The Generation Mechanism of Internet Rumors—Based on Consideration of Information Philosophy ^†

Abstract

The Internet rumor shows the great destructive power by means of Microblogs, WeChat and other emerging carriers. It can not only defame and belittle personal reputation, but also form a strong impact on social order and national stabilization. Therefore, the discussion of the generative mechanism of the Internet rumor is of practical significance. From Schramm’s model of communication, people play the role in the communication process as the receiver and spreader, encoding, decoding, and interpreting the code. Meanwhile, according to the information philosophy theory, the knowledge of a person and the creation of information are complex and random. And the communication of the rumors is closely related to the knowledge of the people spreading them. In the present study, we attempted to investigate the generative process of the Internet rumor by setting up an analytical framework for the underlying generative mechanism, deeply seeking methods to govern the Internet rumor.

1. Introduction

The “father of rumor research”, Allport, in his book The Psychology of Rumor, said that the generation of the rumor and its communication in the society medium is caused by the strong interests of the spreader, and the rumor can be simply summarized as the projection of some complete subjective feeling. Later on, a communication scholar, Kloss, considered that in his rumor formula, the judgment level of the public is also connected to the spreading of the rumor. The researches of the two scholars mentioned above thoroughly show that the preparation and spreading of gossip and rumor is closely correlated to the spreader “person”.

The communication model of Schramm shows that after the media obtains or receives the information sent through the information source, it needs the processing and sorting of the cryptographer, interpreter and the coder. For each cycle of decoding, encoding and interpreting of the code, the information will be interpreted or processed again in the communication in the group. Once the spreader has the deviated understanding of the knowledge and grasp of the information to be spread by them, information forging, breaking, misinterpreting, hollowness, fault and various conditions would appear, and the rumor appears correspondingly.

2. Based on the Theory of Information Philosophy

Based on the information philosophy theory, it can been seen that the information system theory takes these matters as a whole information system, and subsequently analyzes them. Hence, the creation of information in the information system theory is complex and random. As a kind of information, the creation of the rumor is also the actual processing and recombining of information. In the information creation working mode, after the information set is processed and recombined by the information processer, the new information set becomes different from the original one; but this difference has no relation with the generation of the rumor. Furthermore, this random and complex information processing method will cause the appearance of various information sets, and the various versions of the rumor will be due to this random and complex feature of the information processing method.

In addition, the knowledge of the spreader plays an important role in the generation process of the rumor, and the knowledge level influences the judgment of information. In The Philosophy of Information, it is known that knowledge cannot be generated directly, and that it must rely on the medium; and that this “medium” may be complex and multi-level [1]. The medium includes the existing knowledge structure of the person, such as the personal experience of the spreader. In the communication of the information, the spreader will discriminate and process the information received according to their personal emotion, value and beauty-appreciation experiences, etc. This will make the information lose its original features in the communication process or generate “thousands of Hamlets”. That is, the more medium involved, the more changes will occur on the same information. Therefore, the rumor appears correspondingly.

3. Conclusions

In the present study, it is known that the generation of the Internet rumor is directly related to the spreader and the spreader’s knowledge, and the processing and recombining of information in the information creation working mode is the reason for the Internet rumor in view of information system theory. It is hoped that this study can be helpful for philosophical reflection and effective governance on the Internet rumor in these different views, thus forming a good social Internet environment. However, it should be pointed that due to the complex features of a person, the inherent random features of information in the recombining process, and the open complex and giant system feature of the internet, it will be a long and challenging task to eliminate the Internet rumor with this special communication phenomenon.