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POL06
Independence and Protest
PP 135
Citizens’ Role in Mediatized Conflicts: Reproducing Elite Discourses or Creating New Ones? The Case for Catalonia’s Secessionist Process
C.M. Moragas-Fernández
1
, A. Capdevila Gómez
1
, M. Lores Garcia
2
1
Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Communication Studies, Tarragona, Spain
2
CIEMAT Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas- Medioambientales y Tecnológicas, Centro de Investigación Socio-Técnica, Barcelona, Spain
In the political public sphere,“people in their roles as citizens have access to what can be metaphorically called societal dialogues, which deal with […] pol‑
itics in the broadest sense”(Dahlgren 1995:9).These so-called societal dialogues take place between the three different actors who coexist within the public
sphere: citizens, politicians and the media. However, it is assumed that the last two (politicians and media) play the leading role when it comes to shape
public opinion, whereas the citizen-elector tends to reproduce the discourses they generate. Because of its ability to “simplify and make understandable
political events”(Mio 1997:121), metaphor is one of the mechanisms used both by political actors and media in their struggle for imposing a certain vision
of contested issues. As it is analogically structured, metaphor deals with two different domains of knowledge (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) that relate with
each other: one from which we depart (source domain) to understand the meaning of the other (target domain). Hence, metaphors function as political
schemas used as a mean “to shape public discourse”and “to present political ‘reality’ in a specific way”(Cammaerts 2012:244), while they influence evalu‑
ation on the metaphorized topics (Charteris-Black 2011) and, thus, are also persuasive. In order to verify to which extent do citizens reproduce the political
and media actors’ discourses underlying the use of metaphorical expressions, a contested issue was investigated. We focused on the 11 September 2015
demonstration in Catalonia prior to the parliamentary election as one of these issues.We analyzed the information given by three relevant newspapers with
different editorial policies (La Vanguardia, El País and El Mundo) as well as the main claim-makers’Twitter accounts and websites, between 11 September
2015 and 14 September 2015. Metaphorical expressions were identified following Greimas’ (1987) concept of isotopy and through four pre-established
target domains: (1) Catalonia/Spain relationship; (2) National Day or Demonstration; (3) parliamentary election; (4) independence process. After identifying
the most relevant metaphors used both in newspapers and claim-makers’discourses, we worked with them in two ideologically opposed focus groups. Our
aim was to determine how citizens had interpreted these metaphors and to evaluate, through the scenario construction, whether they reproduced the po‑
litical and media discourses or, on the contrary, generated alternative narratives on the analysed issue. From a political communication viewpoint, “sce‑
nario”, which provides“the main story-lines or perspectives along which the central mappings [generated within the use of metaphors] are developed and
extended” (Musolff 2004:18), revealed as a key concept for approaching metaphor interpretation, where metaphor achieves its argumentative strength.
Among the main results, citizens’ evaluation of the analysed issue in terms of political and mediated discourses must be stressed. This was particularly
relevant when conceptualizing Catalonia/Spain relationship under FAMILY/LOVE (“breakup”, “mistreatment”, “unrequited love”) source domain in line with
the frame promoted both by politicians and the media. Although the scenarios developed by the ideologically opposed groups were different among them,
they coincided respectively with those supported by political actors who were in favour of or against Catalan secession.
PP 136
A Media Ecology Approach to Understand Patterns of Political Communication and Participation in Italy, Spain and Greece
A. Mattoni
1
, D. Ceccobelli
1
, E. Treré
1
1
Scuola Normale Superiore, Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Firenze, Italy
Recent literature in media studies argues that we live in a media-saturated society and that media practices resting on information and communication
technologies are deeply affecting the way in which social practices unfold in a variety of realms. Amongst other, current media practices revolving around
web applications and internet platforms sustain, order and anchor many social practices linked to political activities, including citizens’mobilizations within
and outside institutions, and the related patterns of political communication. Such media practices, though, do not develop in a void: they are contex‑
tual and embedded in broader media ecologies, in which a wide range of media professionals, organizations and technologies interact on a daily basis.
Several studies focus on definite instances of political participation and on the role that specific information and communication technologies play with
their regard. However, there is a limited amount of knowledge on the overall media ecology in which media practices sustaining, anchoring and ordering
political activities and the related patterns of political communication are embedded. The paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature in three ways. First, at
the theoretical level, it discusses some of the analytical tools that scholars might use to make sense of multi-faceted communication flows that surround
and underpin political participation today. In particular, it contrasts three analytical metaphors that have been regularly used in past and present literature
on the topic: media systems, media environments and media ecologies. Second, at the methodological level, the paper considers how the media ecology
metaphor can be operationalized to analytically reconstruct its architecture and infrastructure, in which media practices related to political participation are
grounded. Hence, it develops a set of qualitative and quantitative indicators starting from the seminal research of Hallin and Mancini (2004) and Chadwick
(2013) on media systems, combined with recent conceptualizations of media environments with regard to grassroots political participation (Mattoni 2012)
and the tradition of media ecologies approaches (Treré and Mattoni 2016), that scholars increasingly use to understand mobilization in the political realm.
Third, at the empirical level, the paper compares the architecture and infrastructure of the media ecology in three Southern European countries – Italy,
Spain and Greece – through the analysis of existing statistical data related to the media ecology, expert interviews with media professionals, and grey liter‑
ature on media systems in each country. While the three countries under investigation traditionally belong to the same Southern European media system,
the paper shows that the overall media ecology of political participation has its own features in each country, especially when considering information and
communication technologies, organizations and outlets. And this, in turn, also has an impact on the patterns of political communication that develop within
each country. Overall, the paper suggests that the media ecology metaphor is a powerful analytical tool to understand cross-national differences related to
media practices that sustain, anchor and order various forms of political participation and the related patterns of political communication.