ECREA16-Abstract

Thursday, November 10

1 4 : 3 0 – 1 6 : 0 0

CDE06

Political Talk Online and Citizen Engagement

PP 168

Openness to other People's Opinions in Online Debate

A. Løvlie

, L. Rossi

IT University of Copenhagen, Culture and Communication research group, Copenhagen, Denmark

The "echo chamber" theory (C. Sunstein, 2001, 2007) posits that online debate is characterised by forums where like-minded gather to reinforce each

other's existing opinion, potentially leading to increased polarisation and extremism. While this theory has been supported by several studies based on

single social media (Adamic & Glance 2005, Colleoni et al. 2014), Enjolras et al. (2013, pp. 111–152) found contradictory evidence in data from several

surveys of the Norwegian population in 2011 and 2012. In the present paper, we will analyse data from a survey of a representative sample of the Danish

population (n=1593) to examine whether the conclusions from Enjolras et al. still hold for Denmark in late 2015. On a societal level Denmark and Norway

are quite comparable, and they both show high level of internet use with 84% of Danes and 85% of Norwegians using Internet every day (Eurostat 2013).

Following Enjolras et al (2013, pp. 112–116), we assumed that if the echo chamber theory is correct, we should expect participants in online debates to

rarely learn something new or change their opinions after participating in online debates. Our data show that: A majority of respondents (69%) report that

they sometimes or often learn something new from political discussions online, whereas 31% say this never or very rarely happens. 45% of respondents

have sometimes or often changed their opinion about a political issue after participating in a political discussion online, while 55% report that this never or

very rarely has happened. (Results are summarised from a 5-point likert-type scale. A more detailed analysis will be given in the full paper.) In the proposed

paper, we interpret data from these two questions as a measure of the respondents' openness to opinions and information from other people. We then

adopt regression analysis to identify variables explaining different levels of openness.We find a relevant and statistically significant correlation with respon‑

dents use of Facebook for discussing news and online content. The respondents in the 'open' group report significantly more often to use Facebook for these

purposes. One possible interpretation of this result, that we will explore in the paper, would be that there is a connection between social media literacy and

openness toward different opinions. In our full paper, we will provide further data and discuss these results in light of the emergence of echo-chambers and

the consequences for democratic debate in contemporary societies. References: Adamic, L. A., & Glance, N. (2005). The political blogosphere and the 2004

US election: divided they blog. In Proceedings of the 3

international workshop on Link discovery (pp. 36–43). ACM. Colleoni, E., Rozza, A., & Arvidsson,

A. (2014). Echo chamber or public sphere? Predicting political orientation and measuring political homophily in Twitter using big data. Journal of Com‑

munication, 64(2), 317–332. Enjolras, B., Karlsen, R., Steen-Johnsen, K., & Wollebæk, D. (2013). Liker - liker ikke: Sosiale medier, samfunnsengasjement

og offentlighet. Oslo: Cappelen Damm. Sunstein, C. (2007). Republic.Com 2.0. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sunstein, C. (2001). Republic.com.

Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press.

PP 169

Emotional Language Use in Political Engagement on Twitter – Love and Affiliation in #Kämpamalmö

G. Persson

University of Gothenburg, Department of Journalism- Media and Communication, Göteborg, Sweden

While emotional language and imagery in protest aesthetics are nothing new, emotions have been repressed in modern political discourse at large, as being

irrational if not dangerous (Mouffe, 1993; Butsch, 2008). Similarly and as previous studies on mass media discourse clearly have pointed to how particularly

in journalistic coverage of political protest there is a structural and discursive tendency to dismiss the emotional aspects of protest language and aesthetics

as deviant (Gitlin, 1980; Cammaerts, 2012; Hallin, 1989). As new media spaces such as Twitter and Facebook are becoming central media spaces for live

online broadcasting of political protests, they have become an important site of discursive struggle for researchers to take into account. This paper argues

that emotional language use is not merely something excessive but a central symbolic resource for participants in terms of how they politically and socially

relate to each other (Ahmed, 2004). The analysis in this paper is based on data collected under the hashtag #kämpamalmö during an anti-fascist demon‑

stration that took place in Malmö in 2014. Methodologically this paper is guided by a Critical discourse analytical approach (Fairclough, 1995; Zappavigna,

2012) with focus on how emotional language use allow for participants to position themselves. Empirically the paper identifies how participants make use

of emotional language to negotiate and relate to and identify with social objects, as well as how they create affiliations and solidarity with distant as well

as present others (Ahmed, 2004). One example of this is how the city itself became a central object of negotiation, as a contested love object as well as a po‑

litical ‘empty signifier’. Another object around which participants negotiate themselves is ‘love’ itself, as in love for the movement and as a political object

in itself. The wider aim of the paper is to join the discussion of the role of emotions in politics at large and the basis of what‘feeling’political subjects can be

understood (Frosh, 2011; Coleman, 2013; Wetherell, 2012). Such debate includes both the question of the role of affect and feelings in politics in general,

and the attempt and ambition of this paper is to be a methodological contribution of how to research emotions in public media discourse.

PP 170

Political Discussion on Facebook: Everyday Practices Beyond Normative Expectations

M.F. Murru

, G. Mascheroni

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy

That social media represent the elective site for youth participation in the digital age is a recurrent cliché in media representations and lay discourses around

young people and the internet.When in 2013 Facebook extended to teenagers (13-to-17-year-olds) the possibility to post publicly, it adhered to this shared

assumption regarding youth civic and political participation. Indeed, informal political talk has been recognised as a pre-condition of participation, which

sustains political knowledge and the construction of political identities and political agency. However, beyond normative expectations of social media as

opportunities to re-engage the “disaffected” young citizens and common assumptions of youth as an homogenous category, empirical evidence suggests

that young citizens are diverse and their online practices are also varied. This paper draws on quantitative – a survey of citizens during the 2014 European