ECREA16-Abstract

Saturday, November 12

1 1 : 0 0 – 1 2 : 3 0

CDE16

Networked Publics and the Public Sphere

PP 628

Democracy and Twitter. A Comparative Study of Public Online Debate in BBC One, La 1 and La Sexta Factual Programs

P. Gómez-Domínguez

, R. Besalú-Casademont

, F. Guerrero-Solé

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Department of Communication, Barcelona, Spain

Democracy and public service media (PSM) have a narrow relationship. One of PSM' main goals has been to promote a public sphere of debate among their

audiences-citizens. New media seem to help PSM to fulfil this mission with new bilateral communication channels that open the discussion to the massive

public. This merge of new and old media has important consequences for TV consumption, specifically due to the so-called phenomenon of Social TV, in

which social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or evenWhatsApp have changed the ways users debate around TV content. This second-screen dimension

enables TV to (1) stablish strategies of engagement and (2) give the audience a space to participate in the online public sphere. The communicational spec‑

ificities of Twitter like simultaneity, word-of-mouth nature or public profiles make it the main second-screen network chosen by the audience to participate

and discuss. Consequently, TV stations try to take advantage of this, setting strategies to organize the discussion. In this sense, programs use the hashtags

as a referential framework to drive the flow of information. There is a significant relationship between the use of hashtags and public engagement around

factual genre programs. This paper focuses on how public service TV channels (BBC One and Spanish La 1) organize a debate in Twitter around factual genre

programs. It also deals with the issue of what the role of commercial television is in the creation of an online public debate (focusing on commercial channel

La Sexta). Finally, it assesses to what extent it is possible to create an effective and long-lasting discussion on the social network Twitter. We set the follow‑

ing specific goals: 1.To evaluate the number of participants and the regular users in each program to stablish the core of debate 2.To identify and classify

opinion leaderships according to their typology (media leaders, politicians, celebrities, etc.) 3.To examine users’activity on Twitter before, during and after

the broadcasts in order to detect high-activity periodsThe sample is made up of two political debate programs, BBC QuestionTime and El Debate de La 1 (La

1), and two documentaries, BBC Panorama and Salvados (La Sexta). The reason why a commercial TV station program was chosen has to do with the fact

that Salvados has an overwhelming success, even posing important debates around how this program is dealing with public service issues to a greater

extent than the Spanish PSM channel La 1. A five-week period was randomly selected to analyze the users’activity around the hashtags proposed by each

program. Applying our own network analysis technique, all the commentaries containing the programs’hashtags were captured and analyzed. Preliminary

results show that PSM programs fail in generating a second-screen debate. In fact, we cannot consider that there is a public online sphere of debate around

these programs in terms of participants and duration. Nevertheless, the commercial TV station program Salvados fulfils the public mission of generating

an online debate, since the data show how the hashtags of this program create a massive discussion.

PP 629

Digitalizing the Public Sphere – The Gezi Park Protests and Its Backlash

E. Klaus

University of Salzburg, Department of Communication, Salzburg, Austria

The paper ponders the question of the role of the Internet and digital media for democracy and the public sphere. It centres around the thesis that the Inter‑

net can help social movements in their quest for fostering democracy and gaining rights for minority groups, but at the same time it is also a medium tightly

linked to the existing power structure in society and is likewise used by antidemocratic groups. The thesis is explored by introducing a model of the public

sphere developed in Pre-Internet times (Klaus 2008, Klaus and Drüeke 2016) and then primarily applied (and thus empirically tested) in research on the his‑

torical women’s movement and the conditions for its achievements (e.g. Wischermann 2003, Kinnebrock 2016). It has later been elaborated and sharpened

as regards to the new political spaces and communicative forums enabled by digital media (e.g. Drüeke 2013, Katzenbach 2010). The public sphere in this

model is understood as a realm of self-understanding, wherein members of society debate political and social issues and question or legitimize existing

norms and values. The model identifies three communicative arenas for processes of self-understanding and debate and differentiates them according to

the complexity of their communication, distinguishing a complex, an intermediary and an elementary level: At the complex level media and the traditional

economic and political elites exert a tremendous influence on public communication and decision making processes, at the intermediary level social move‑

ments and special interest groups can initiate anti-hegemonic discourses and changes, while at the elementary level members of social sub-groups – fami‑

lies, neighbours, colleagues – are involved in more spontaneous debates on social and political issues.The Gezi Park Protests in Istanbul provide one of many

examples that social movements serve as intermediaries for effectively voicing the discontent of people at the elementary level of the public sphere and

focusing their diverse interests by providing spaces (both in respect to geographical location as well as spaces of identity) for voicing protest and enhancing

the visibility of dissenting opinions (David andToktamis 2015).The example likewise shows how the Internet and other means of digital communication can

serve to mobilize protesters and stimulating creative and new forms of protest, such as subverting the meaning of concepts (appropriating the word“capul‑

cu” as an example, Walton 2015) or using graffiti and other culture jamming activities in order to demask, often in a humorous way, antidemocratic and

neoliberal developments (Ynik 2015). At the same time, however, the Gezi Park Protests and their democratic impulses seem to have been largely crashed

by an authoritarian form of government at the complex level of the public sphere that successfully addressed people at the elementary level of the public

sphere. The paper traces the digital footprints of the electoral successes for Erdogan, since Internet forums of different individuals and groups supporting

neoliberal policies and a move towards more traditional religious values proved important for the mobilization of Erdogan voters.