http://dspace.cityu.edu.hk:80/handle/2031/5382 2013-04-30T12:09:22Z 2013-04-30T12:09:22Z Zhang, Wei ( 張薇) http://dspace.cityu.edu.hk:80/handle/2031/6506 2012-08-07T07:43:22Z 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Discursive contestation in China's marketized media : coverage of the torch relay incident in Beijing Olympics Authors: Zhang, Wei ( 張薇) Abstract: After three decades of economic reform, mass media in China have had to meet the challenges of political pressure and fierce market competition. These challenges have produced ideological contestation between media discourses. This study focuses on the coverage of the torch relay incidents prior to the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 by the Global Times and the Southern Metropolis Daily, both of which set the boundary of official tolerance over media discourse on issues of political controversy. The Global Times, a subsidiary of the People’s Daily that reflects the Chinese government’s foreign policy, constructed the torch relay as a showcase of the prowess and achievements of the party-state so as to justify the legitimacy of the regime as well as to arouse nationalistic emotions against foreign criticism. It seeks to commodify official ideology as profitable information goods through sensationalized discursive strategies. On the other hand, the Southern Metropolis Daily, which is widely regarded as the most liberal and outspoken newspaper in China, framed the same event as an opportunity to reflect on how China can be a member of the international community. It adopts the professional convention of balance reporting to champion the universal values as embraced by the Olympic Games. Finally, the study maintained that marketization has partially expanded the ideological boundary of media discourses in China. Notes: CityU Call Number: GV721.92 .Z45 2010; iv, 106 leaves : ill. 30 cm.; Thesis (M.Phil.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2010.; Includes bibliographical references (leaves 98-102)

2010-01-01T00:00:00Z Zhang, Lun ( 張倫) http://dspace.cityu.edu.hk:80/handle/2031/6505 2012-08-07T07:43:20Z 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Growth model of online friendship and individual, dyadic, and network determinants Authors: Zhang, Lun ( 張倫) Abstract: The online social networking sites (SNSs), which have rocketed from technique engaging niche users into a dominant online communication platform engaging millions of users, may change the pattern of online interpersonal communication. The study found that dyadic characteristics and structural factors largely determined the behavior of friendship formation, rather than characteristics of users. The data of the current study are collected from one of the largest SNS platforms in China, coving the first two years (2006-07) since its inception, during which time most users of the SNS were college students. The dataset records an anonym zed ID, demographic characteristics, a list of bidirectional friends and the time of the friendship formation. In total, 10 million users and 200 million bidirectional ties are involved. Using polynomial logistic regression to fit the time path of friendship formation for each individual user, the study finds that the increase in the number of friends for each user typically follows a Logistic function with time, indicating that the growth of friends starts slowly at the beginning, speeds up rapidly after reaching a critical point, and then tapers off finally. More importantly, the trajectories appear uniformly, if not identically, across individuals who joined the social network at quite different points in time, suggesting a high degree of regularity in user behavior when forming friendship. This study further examines the growth trajectory of friendship of the entire SNS, and compares the resulting of global-level trajectory with the individual-level trajectories. Surprisingly, there emerges a strong self-similarity in the growth of friendship between the individual level and the global level, which reinforces the regularity of social friendship formation behavior. Although users show a similar time path of adding friends, there are substantial differences across individuals in the sheer size of their friendship networks. As the second research objective, the study examines the effects of three sets of factors, including characteristics of network structure, characteristics of dyadic friendship, and characteristics of individual users, on the likelihood of the friendship formation. Of the factors under study, Balance Structure and the Cohesiveness of User's Ego Network (which involves the user as the "ego-center" and only directly-related friends as other members of the network) are the two most dominant factors influencing the tie formation. Contrary to the prevailing theory of "Preferential Attachment" in the previous literature, friendship formation is positively related to Homophily of Degree (i.e, number of friends), which means that people make friends with similar (rather than famous) others. In addition, the Popularity of the user and his/her Experience with using the SNS has a negative effect on friendship formation, i.e., users with higher popularity or longer SNS using history are less likely to add new friends. Likewise, Homophily of Experience has also a negative effect on friendship formation in that users become increasingly inclined to establish friendship with those with different duration of experience with the SNS (i.e., veteran users are more likely to add new comers whereas new comers more likely to team up with veterans), which suggests that friendship formation is a dynamic process throughout which users change their friendship strategies over time. Finally, individual characteristics, such as Sex and level of online Self-Disclosure, do not have any significant effect on the tie formation, which in fact strengthens the importance of structural factors reported above. The findings of structural effects on friendship formation sheds some lights on social media marketing in the sense that online marketers could choose marketing information initiators according to users network positions, rather than users SNS usage frequency or motivation. In addition, this study also has some practical implications on SNS operators. Considering the strategy of retaining user loyalty, SNS operators should focused more on the friendship maintenance, such as encouraging the creation of user generated contents and developing tools to facilitate information sharing, rather than simply encouraging friendship formation since most users will stop adding new friends after they reach their saturation point. Notes: CityU Call Number: HM742 .Z44 2011; x, 181 leaves : ill. 30 cm.; Thesis (Ph.D.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2011.; Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-135)

