Online Politics

Apart from the exchanging of information, an important role of conversation and communication is to promote social harmony through the maintenance of relationships. This is referred to as the ‘phatic’ function of communication. Indeed, digital communications technologies, and social media in particular, have been lauded for their potential to promote activism and social change through ‘raising awareness’ of injustices, their ability to motivate people into political action, and the facility to organise and co-ordinate that action for maximum effect.

In this paper, I build upon previous arguments which suggested that the rise of social networking demonstrated that online culture and communication had become increasingly ‘phatic’ and less dialogic. Here I use previous empirical work to challenge the above claims of digital politics enthusiasts. I then suggest an alternative theoretical account of the function of digital media activism which better suits these empirical findings. I suggest that digital politics demonstrates a rise of ‘phatic communion’ in social media. Incorporating Heidegger’s notion of ‘idle talk’, I further suggest that the rise of a phatic online culture in social media activism has atrophied the potential for digital communications technologies to help foster social change by creating a conversational environment based on limited forms of expressive solidarity as opposed to an engaged, content-driven, dialogic public sphere.

Keywords: Phatic, Heidegger, Clicktivism, Social Media, Online Politics, Multitude, Arab Spring, Occupy, Twitter, Facebook.

Please see the link below to access the paper. If you do not have access to Convergence, feel free to send me a message and i will e-mail you a copy.

Many advocates of deliberative democracy see in the Internet a new opportunity for the development of public spaces, public spheres, and places where deliberation can take place. An important element of the notion of the public sphere in general and of deliberation specifically, is the quality of the debate. In the past decade, many studies have been conducted to evaluate online discussions in light of the ideal notion of the public sphere. However, a wide gap exists between theoretical approaches and the actual operationalization of such theories for empirical research. In an attempt to bridge this gap we develop a method for examining the extent to which Internet forums meet the normative requirements of rational-critical debate, reciprocity, and reflexivity. The methodological approach consists of a textual analysis of the contributions made to an online forum. The coding scheme presented in this article is based on a case study (UK Online) and guided by the theoretical notions of deliberative democracy.

Talking politics online is not exclusively reserved for those spaces dedicated to politics, particularly the everyday political talk crucial to the public sphere. However, past net-based public sphere research has focused mostly on political spaces thereby neglecting an array of other genres. The aim of this article is to move beyond politically oriented communicative spaces by investigating political talk within the British reality TV discussion forum Wife Swap. The purpose is to see whether a forum dedicated to reality TV provides the communicative space, content, and style for politics that extends the public sphere. The central question is whether it fulfils the requirements of rationality and ‘decent’ deliberation. Moreover, the analysis moved beyond a formal notion by investigating how expressives influence the more traditional elements of deliberation. The findings revealed that Wife Swap participants engaged in political talk that was often deliberative. Moreover, it was a space where the use of expressives played a key role in enhancing such talk.

When musical parodies as ‘authentic imitations’ of existing artistic compositions or cultural memes are transmitted through social media, the general public may be provoked and confronted with mixed reactions on decency and other moral issues.  This has the potential conflating to a catastrophic state especially when the audiovisual data have instantly been enabled for public access.

The ‘listen, listen, listen’ phenomenon started when a video, which depicts a moderator named Sharifah Zohra Jabeen dismissing a student from asking questions at a forum held in a local university, went viral on social media on 14 January 2013, while her abusive ‘listen’ catch-line and other humiliating remarks catapulted the public uproar overnight. Immediately following the incident, there came a few parody videos, which appear both satirical and entertaining, to underscore a typical paradox that apparently parallels the many underlying problems of the education and politics in Malaysia, and thus ‘listen, listen, listen’ significantly emerges as a contemporary Internet meme.

This paper deals with a hermeneutic study on the ‘listen, listen, listen’ phenomenon based on online comments YouTube members have posted (3,583 as of 10 October) for a musical parody produced and published by Yuri Wong on 14 January. As commentary from other available Internet platforms is analysed, the use of audiovisual data is also technically observed and interpreted. When net citizens drastically involved themselves through actions of liking, disliking, sharing or commenting on the social media, are they more voluble and honest on the Internet platform? Through this musical parody, what idea did they gather to reflect the reality in Malaysia? Are they ready to appreciate musical parodies?

The discussion continues on possible reactions of the censors in the event when musical parodies allegedly ‘collide’ with the ‘national security concerns’.

