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Abstract

With the intercultural exchanges between different countries becoming more and more frequent, the degree of cultural exchanges is gradually deepening, which brings more and more cultural security problems. As an important part of national security, cultural security is closely related to national interests. This article takes Chinese college students and social workers who just graduated as research objects, takes online comments on “hip-hop” culture and “funeral culture” as research objects, and uses literature research and empirical research methods to analyze social media comments and study the cultural security situation in China. It is concluded that online comments have a significant impact on cultural identity and cultural security, and negative online comments have a greater impact on both than positive online comments. In addition, cultural identity has a significant impact on cultural security. At the same time, the impact of cultural identity on online comments and cultural security is partly mediated. The results of this study will help to provide reference and guidance for the maintenance of cultural security.

Keywords

Cultural security cultural identity social media analysis situation awareness information security

Introduction

At present, with the increasing frequency of cross-cultural exchanges among countries, the degree of cultural interaction is gradually deepening. The problem of cultural security is becoming more and more obvious. Especially in today’s rapid development of information technology, as a kind of communication channel, social media has a great influence because of its openness, rapidity, and anonymity. Therefore, the research of cultural security situation based on social media analysis is a very meaningful research. Overall, the above studies mainly involve cultural security, cultural identity, social media cultural activities, and online reviews. Among these, cultural security refers to the ability and state of a sovereign country to maintain its cultural nature, develop its cultural function, and protect its cultural interests from threats and violations,¹ and cultural identity refers to the degree to which an individual identifies a certain culture.

This paper is organized as follows. First, the literature review is introduced, and then the theoretical models are showed. Then, the demonstration of the influence mechanism of microblog comments on cultural identity and cultural security is given in section “Empirical research.” Finally, section “Conclusion” gives the summary of this paper.

Literature review

Cultural security and cultural identity

Cultural security first appeared in Chinese literature in the 1980s, and Zhu¹ pointed out that the core of cultural security is the security of ideology and values. Thereafter, the research on national cultural security began to increase day by day, especially in 2014, Chairman Xi put forward the overall security concept, and cultural security as one of the most basic areas has been widely concerned by academia. There are four main areas in the study of cultural security as follows: the first is the connotation study of cultural security, such as Zhang,² who believes that cultural security comes with globalization. She points out that cultural security refers to the security of ideology, values, and national culture that a country develops and inherits; the second is the study of factors affecting cultural security. Generally speaking, the factors affecting cultural security can be divided into internal and external factors. Rong³ believed that popular culture, which rose in the 1980s, was the result of the infiltration of Western ideology into the mainstream ideology of our country, and its influence was the adjustment of national mentality and the remodeling of national character; the third is the study of the types of cultural security issues. Guo⁴ believed that in the compilation of the Chinese–English Dictionary, the errors in the interpretation of a few entries would affect culture. Security brings adverse effects; the fourth is how to realize the countermeasure of cultural security. Li⁵ believes that we should accelerate development and construct appropriate communication mode and strengthen the external media of Chinese culture.

Cultural identity refers to people’s recognition of their “cultural identity.” For example, Zheng and Wang⁶ hold that cultural identity refers to the degree to which the individual’s own cognition, attitude, and behavior are identical or consistent with that of most members of a culture. Cultural identity helps to maintain the independence of national culture in the context of global cultural conflict, thus avoiding the danger that national culture will be assimilated, swallowed up, and eliminated in the unequal exchange between strong culture and weak culture.⁷ The research on cultural identity mainly focuses on two aspects: the influencing factors of cultural identity and the structure of cultural identity.

Social media cultural events

There are many definitions of social media. For example, social media is a tool and platform for people to share opinions, opinions, experiences, and opinions with each other, which is closely related to social networks sites, such as mobile connectivity, blogging, and photo/video sharing.⁸ Social media does not simply refer to the wide array of media that enable sociality, but it refers to a set of tools, practices, and ideologies that emerged after the dot-com crash by a network of technologists primarily located in the Bay Area.⁹ Overall, social media refers to the content production and exchange platform based on user relationship on the Internet, and at this stage, it mainly includes social networking sites, microblogs, micro letters, forums, and so on. Relative to social media, social media cultural events refer to cultural events that are spread through social media platforms and have certain social significance and influence. It is generally known that social media not only provides the public with a platform for microblog communication, entertainment, and recreation, but also meets the needs of people to participate in political, economic, and social life. However, there are some negative behaviors such as ridicule, incitement, and threat in social media, and how to effectively manage the biased information behavior of social media is a challenge in the governance of cyberspace.