2011-01-01T00:00:00Z Huang, Shunming ( 黃順銘) http://dspace.cityu.edu.hk:80/handle/2031/6504 2012-08-07T07:43:18Z 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Manufacturing professional honor : journalism award institution as social control in China Authors: Huang, Shunming ( 黃順銘) Abstract: This dissertation investigates China‟s journalism award institution and its practice from the perspective of social control. It makes a central argument that the party-state enacts social control over news people by manufacturing journalism awards within the institutional framework of state corporatism. State corporatism explains the top-down control over official journalism awards, characterized by the strong vertical interactions (between peak organizations and their local members) on the one hand, and the weak or even lack of horizontal interactions (among local professional organizations at the same levels) on the other. The argument is elaborated as six dimensions: institutionalization, historical icon, opportunity structure, gatekeeping, ritual, and professional elites. Chapter 2 traces the history in which journalism awards were established as a formal institution of professional honor at the turn of the 1980s, alongside social transformation from the Maoist to post-Mao era. The clampdown on the democracy movement in 1989 marked a watershed, witnessing the tightening of control. Chapter 3 investigates how certain journalists were iconized as journalism awards. By placing these icons back into the historical contexts, the chapter uncovers the vicissitudes of their living and posthumous reputations, and their posthumous images constructed by the collective memory. Present-day news people neither identify uncritically with officially designated icons nor accept official professional interpellations at face value. Chapter 4 shows that official journalism awards have invented a set of institutional mechanisms to shape and manage the opportunities of professional honors, resulting in a particularistic type of opportunity structure. Chapter 5 performs a preliminary analysis of the gatekeeping practice. The judges sitting on the award committees are typically power-oriented and produce symbolic orders of honor that satisfy the propaganda authorities. Chapter 6 examines the ritual of official and non-official award ceremonies. Chapter 7 paints a quantitative portrait of the Changjiang & Taofen Award winners. Chapter 8 summarizes four basic social-control functions of journalism awards: indexing, purification, demonstration effect, and co-optation. It also reflects on three sets of relations revolving around journalism awards, to wit, press control and honorary control, journalism awards and journalistic excellence, and journalism award and media marketization. In sum, official journalism awards in China represent a state-corporatist model of professional honors, distinctive sharply from such professional-community models as the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Academy Award. Notes: CityU Call Number: PN5367.A87 H83 2011; viii, 220 leaves : ill. 30 cm.; Thesis (Ph.D.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2011.; Includes bibliographical references (leaves 195-220)

2011-01-01T00:00:00Z Qian, Li (錢莉) http://dspace.cityu.edu.hk:80/handle/2031/6285 2011-05-25T01:20:34Z 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Corporate blogs : new opportunities for the organizational crisis response Authors: Qian, Li (錢莉) Abstract: As the Internet constantly brings about dramatic changes to crisis communication, two-way communication is increasingly believed to be far more effective for crisis response than the traditional top-down, one-way communication. This study aims to explore an effective crisis response strategy in view of the ever growing corporate blogs, in hopes to report as a typical interactive online communication tool, whether blogs can be adopted as a novel effective crisis response tool. A two-by-two factorial experiment was conducted, with four kinds of sites manipulating the types (Website and blog), and the hosts (company and news organization) of online crisis response tools. One hundred and twenty Hong Kong students reported their attitude toward a hypothetic company involved in a product recall crisis after being exposed to the crisis response which was posted on one kind of the sites. Results supported that (a) crisis response posted on the Website or blogs hosted by the company itself would get more positive audience impression, and then lead to more positive attitude toward the company; (b) crisis response posted on the corporate blog would get higher evaluation than the corporate Website on the interactive features, and then lead to more positive attitude toward the company; (c) crisis response posted by online news organization would have higher perceived credibility than that posted by the company itself. Implications for the selection of crisis response tools and formulation of relevant crisis response strategies are also discussed. Notes: CityU Call Number: HD49 .Q25 2009; vi, 88 leaves 30 cm.; Thesis (M.Phil.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2009.; Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-82)

2009-01-01T00:00:00Z