With the introduction of the Internet, digital cameras, and smartphones, the selfie has emerged as an important trend. To date, research has focussed predominantly on homogenous groups of participants, examining if and why they portray themselves online; these investigations have been exclusively concerned with analysing identity construction on the platforms Facebook and Twitter. This investigation aims to obtain a deeper, more personalised understanding of how women aged between 20 and 25 attending UK universities portray themselves through selfies on Instagram. Through semi-structured interviews, selfie activities have been analysed within the framework of Erving Goffman’s (1956) theory of dramaturgy from his book ‘The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’, as well as those of other studies. Results revealed all women to strive for a curated online portrayal in which a beautiful, attractive self was balanced with certain affirmations of authenticity. This hyper-idealistic persona was achieved by highlighting certain aspects of appearance with the aid of makeup, image manipulation tools and virtual beauty applications. Interestingly, some individuals also utilised selfies for activist purposes. The selective enhancement of some features and concealment of others in the front stage confirms that impression management is habitually monitored - a key premise in Goffman’s work. Furthermore, front stage images were found to be deliberately constructed in order to attract likes and comments, with the use of such communicatory utilities interpreted as a validation of the attractiveness of selfies. The study overall reveals the manipulation, complexity and insecurity behind selfies on Instagram, and concludes that Goffman’s principal frameworks are applicable in the online world.

Este trabajo analiza los blogs de los diputados. A través de una metodología descriptiva, se identifican una serie de datos acerca de la actividad bloguera de los miembros del Congreso en 2012. Por un lado, el artículo se centra en quiénes tienen blog, quiénes lo tienen vivo, el volumen de entradas publicadas cada mes, quiénes son los diputados que más posts escriben y qué grupos parlamentarios presentan más blogueros activos. Por otro lado, se busca
conocer si los diputados blogueros ostentan perfil en dos de las principales redes sociales, Facebook y Twitter, y si existe vinculación con sus bitácoras.

On the rapidly expanding social media in India, online users are witness to a routine exchange of abusive terms and accusations with the choicest swearwords hurled even for the seemingly non-inflammatory political debates. This paper draws upon anthropology of insult to uncover the distinctness, if at all, of online abuse as a means for political participation as well as for the encumbering it provokes and relations of domination it reproduces as a result. In so doing, the paper critiques the conception of ludic as anti-hegemonic in the Bakhtian tradition, and develops an emic term ‘gaali’ to signal the blurred boundaries between comedy, insult, shame and abuse emerging on online media which also incite gendered forms of intimidation. Gaali, it argues, is best conceptualized through the metaphor of ‘sound’ as distinct from what recent new media studies theorize as ‘voice’.

Ever since the advent of the Internet, political communication scholars have debated its potential to facilitate and support public deliberation as a means of revitalizing and extending the public sphere. Much of the debate has focused on the medium’s potential in offering communicative spaces that transcend the limitations of time, space and access (and the traditional mass media) whereby open communication, deliberation and exchange of information among the public can prosper. Following the initial enthusiasm over the possibilities of a more interactive and deliberative electorate, along with the cyber-pessimist response, a growing body of rich empirical research into online deliberation has arisen in its wake. In search of online deliberation, scholars have conducted a broad range of investigations, developing several prominent directions in the field. One popular line of research has been the study of informal political talk through the lens of public sphere ideals.The aim of this chapter is to detail and discuss this growing body of research and its significance. First, I begin by discussing what scholars mean by political talk and why it is thought to be essential for (a more deliberative) democracy. Following this, the major findings to date are set out focusing specifically on three of the most common features of political talk investigated by scholars in the field. I discuss scholarly disagreement and offer my thoughts and critical reflection on the topic. Finally, the chapter ends with several recommendations for future research into informal political talk in the Internet-based public sphere.

The aim of this study then is to move beyond politically oriented discussion forums by also examining the  communicative practices of participants within fan-based forums. The focus is on how participants talk politics in online informal discussion forums. By informal discussion forums, I am referring to those forums that are not bound to any formal predetermined agendas such as e-consultations or e-juries, but rather to forums who’s primary purpose is to simply provide a communicative space for talk, e.g. fan-based discussion forums, news media message boards, and Usenet newsgroups. By political talk, I am referring to everyday, informal, political conversation carried out freely between participants in these online spaces, which is often spontaneous and lacks any purpose outside the purpose of talk for talk sake, representing the practical communicative form of what Habermas (1984, p. 327) calls communicative action. It is through this type of everyday political talk whereby citizens achieve mutual understanding about the self and each other, and it represents the fundamental ingredient of the public sphere.

