Agenda Setting and Micro-blog Use: An Analysis of the Relationship between Sina Weibo and Newspaper Agendas in China

Abstract

Micro-blogging is a broadcast medium in the form of blog posts, the diffusion of which is expanding alongside social networking. Fotisrsquo; review of the social networking literature suggests that online social networks (OSNs) are displacing traditional mass media outlets as sources of information. Since their arrival on college campuses in 2005, OSNs have diffused to a critical mass in the U.S. population, having doubled in penetration between 2008 and 2011to reach half of the adult population; the shorter-form (140 character) Twitter service is used by 13% of online adults and averages 40 million tweets a day (Lin amp; Atkin, in press).

Since it was initiated as the first micro-blog service in the U.S., Twitter has grown exponentially. On March 11, 2011--the day of the Japan earthquake and tsunami--the number of Twitter users exceeded the average daily tweets by 37 million, which amounted to 177 million tweets in a single day. Some 572,000 new accounts were created the following day (Huffingtonpost.com, 2011). Around the world, people sent more than 60 billion Tweets in 2011, each one reflecting a particular perspective and point in time.

These micro-blogs are one of the most fashionable and popular instant-message sharing platforms in China as well, where 23% of Internet users have adopted OSNs (of the 47% of Chinese who are online). Sina Weibo was first launched by Sina.com on August 14, 2009 and is the most popular micro-blogging website at present. According to the 28th report released by the China National Network Information Center (2011), “In the first half of 2011, the scale of micro-blog users remained a trend of soaring growth. June 2011, the number of Chinese micro-blog users hit 195 million, having doubled in six months, for a growth rate: 208.9%.”

With the proliferation of micro-blogs, micro-blogging has beenquickly gaining popularity and become an effective tool of communication for the quick organization of protests, help/advice, and sharing information from media sources, enabling unfamiliar groups of people to relay information of interest (Lee amp; Chan, 2012). This ability to disseminate information among social networks that lie outside the control of institutions—such as the traditional media—has had a profound impact on traditional mediarsquo;s agenda setting power immediately after an accident. The present study investigates the influence of micro-blogs on the major agenda-setting media in China during the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic railway accident. In particular, we investigate whether the singular agenda setting function monopolized by the traditional Chinese media is circumvented by micro-blogging following an accident that attracted national attention.

Literature Review

Walter Lippmann stated in his landmark book Public Opinion that people did not respond directly to events in the real world but instead lived in a pseudo-environment composed of “the pictures in our heads.” He nominated the media as a primary determinant of this pseudo-environment. Expanding on this agenda-setting effect, Cohen (1963) observed that: “The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.” In their groundbreaking work, McCombs and Shaw (1972) concluded that the mass media exerted a significant influence on what voters considered to be the major issues of a political campaign. Studies of agenda setting have found a strong relationship between the media and public agendas. McCombs (2000) concludes,“The power of the news media to set a nationrsquo;s agenda, to focus public attention on a few key public issues, is an immense and well documented influence”.

Agenda setting was formulated when traditional media had monopoly power over the tools of content creation and distribution . This conception allowed traditional media to be the central power in agenda setting over a passive public. The advance and diffusion of new media technologies has given rise to research on intermedia agenda setting. This process addresses the ways in which different outlets can set agendas for each other. Pioneering work on intermedia agenda setting, following a topical approach, examined the salience transfer of individual agenda

items between media outlets and modalities .

With the proliferation of social media, research on social media and agenda setting—as well as traditional media influences on the social mediarsquo;s agenda—began to emerge. For example, Adamic and Glance found that political blogs link to news articles more than other blogs, while Scott noted that mainstream media sources are the dominant source in the four A-list blogs in his study. Other work further underscores the dominant function of traditional media in agenda setting, with Reese et al. finding greater reliance on traditional media than citizen media within top, citizen media outlets.