Online comments

As a typical representative of content sharing social media, online comments have attracted more and more scholars’ attention. For example, Springer et al. have studied the personal motives of reading reviews, which is carried out from four dimensions: cognitive dimension, entertainment dimension, social-integrative dimension, and personal identity dimension. In addition, they pointed out that commenters are driven by social-interactive motives to participate in journalism and to discuss with other users.¹⁰ As a literary style, comments are regarded as a political news genre. Usually, there are thousands of online comments on some hot and unexpected events, reflecting and guiding public opinion. Fan¹¹ believes that comments contain a lot of information and have their own characteristics. Shi and Zhang¹² proposed that the new media represented by Weixin and Weibo always influence people’s work and study, and will have a negative effect on college students’ cultural identity. As one of the most popular social media platforms in China, microblog is used to spread a large number of cultural events, such as through Sina Weibo. In the process of microblog dissemination, there will be many comments on cultural activities, including some users’ comments on other people’s opinions and experiences. In the above comments, there are often both positive and negative evaluations of cultural events. Whether negative or positive comments on cultural events, users will be reminded of the cultural significance behind the cultural events, especially the vicious cultural events. Therefore, the microblog platform is used as the source of comments to study the impact of comments on cultural events on cultural identity, and explore the impact mechanism of comments on cultural security in our study.

The theoretical models

Variable setting

Cultural security

National cultural security that refers to a country’s cultural and spiritual life is not interfered and controlled by foreign cultures, so as to maintain the national values, lifestyle, and national autonomy of its own ideology.¹³ Some scholars believe that the current cultural security problems in China mainly include the following aspects: traditional culture is distorted, social legal system is challenged, national values are misled, cultural ideology security is threatened, and ideology education innovation is not enough.^14–16 Referring to previous studies, this article studies cultural security from individual ideology, values, traditional culture, customs, and social ethics.

Cultural identity

Cultural identity can be used as a force to determine the change and remodeling of certain social standards, and it is an indispensable driving force to promote social development. If social development is always progressing by default, it is the dissemination and identification of culture that make social progress.¹⁷ According to the psychological meaning of identity, Ma et al.¹⁸ define the dimensions of cultural identity as cognitive cultural identity, emotional cultural identity, and behavioral cultural identity. Tajfel and Turner¹⁹ divide cultural identity into three categories: cognitive cultural identity, emotional cultural identity, and evaluative cultural identity. Cognitive components in cultural identity refer to individuals who realize that they are members of a regional group through self-classification, and try to obtain positive recognition of the group through membership. The emotional component of cultural identity refers to the individual’s emotional commitment and emotional input to the identity group. The evaluation component of cultural identity refers to whether an individual’s evaluation of the identity of a group member is positive or negative, that is, group self-esteem.

Online comments

Social media is a tool and platform for people to share opinions, opinions, experiences, and opinions with each other. At this stage, it mainly includes social networking sites, microblogs, micro letters, forums, and so on. As microblog integrates the characteristics of blog, forum, message board, and other online comment platforms, it has two characteristics: information dissemination and comment interaction. It is a completely open system,²⁰ and materials are relatively easy to collect. Therefore, online comments on microblog platform are used as experimental materials.

Theoretical model

Based on the literature, theoretical basis, and variables set up above, the theoretical model is proposed, as shown in Figure 1. Through the theoretical model of the impact of cultural identity on cultural security, this article studies the impact of online comments on cultural identity and cultural security. Cultural identity also affects cultural security. At the same time, cultural identity plays a moderating role between the impact of online comments and cultural security. Many studies have shown that demographic variables also have an impact on cultural identity, but this study does not study demographic variables, only as control variables in the model.

Figure 1.

Research model.

