| Summary: | 碩士 === 世新大學 === 新聞學研究所(含碩專班) === 96 === This study is based on the spiral of silence theory and designed specifically to exam how the spiral of silence works on the Internet. This study adopts computer online survey to test the spiral of silence on the Internet. A sample of 355 respondents are collected from the Internet. Besides, this research also adopts the concept of segmentation in order to investigate the online opinion- expression. And text analysis would be conducted to observe “political,” “KMT” & “DPP” boards of PTT, the popular BBS in Taiwan.
Results show that the spiral of silence effect really works on the Internet. First of all, internet user has quasi- statistic organ, just like the people in real society. They are able to differentiate the varieties of the boards. In outspokenness, research shows that individual’s opinion and their perception of the future opinion trends of real society would determine internet user’s willingness to speak up. On the other hand, individual’s perception of the current online opinion distribution and the future online opinion trends are not related to willingness to voice one’s opinion. In addition, this study also find “hardcore” on the Internet. In demography, individual’s political attitude is the only one factor which would influence individual to perceive the online future opinion trends. And one’s gender, education, age, and political attitude are related to influence one’s perception of future opinion trends of real society.
In fear of isolation, anonymity, one characteristic of the internet, could not decrease one’s fear of isolation. And two results have found no support for the spiral of silence theory. The first one is that the lower one’s willingness to speak up, the less they would fear the isolation, when they are on the following three situations, “discussing on the anti-desinicization board,” “supporting the one who expressing anti-desinicization on the for-desinicization board” and “supporting the one who expressing for-desinicization on the anti-desinicization board.” The latter is that once individual has neutral attitude on the above three situations, they fear the isolation most. The last, “political,” “KMT” and “DPP” boards do not link to other kinds of websites with diverse viewpoints. And anti-desinicization is the mainstream in the above three boards. It shows that the current opinion distribution would influence one’s willingness to speak.
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