其他
外文橱窗 | 政治传播研究前沿
Propaganda has been perceived as ‘poison’ in the field of communication study. Xuanchuan, propaganda’s counterpart in China with a master metaphor of ‘seeder,’ however, has different histories and traditions that do not fit into the ideology-charged theoretical framework. Drawing upon Chinese thought and scholarship on xuanchuan/propaganda, the author demonstrates a deep conceptual and perceptual gap, rooted in culture, between propaganda and xuanchuan. Revelation of the gap is of paramount importance for studying China’s propaganda, both theoretically and empirically.
Scholars continue to debate how information and communications technology (ICT) influences civic behavior. Existing studies may be grouped into two approaches: ICT as a tool used to achieve a civic end, and ICT as an unanticipated influencer of how citizens view civic roles. This paper develops the second theory by testing moderated relationships between social media use, political identity, and citizen views of government service provision and spending. Regression results suggest that liberal users show greater preference for an active government, while conservatives show less preference.
During the last decennia media environments and political communication systems have changed fundamentally. These changes have major ramifications for the political information environments and the extent to which they aid people in becoming informed citizens. Against this background, the purpose of this article is to review research on key changes and trends in political information environments and assess their democratic implications. We will focus on advanced postindustrial democracies and six concerns that are all closely linked to the dissemination and acquisition of political knowledge: (1) declining supply of political information, (2) declining quality of news, (3) increasing media concentration and declining diversity of news, (4) increasing fragmentation and polarization, (5) increasing relativism and (6) increasing inequality in political knowledge.
This paper documents basic facts regarding public debates about controversial political issues on Chinese social media. Our documentation is based on a dataset of 13.2 billion blog posts published on Sina Weibo - the most prominent Chinese microblogging platform - during the 2009-2013 period. Our primary finding is that a shockingly large number of posts on highly sensitive topics were published and circulated on social media. For instance, we find millions of posts discussing protests and an even larger number of posts with explicit corruption allegations. This content may spur and organize protests. However, it also makes social media effective tools for surveillance. We find that most protests can be predicted one day before their occurrence and that corruption charges of specific individuals can be predicted one year in advance. Finally, we estimate that our data contain 600,000 government-affiliated accounts which contribute 4% of all posts about political and economic issues on Sina Weibo. The share of government accounts is larger in areas with a higher level of internet censorship and where newspapers have a stronger pro-government bias. Overall, our findings suggest that the Chinese government regulates social media to balance threats to regime stability against the benefits of utilizing bottom-up information.