Research hypothesis

Online comments

Online comment is the evaluation of events by network users. Chatterjee²¹ put forward the concept of “online comment” for the first time when studying whether consumers will refer to the comments of purchased products. Hao et al.²² explored the influencing factors of the usefulness of online comments from the perspective of text characteristics, and found that online comments with positive and negative emotions are more useful. Most studies believe that the impact of negative reviews is more obvious than that of positive reviews. For example, some studies in the field of psychology have found that people give more weight to negative information than positive information in the process of evaluating an object. This article uses online comments, and the assumptions are as follows:

H1. Online comments have a significant impact on cultural identity.

H1a. Positive online comments have a positive impact on cultural identity.

H1b. Negative online comments have a negative impact on cultural identity.

H1c. Negative online comments have a greater impact on cultural identity than positive online comments.

Cultural security

Gong and Shen²³ believed that due to the continuous updating of various media forms, various negative cultures and vulgar values, and relying on the rapid spread of microblog, micromessaging, and other media, it is easy to cause the trend of the spread of erroneous ideas and ideological dilution, which poses a serious challenge to cultural security. Li²⁴ also believed that the prevalence of individualism and the supremacy of interests in cyber culture had brought a great impact on cultural security. Therefore, this article proposes the following hypothesis:

H2. Online comments have a significant impact on cultural security.

H2a. Positive online comments have a positive impact on cultural security.

H2b. Negative online comments have a negative impact on cultural security.

H2c. Negative online comments have a greater impact on cultural security than positive online comments.

Cultural identity

Meng²⁵ believed that in order to achieve cultural security, on the basis of cultural consciousness, a wide range of cultural identity was also needed. Meng also points out that cultural identity should include two aspects: identification with commonness and identification with differences.

This article proposes the following hypotheses:

H3. Cultural identity has a significant impact on cultural security.

At the same time, based on the above assumptions, the mediating effect of cultural identity on online comments and cultural security is proposed.

H4. There is a mediating role between the influence of cultural identity on online comments and cultural security.

H4a. There is a mediating effect between cultural identity and negative online comments and cultural security.

H4b. There is a mediating effect between cultural identity and positive online comments and cultural security.

Empirical research

Research purposes and object

This study combines literature research method and empirical research method, and uses questionnaire to study the influence mechanism of microblog comments on cultural identity and cultural security. This study has three purposes: the first is to study the impact of online comments on cultural identity, including positive and negative comments on social media cultural events; the second is to study the impact of cultural identity on cultural security; and the third is to study the mediating role of cultural identity on the impact between online comments and cultural security.

Zhang divided the problems of China’s cultural security into international and domestic aspects. She believed that the infiltration and invasion of Western culture had shaken the ideals and beliefs of the Chinese people, and has brought new challenges to China’s national spirit. The transition of domestic economic system and social transformation have caused tremendous changes in people’s ideas, and the social value orientation and evaluation criteria tend to be diversified and utilitarian.²⁶ Therefore, on the selection of cultural events, this article chooses two cultural events: one is the culture introduced from abroad, that is, “hip-hop culture,” and the other is a domestic cultural event, that is, “funeral culture.” Hip-hop is a kind of cultural form born on the streets of slums in the United States. It contains four elements: rap, DJ, floor break dance, and graffiti. The spirit behind this culture is people’s rebellion against restraint, yearning for freedom, and pursuit of self. At the same time, hip-hop culture is also full of violence, drugs, and so on, which is the reality of life of most young people in slums. Funeral culture refers to a cultural trend formed by young people expressing or displaying their frustration on the Internet or in their lives because of their unfavorable life, study, career, and emotions in real life. Appendix 1 provides part of some questionnaires of hip-hop culture and funeral culture of our study.

Data collection

In this study, 200 college students and social workers who just graduated (less than 3 years) were randomly invited to participate in the questionnaire on the Internet. The main reason for choosing the above-mentioned persons as the subjects of the survey is that the college students and the newly graduated social workers belong to the representative group of online commentators. This group of people pays more attention to cultural events and is also the main group for commenting, forwarding, and reading cultural events. The cultural identity of the two groups mentioned above is the core socialist values advocated by China, which are supported by curriculum in university education in China. At last, 180 questionnaires were collected, of which 6 invalid questionnaires were excluded and 174 questionnaires remained. On the basis of previous scholars’ measurement methods, and combined with the cultural issues of this study, the items of the questionnaire were determined. There are 10 comments on cultural events on Weibo, including five comments of “funeral culture” and five comments of “hip-hop culture.” There are nine comments on cultural identity, including cognitive cultural identity, emotional cultural identity, and evaluative cultural identity. There are five comments on cultural security. Whether it is to measure online comments or cultural identity and cultural security, questions are all in the form of Likert-type five-point scale, from total disagreement to total agreement (1–5). Finally, respondents need to fill in their age, gender, and educational level.