The purpose of this study first is a normative one; it is to examine the democratic quality of this fundamental ingredient, of the communicative practices of participants within online discussions forums in light of a set of normative conditions of the public sphere. It is also to move beyond a formal notion of deliberation (beyond rationality via argumentation) by providing a more accurate account of how the political emerges in online discussions (particularly within nonpolitically oriented forums), how people actually talk politics in those discussions, and finally, how alternative communicative forms such as humor, emotional comments, and acknowledgements interact and influence the more ‘traditional’ elements of deliberation (e.g. rational-critical debate and reciprocity). Consequently, I present the following three research questions, which are central to this study:

To what extent do the communicative practices of online political discussions satisfy the normative conditions of the process of deliberation of the public sphere?

What role, if any, do expressives (humor, emotional comments, and acknowledgements) play within online political discussions and in relation to the normative conditions of deliberation?

How does political talk emerge in nonpolitically oriented discussion forums?

Together, the answers to these questions present a more comprehensive account of online political talk. They seek not only to offer insight into the quality of such talk, but also to provide a better understanding of its expressive and affective nature. Moreover, they seek to improve our understanding of how political talk occurs outside the realm of politically oriented discussion forums, and how it emerges in such communicative spaces. Therefore, in order to answer these questions and provide this insight, I examine and compare political talk within three online discussion forums of the Guardian, Big Brother, and Wife Swap. A comparative study design with normative, descriptive, and explorative characteristics was utilized. A content analysis with both qualitative and quantitative features was employed as the primary instrument for examination. Additional textual and network analyses were carried out to provide more depth to the investigation.

Talking politics online is not exclusively reserved for politically-orientated discussion forums, particularly the everyday political talk crucial to the public sphere. People talk politics just about anywhere online from reality TV discussion forums to numerous other forum genres. Thus, the need to tap into those discussions is important if our aim is to provide a more comprehensive overview of the online discursive landscape. However, widening our scope of analysis presents us with a new set of difficulties, namely, how do we identify political talk within the vast pool of threads and postings, and how do we assess such talk in light of the public sphere, while at the same time, taking into account its informal nature. The aim of this article is to tackle these questions by presenting a methodological approach, which attempts to detect, describe, and assess political talk in non-political discussion forums.

Net-based public sphere researchers have examined online deliberation in numerous ways. However, most studies have focused exclusively on political discussion forums. This article moves beyond such spaces by analyzing political talk from an online forum dedicated to reality television. The purpose is to examine the democratic quality of political talk that emerges in this space in light of a set of normative criteria of the public sphere. The analysis also moved beyond an elite model of deliberation by investigating the use of expressives (humor, emotional comments, and acknowledgments). The findings reveal that participants engaged in political talk that was often deliberative. It was a space where the use of expressives played a significant role in enhancing such talk.

Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit dem politischen Engagement von Schweizer und Deutschen Digital Natives auf Facebook und der Rolle, welche Impression Management bei der Darstellung politischer Aktivität spielt. In einem ersten Schritt soll sie Aufschluss über die Rolle politischer Themen unter Jugendlichen im Sozialen Netzwerk bringen. Da Selbstdarstellung in SNS eine zentrale Rolle spielt, wird erst das jeweilige Verhältnis zwischen Online- und Offline-Engagement untersucht und dann vor dem Hintergrund der Impression Management Theorie auf eine inszenatorische Komponente geprüft. Weiter soll die Arbeit Treiber politischen Engagements identifizieren. Die Resultate zeigen auf, dass sich Digital Natives nur schwach auf Facebook engagieren und dabei hauptsächlich niederschwellige Aktionen wie das „Liken“ und Teilen bestehender Inhalte vorziehen. Sie verwenden es jedoch auch, um über politische Themen zu diskutieren und finden dabei ein hetero- genes Umfeld vor, das sie über Weak Ties mit neuen Meinungen konfrontiert. Impression Management ist ein wichtiger Treiber der Online-Partizipation, doch geht dessen Wirkung über den Online-Raum hinaus und spielt auch offline eine wichtige Rolle. Es konnte gezeigt werden, dass sich Facebook-Politik positiv auf die Offline- Teilnahme auswirkt und dabei vor allem aktive, extrovertierte Formen der Partizipation fördert. Hinweise darauf, dass die Inszenierung politischer Aktivität auf Facebook das Offline-Engagement untergräbt, konnten keine Gefunden werden. Viel mehr zeigte sich, dass die Impression Management-Techniken verschiedene Formen der Offline-Partizipation unterschiedlich fördern.

