Social Network-Based Folk Culture Propagation in the Digital Age: Analyzing Dissemination Mechanisms and Influential Factors

Abstract

The rapid development of the internet has ushered the real world into a “media-centric” digital era where virtually everything serves as a medium. Leveraging the new attributes of interactivity, immediacy, and personalization facilitated by online communication, folklore has found a broad avenue for dissemination. Among these, online social networks have become a vital channel for propagating folklore. By using social network theory, we devise a comprehensive approach known as SocialPre. Firstly, we utilize embedding techniques to capture users' low-level and high-level social relationships. Secondly, by applying an automatic weight assignment mechanism based on the embedding representations, multi-level social relationships are aggregated to assess the likelihood of a social interaction between any two users. These experiments demonstrate the ability to classify different social groups. In addition, we delve into the potential directions of folklore evolution, thus laying a theoretical foundation for future folklore communication.