Data analysis

Reliability analysis

Reliability refers to the reliability of measurement data, that is, the stability and consistency of the results obtained by the test. The evaluation score shows how much people can trust. This experiment used SPSS software (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA) to analyze the reliability of 270 results of online comments, cultural identity, cultural security, and demographic variables. As shown in Table 1, generally speaking, Cronbach’s value is above 0.7, which can confirm the reliability of the measurement tool. Through the analysis of the data, we can see that Cronbach’s value is greater than 0.8, and the Cronbach’s value of each variable is above 0.7, which meets the research reliability standard, and the results are very good.

Table 1.

Reliability statistics.

Cronbach’s alpha	Number of terms
0.891	27

Validity analysis

Validity refers to the accuracy of measurement tools, that is, the degree to which the measurement results can reflect the characteristics of the measurement. In order to test the structural validity, factor analysis was used to measure the model. In general, the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) measurement and Bartlett’s test test are used to determine whether the question is suitable for factor analysis. Table 2 reflects the effect level of factor analysis represented by different ranges of KMO values. From the results of data analysis, it can be seen that the KMO values of all measurement items on the variables to be measured are greater than 0.5 (up to 0.9) and highly significant in statistics (p < 0.05). Therefore, the variable measurement scale in this study has good structural validity.

Table 2.

KMO and Bartlett’s test.

KMO sampling appropriateness quantity		0.925
Bartlett’s test	Chi-squared of last time	4270.124
	Variance	351
	Significance	0.000

KMO: Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin.

Relevance analysis

In this study, the Pearson correlation coefficient analysis method is used to analyze the correlation among independent online comments, dependent cultural security, and intermediary variables’ cultural identity. The results are shown in Table 3. In the table, we can see that the significance of each correlation coefficient is less than 0.05, so the correlation is significant. And, online comments have a significant correlation with cultural identity: negative comments and cultural identity are negatively related, and positive comments and cultural identity are positively related. Similarly, online comments and cultural security have also the same correlation; there is a high correlation between cultural identity and cultural security.

Table 3.

Relevance.

		Negative comments	Positive comments	Cultural identity	Cultural security
Negative comments	Pearson relevance	1	−0.152*	−0.282**	−0.275**
	Significance		0.046	0.000	0.000
Positive comments	Pearson relevance	−0.152*	1	0.261**	0.249**
	Significance	0.046		0.000	0.001
Cultural identity	Pearson relevance	−0.282**	0.261**	1	0.879**
	Significance	0.000	0.000		0.000
Cultural security	Pearson relevance	−0.275**	0.249**	0.879**	1
	Significance	0.000	0.001	0.000

p < 0.1, **p < 0.05.

Regression analysis

The online comments are taken as independent variables. Because the content of the comments is composed of positive comments and negative comments, the review materials are analyzed by the principal component analysis. After extracting the two principal components, the comments are named as positive comments and negative comments. Negative comments and positive comments are taken as independent variables, and cultural identity measured from three different dimensions is taken as a dependent variable; cultural identity is taken as an independent variable, and cultural security is taken as a dependent variable; negative comments and positive comments are taken as independent variables, and cultural security is taken as a dependent variable to make regression. The results are shown in Table 4.

Table 4.

Coefficient.