Ambiguity is defined as a situation of inexactness, and is synonymous with the feelings of uncertainty and ambivalence. It is a state of mind that one might generally expect to find when discussing complex social and political issues with others, as the causes of and remedies to societal ills is far from being clear to all citizens. Nevertheless, discourse in the United States has become highly polemic in the early twenty-first century, where the social attitudes of political partisans seem very strong, stable, and virtually impervious to change. These traits reduce the ability to appreciate the presence of ambiguity in the political beliefs held by others. While differing political viewpoints and theoretical assumptions are central to a healthy Democracy, an inability to recognize and validate the varying worldviews held by others is problematic.
How has this occurred in a society where there exists a nearly countless amount of mediums for people to collect and share political information? Is it possible that the ability to share and consume information so readily actually reduces ambiguity rather than increases it? Questions such as these have been addressed by a wide variety of scholars in recent years, cutting across all academic disciplines. This article reviews the literature regarding political news media and its relevance to the rise of attitudinal extremity found among the American public. Additionally, new data will be explored that tests whether media selectivity increases feeling of antipathy and blame that self-identified political partisans hold towards members of the opposing party in the United States.

Garland, C. (2014) ‘As Barriers Fall, Contingency Becomes Possibility: Protest Resisting and Escaping Containment and Categorization’, Part II Identity, Embodiment and Categorisation in Eds. Lamond, I. and Spracklen, K. 'Protests as Events: Politics, Activism and Leisure (London: Rowman & Littlefield International) Hardback ISBN/9781783480760 Paperback ISBN/978-1-78348-077-7 eBook ISBN/978-1-78348-078-4 

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781783480760

This chapter examines the arguments that blogs have  transformed certain social practices. The chapter is divided intro three sections: section one provides a brief history of blogs and an examination of the term blog.  Sections two and three explore the different arguments put forward concerning the transformational power of blogs. Section two examines the case for the power of blogs to transform civic life while section three looks at those arguments proposed to counter such claims. 

The uploaded file is a pre- publication draft, the book is due for publication in 2010.

[Ensaio para o Nexo*] Questões sobre imunização de crianças contra o novo coronavírus não são uma tentativa de promover o engajamento cívico da população em torno de uma questão controversa. Nos objetivos, na forma e na substância, o que se nota na consulta pública sobre a vacinação infantil contra a Covid-19 é um procedimento não democrático de mobilização de apoiadores.
*O Nexo não é uma revista acadêmica.

Exploring the cases of India and Ethiopia, this article develops the concept of “extreme speech” to critically analyze the cultures of vitriolic exchange on Internet-enabled media. While online abuse is largely understood as “hate speech,” we make two interventions to problematize the presuppositions of this widely invoked concept. First, extreme speech emphasizes the need to contextualize online debate with an attention to user practices and particular histories of speech cultures. Second, related to context, is the ambiguity of online vitriol, which defies a simple antonymous conception of hate speech versus acceptable speech. The article advances this analysis using the approach of “comparative practice,” which, we suggest, complicates the discourse of Internet “risk” increasingly invoked to legitimate online speech restrictions.

Net neutrality often gets treated as a sort of technocratic squabble over ownership and control of internet pipes. But in fact it speaks to a core social contract between government, corporations, and the public. What it really comes down to is, how can members of the public obtain information and services, and express ourselves creatively and politically, without interference from massive corporations?

Net-based public sphere researchers have questioned whether the internet presents the public sphere with a new opportunity for the development of public spaces where free, equal and open deliberation among citizens can flourish. However, much of the research has operationalized a formal notion of deliberation thereby neglecting the expressive nature of everyday political talk. This study moved beyond a formal notion by also investigating the use of expressives within The Guardian (UK) political discussion forum. A content analysis was employed as the primary instrument for examination. Additional textual analyses were conducted on the use of expressives. The findings suggest that with the exception of humour expressives tended to impede political talk rather than facilitating it.