Research on Public Sphere in Cyberspace : Dominance, Verbal Conflict and Interaction Processes of China’s Online Forum

Many studies demonstrated that use of Internet could profoundly affect the balance of liberty and democracy in Western society, which has high level of Internet penetration. For the developing countries, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have huge potential to influence societies. This study is set in the context of China, a country which is undergoing economic and political development. Using Habermas’s theory of the public sphere as an analytical framework, this study identifies features of the public sphere and uses them as criterion to examine whether the sampled online forum can be viewed as public sphere. This research was conducted in a certain period of time when a new cultural policy was issued in China to ban online dissemination of unlicensed TV programs (especially overseas programs). The objectives of this research are to measure the real discussion process about a new policy and what are participants’ main views about this policy. A lot of studies about public sphere focus on discussion about political issues. The study chooses another angle to look into the cultural public sphere (MuGuigan, 2005) and aims to stress the value of public opinions formed among cultural consumers. In order to answer research questions in this study, both qualitative and qualitative methods are used to examine research questions, including content analysis, social network analysis and discourse analysis. A limited public sphere is found, which can provide a safe online space for participants to express voice freely, but at the same contains some potential challenges such as lack of rationality and speech responsibility. The implication for policy-makers is provided that participants of online forum are speaking to the power but in a one-way communication paradigm, and policy-makers should pay attention to their voice. This paper contributes to the study about cultural public sphere and social network analysis for online forum