Non-standardization coefficient		Standardization coefficient	t	Significance
B	Standard error	Beta
2.095	0.672		3.117	0.002
−0.391	0.114	−0.248	−3.428	0.001
0.511	0.165	0.224	3.097	0.002
11.832	3.759		3.148	0.002
−2.134	0.638	−0.243	−3.347	0.001
2.702	0.922	0.213	2.930	0.004
1.794	0.656		2.736	0.007
4.895	0.202	0.879	24.195	0.000

In the table, we can see that the positive and negative comments on “funeral culture” and “hip-hop culture” have a significant impact on cultural identity (p < 0.05). Assuming H1 is established, positive online comments have a positive impact on cultural identity (coefficient is 0.224), negative online comments have a negative impact on cultural identity (coefficient is −0.248), H1a and H1b are established, and the other two systems are compared. After comparing the absolute value, we find that the negative comments on the Internet have more influence on cultural identity than the positive comments, so the hypothesis H1c is true.

Taking positive and negative comments as independent variables and cultural security as dependent variables, we can see that positive and negative comments on “funeral culture” and “hip-hop culture” have a significant impact on cultural security. Assuming H2 is established, positive online comments have a positive impact on cultural security (coefficient is 0.213), negative online comments have a negative impact on cultural security (coefficient is −0.243), and H2a and H2b are established. In addition, by comparing the absolute values of the two coefficients, we find that negative online comments have a greater impact on cultural security than positive comments, assuming H2c holds.

Taking cultural identity as an independent variable and cultural security as a dependent variable, we can see that cultural identity also has a significant impact on cultural security, so it is assumed that H3 is valid. At the same time, because the above assumptions H1, H2, and H3 are established, cultural identity plays a part of mediating role in the positive and negative comments and the impact of cultural security, and H4 is established.

Conclusion

Taking two cultural events of social media as examples, this study examines the influence mechanism of online comments on cultural identity, the influence mechanism of online comments on cultural security, and the mediating effect of cultural identity on online comments and cultural security. Through this empirical study, we can obtain the following conclusions and suggestions:

Comments of social media cultural events have a significant impact on cultural identity and cultural security. Positive comments have a positive impact on cultural identity and cultural security. Negative comments have a negative impact on cultural identity and cultural security. At the same time, negative comments have a greater impact on cultural identity and cultural security than positive comments on cultural identity and cultural security. This shows that in social learning, online comments on negative comments can more affect the user’s sense of cultural identity, and the impact on cultural security will be greater. Therefore, in order to enhance cultural identity and ensure cultural security, we must strengthen technical supervision, curb the emergence of comments that have a negative impact on culture, set up barriers in the commentary link through technological upgrading, and strengthen the review and governance.

Cultural identity plays an intermediary role in the influence of online comments and cultural security in social learning. Every microblog user is the most basic carrier of cultural identity. The reduction of negative comments by microblog users has an impact on cultural security. Therefore, improving people’s cultural identity is of great significance to resist the impact of online comments on cultural security.

Cultural identity has a significant impact on cultural security, which is consistent with previous studies by Meng²⁵ and Li²⁷ Therefore, in order to maintain cultural security, we need to treat local culture and foreign culture objectively, and improve people’s sense of cultural identity and grasp the great advantages of our culture.

In future studies, we need to consider the dynamics and development of cultural identity. With the development of cross-cultural communication, cultural integration has become inevitable. Different cultures are constantly communicating, merging and developing, forming new cultural forms, or enriching the original cultural content.

Footnotes

Appendix 1

This questionnaire is filled out anonymously. It is only for academic research and will not be used for other purposes. Thank you for your participation.

Part of some questionnaires of hip-hop culture and funeral culture.

Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments on the earlier draft of this article.

Handling Editor: Marcin Wozniak

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported in part by Major Project of Philosophy and Social Science Research, Ministry of Education of China (No. 19JZD010), Shanghai Philosophy and Social Sciences Plan (Nos 2016BGL004 and 2018BGL023), and International Cooperative Program of Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Commission of China (No. 16550720500).

ORCID iD

Yonghui Dai

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Study of situation awareness of cultural security based on social media analysis

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Literature review

Cultural security and cultural identity

Social media cultural events

Online comments

The theoretical models

Variable setting

Cultural security

Cultural identity

Online comments

Theoretical model

Research hypothesis

Online comments

Cultural security

Cultural identity

Empirical research

Research purposes and object

Data collection

Data analysis

Reliability analysis

Validity analysis

Relevance analysis

Regression analysis

Conclusion

Footnotes

Appendix 1

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

References