McKenna inds that those so-called policy bloggers frequently fact check the mediarsquo;s coverage on the issues they blog about. The issue of whether social media has any agenda setting power that may affect the universality of traditional media agenda-setting reach was explored as well, with more and more citizen media platforms providing the average citizen greater opportunity to be a news source . McCombs noted that, “whether the basic agenda setting effects of news media continue in much the same fashion as the previous decades or eventually disappear because of the changing media landscape, measuring these effects will remain high on the research agenda for at least the near term”. Two conflicting results were observed on the subject: Some scholars have found that a dominant, sin

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附录 译文

议程设置和微博客使用范围：

在中国的新浪微博和报纸的议程之间的关系分析

摘要

推特一种依靠社交网络，以博客的形式进行传播的传播媒介。FORIS对社交网络文学的评价暗示着社交网络正在取代传统的大众媒体，成为新的信息来源。自2005年社交网络在大学校园里出现以来，它已经扩展到了美国人口临界质量，普及率在2008年和2011年之间翻了一番，达到成年人口数量的一半。13%的网民会使用微博，平均每天有亿条推特在这里发布。由于推特被认为是美国微博客的开端，推特已成倍增长。2011年3月11日，日本发生地震海啸的当天，Twitter的用户数量超过了平均每天3700万，总量为1.77亿。在接下来的几天，572000个新帐户被创建。2011年，全世界的人们发送了超过60亿条推特。每一条推特都反映了特定时间的视角和观点。

这些微博是中国最时尚和流行的即时消息交流平台之一，也是其中的互联网用户的23％都采用了嗅觉神经元（对中国谁是网上的47％）。新浪微博于2009年8月14日由新浪网首次推出，是目前最热门的微博客网站。中国国家网络信息中心（2011年）发布的第28次报告只出，“在2011年上半年，微博用户规模增长态势持续飙升。”2011年6月，中国微博用户数为1.95亿，在半年内翻了一番，成长率为208.9％

随着微博客的普及，微博已迅速流行起来并成为一种有效的沟通工具，一种抗议、协助/咨询的平台，并分享来自媒体的信息，使信息在陌生人之间传递。这种通过社交网络来传播信息的能力，会使得谣言不受类似传统媒体的机构的控制，在一起事故后，立即对传统议程设置产生了深远的影响。目前的研究调查了在灾难性铁路事故期间，微博在中国主要的议程设置媒体中的影响。我们将重点探讨中国的传统媒体垄断的单一的议程设置功能是否正在被微博所取代，吸引着全国的关注。

文献综述

沃尔特·李普曼在其经典著作《舆论学》中提出了他的观点：“新闻媒介影响lsquo;我们头脑中的图像rsquo;”他将这一媒体命名为拟态环境的一个重要的决定性因素。 1963年，伯纳德·科恩提出了对“议程设置”最有影响力的表述：“在多数时间，报界在告诉它的读者该怎样想时可能并不成功；但它在告诉它的读者该想些什么时，却是惊人地成功”。麦库姆斯和肖具有开创性的结论是，大众媒体向选民施加政治运动的重大问题时，影响显著。议程设置研究发现媒体和公众议程之间有很强的关系。麦库姆斯认为，“新闻媒体的力量，树立了国家的议程，公众关注的几个关键的公共问题，是一个巨大的，有据可查的影响力”。

议程设置是在制定传统媒体有垄断权的内容创建和发布的工具。这种观念允许传统媒体在被动的公众议程设置中处于领导地位。新媒体技术的发展和普及推动了对媒介间议程设置的研究。这种做法为议程设置提供了不同的途径。可以设置议程对方的方式。研究个别议程的显着性转移 。

随着社交网络的发展，有关社交网络和议程设置，以及社交网络对传统媒体的影响的研究开始出现。例如，亚当和格伦发现，政治博客链接到新闻文章的数量超过其他博客。而斯科特在他的研究中指出，主流媒体的资源主要来自A-list微博中的主导言论。其他工作进一步强调了传统媒体的议程设置的主要功能，发现比起小众媒介，媒介更大程度上依赖传统媒介。

