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A study on Chinese bulletin board system forums: how Internet users contribute to set up the contemporary notions of family and marriage

2013; Routledge; Volume: 17; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1369118x.2013.854823

1468-4462

Weiming Ye, Mauro Sarrica, Leopoldina Fortunati,

Intergenerational Family Dynamics and Caregiving

AbstractThe family has always functioned as mediator between the individual and society in China, but in the last three decades, marriage and the family have taken on diverse trends in China's rural and urban regions. This paper aims to map out how online bulletin board system forums, with their open access, interaction, and anonymous nature, are contributing to a change in the concepts concerning family and marriage in contemporary China. From a large database, we selected 46 threads (with 100,932 messages posted by 14,097 accounts) that discuss family and marriage, adopting a lexicometric approach to map online contents. Results indicate that in online debates traditional Confucian values are conflicting with new individualistic trends, with traditional ideals complicated by social factors, including the policy-induced urban-rural divide, corruption, and extra-marital affairs.Keywords: BBSChinafamilymarriage AcknowledgementsThanks to Professor Yang Boxu from Peking University. Yang Boxu gave and confirmed his permission to use the Four-Forum database which is part of the project 'How do the Internet and mobile phone affect Chinese social and political life?' (No. 07BXW025), supported by the Chinese National Social Science Foundation.Furthermore, we thank very much Professor Michael Tooke who gave us great help regarding the structure and language of this paper.Notes on contributorsWeiMing Ye received her Ph.D. in Communication from Peking University. Her research interest includes computer-mediated communication, bulletin board systems and Social Network Sites in China, ICTs and intimate relationships, and ICTs and health care. She is now a lecturer in the Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School. [email:yewm@pkusz.edu.cn]Mauro Sarrica received his PhD in Personality and Social Psychology. He is a researcher at the Department of Communication and Social Research – Sapienza, University of Rome. His main interests are social construction of knowledge, stability and change of social beliefs, and peace psychology. His studies focus mainly on how people interpret and co-construct social reality in order to face changes and novelties. In this perspective he has investigated the social representation of Information and Communication Technologies, the impact of Internet on journalist's practices, the use of online forum to motivate and coordinate collective actions, and the changes in the representations of peace and war. [email: mauro.sarrica@uniroma1.it]Leopoldina Fortunati is the director of the doctoral programme in Multimedia Communication at the University of Udine, where she teaches Sociology of Communication and Culture. She has conducted several researches in the field of gender studies, cultural processes, and communication and information technologies. She is the Italian representative in the COST Domain Committee (ISCH, Individuals, Societies, Cultures, and Health). She is an associate editor of the journal The Information Society and serves as referee for many outstanding journals. She is the co-chair with Richard Ling of the International Association 'The Society for the Social Study of Mobile Communication' (SSSMC). Her works have been published in 11 languages: Bulgarian, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Slovenian, and Spanish. [email: fortunati.deluca@tin.it]Notes1. Human flesh searches are a primarily Chinese Internet phenomenon of massive researching using Internet media. They have generally been stigmatized as being for the purpose of identifying and exposing individuals to public humiliation. They are used for a number of reasons, including exposing government corruption, identifying hit and run drivers, and exposing scientific fraud.2. ROST Content Mining System has been developed by the ROST virtual learning team from Wuhan University, China. Downloaded from http://www.fanpq.com/?page_id=2. We used ROST to extract the co-occurrence set of high-frequency Chinese characteristic words and establish the frequency of each word.3. The absolute contribution of a point to a dimension is the proportion of inertia (variance) explained by the point. The sum of the contributions of the points to each factor is equal to 100. Only points with considerable value (i.e. >100/n, where n is the number of points) are discussed. In our case, it is 100/500 = 0.2 for words and 100/7 = 14.3 for categories.