of Chinese society. [4]
For the research on the spread of rumors, Chinese scholars emphasize that the research background should be placed in the transformation reality of society and the current media pattern, such as Zhang Tingting's "Analysis of the Psychological Factors of the Deformation of The Content of Rumors in Public Crisis", Chen Wanhuan's "The Spread and Control of Current Social Rumors", etc. At the same time, domestic research on rumor dissemination is relatively scattered, and more research is directly based on the analysis of individual events. One of the most representative is to put the study of rumor dissemination in emergencies and crisis events. Chen Li's "Research on Rumors in Mass Emergencies: Taking the Wong An Incident and the Shishou Incident as An Examples" and Ou Yingfeng's "Rumor Spread and Control in Crisis Situations- Taking the Rumor of "Buying Code" in Fengqiao Village, Hunan Province as an Example" all directly take the incident as the research blueprint. The spread of rumors played an extremely crucial role in the development of the event, and its influence covered the entire process of the situation.