Determinants of message salience in blogosphere

: an examination of the framing effects in Web2.0 context

Abstract

The rapid development of blog service and prevalence of blogging behavior give rise to the new social convention of public discussion online. In virtue of the new media for public deliberation featured by high accessibility, usability, interactivity and wild connectivity, the viewing pattern of audience is shifting from the "first-come-first-serve" principle in the traditional media use context to the keywords-navigation and random-walk-through-weblinks fashions in the online world. The change of audience behavior inevitably brings about the changes in the mechanism of agenda-setting, the prominent function of media that has interested researchers all the time. The research question has always been in what capacity the media agenda is likely to influence on public agenda. Message salience, as the direct reflection of audiences' selective attention to the media contents, is an intuitive observation on the public agenda online. Thereby this thesis provides an integrative investigation on the determinants of message salience or the public agenda online, which in particular emphasizes on the impact of attributes of blog contents on message salience instead of merely the role of temporal or spatial unit in which the contents are presented. The key proposition of the thesis is that attribute matters in determining the public agenda online. In light of the previous studies on framing effect, this thesis re-examines the agenda-setting mechanism in an The rapid development of blog service and prevalence of blogging behavior give rise to the new social convention of public discussion online. In virtue of the new media for public deliberation featured by high accessibility, usability, interactivity and wild connectivity, the viewing pattern of audience is shifting from the "first-come-first-serve" principle in the traditional media use context to the keywords-navigation and random-walk-through-weblinks fashions in the online world. The change of audience behavior inevitably brings about the changes in the mechanism of agenda-setting, the prominent function of media that has interested researchers all the time. The research question has always been in what capacity the media agenda is likely to influence on public agenda. Message salience, as the direct reflection of audiences' selective attention to the media contents, is an intuitive observation on the public agenda online. Thereby this thesis provides an integrative investigation on the determinants of message salience or the public agenda online, which in particular emphasizes on the impact of attributes of blog contents on message salience instead of merely the role of temporal or spatial unit in which the contents are presented. The key proposition of the thesis is that attribute matters in determining the public agenda online. In light of the previous studies on framing effect, this thesis re-examines the agenda-setting mechanism in an including the impact of external media agenda is conducted, finding that the current path model retains sufficient explanatory power. The independent variables in the path model altogether have explained 34.2% of the variance in the dependent variable.

Date of Award	2 Oct 2009
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Jian Hua Jonathan ZHU (Supervisor)