麦肯纳指出，那些所谓的政策博客其实经常检查他们博客上所涉及的问题的范围。随着越来越多的公民媒体平台为网民提供了更多使他们成为新闻的机会，社交媒体是否有可能影响传统媒体议程设置普遍性的问题也已经进行了探讨。麦库姆斯指出，“无论新媒体的基本议程设置是还是以与之前的几十年大致相同的作用产生影响，或是由于媒介环境的变化而最终消失，测量这些影响在短期内将在研究议程设置中持续走高。”在课题中，两个相互矛盾的结果是显而易见的：有学者发现，尽管诸如电子公告板，博客之类的社交网络正在迅速发展，但传统媒体的议程设置功能仍在继续。余和艾克发现，在门户网站与电视、报纸等传统媒介之间出现了聚合议程设置现象。 Cornfield研究表明，传统媒体对博客相关性有78%的影响，相反，68%的博客对传统媒体相关性有影响。其他人发现，社交媒体确实有独立的议程设置功能来影响传统媒体。

附录 外文原文

Agenda Setting and Micro-blog Use: An Analysis of the Relationship between Sina Weibo and Newspaper Agendas in China

Abstract

Micro-blogging is a broadcast medium in the form of blog posts, the diffusion of which is expanding alongside social networking. Fotisrsquo; review of the social networking literature suggests that online social networks (OSNs) are displacing traditional mass media outlets as sources of information. Since their arrival on college campuses in 2005, OSNs have diffused to a critical mass in the U.S. population, having doubled in penetration between 2008 and 2011to reach half of the adult population; the shorter-form (140 character) Twitter service is used by 13% of online adults and averages 40 million tweets a day (Lin amp; Atkin, in press).

Since it was initiated as the first micro-blog service in the U.S., Twitter has grown exponentially. On March 11, 2011--the day of the Japan earthquake and tsunami--the number of Twitter users exceeded the average daily tweets by 37 million, which amounted to 177 million tweets in a single day. Some 572,000 new accounts were created the following day (Huffingtonpost.com, 2011). Around the world, people sent more than 60 billion Tweets in 2011, each one reflecting a particular perspective and point in time.

These micro-blogs are one of the most fashionable and popular instant-message sharing platforms in China as well, where 23% of Internet users have adopted OSNs (of the 47% of Chinese who are online). Sina Weibo was first launched by Sina.com on August 14, 2009 and is the most popular micro-blogging website at present. According to the 28th report released by the China National Network Information Center (2011), “In the first half of 2011, the scale of micro-blog users remained a trend of soaring growth. June 2011, the number of Chinese micro-blog users hit 195 million, having doubled in six months, for a growth rate: 208.9%.”

With the proliferation of micro-blogs, micro-blogging has beenquickly gaining popularity and become an effective tool of communication for the quick organization of protests, help/advice, and sharing information from media sources, enabling unfamiliar groups of people to relay information of interest (Lee amp; Chan, 2012). This ability to disseminate information among social networks that lie outside the control of institutions—such as the traditional media—has had a profound impact on traditional mediarsquo;s agenda setting power immediately after an accident. The present study investigates the influence of micro-blogs on the major agenda-setting media in China during the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic railway accident. In particular, we investigate whether the singular agenda setting function monopolized by the traditional Chinese media is circumvented by micro-blogging following an accident that attracted national attention.

Literature Review

Walter Lippmann stated in his landmark book Public Opinion that people did not respond directly to events in the real world but instead lived in a pseudo-environment composed of “the pictures in our heads.” He nominated the media as a primary determinant of this pseudo-environment. Expanding on this agenda-setting effect, Cohen (1963) observed that: “The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.” In their groundbreaking work, McCombs and Shaw (1972) concluded that the mass media exerted a significant influence on what voters considered to be the major issues of a political campaign. Studies of agenda setting have found a strong relationship between the media and public agendas. McCombs (2000) concludes,“The power of the news media to set a nationrsquo;s agenda, to focus public attention on a few key public issues, is an immense and well documented influence”.

Agenda setting was formulated when traditional media had monopoly power over the tools of content creation and distribution . This conception a

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