Hashtag feminism has become a popular tactic of online protest against gender inequality. Using the Twitter hashtag #distractinglysexy, women scientists posted pictures of themselves in labs or ...during field research to contest misogynist remarks by Nobel laureate Tim Hunt. We examined the resulting humorous and memetic discourse on Twitter as well as its coverage in news media combining a content analysis of the multimodal tweets with a qualitative discourse analysis of German and British news media. The results show that the ironic memes in which researchers addressed sexism in academia by parodying social norms and ideals of ‘sexiness’ yielded substantial media attention, but with differences in the two countries: While the hashtag #distractinglysexy initiated a broader debate on sexism and discrimination in academia in the UK news media discourse, in the German context, this form of ‘self-mediation’ was portrayed either as ‘something funny on the Web’ or as a harmful firestorm.
The 2016 US election and the victory of Donald Trump are closely connected to a perceived rise of the far-right in the United States. We build upon public sphere and alternative media theory to ...discuss the relevance of alternative media for the US (far-)right and whether the election period and the candidate Trump allowed far-right alternative media to establish themselves in the (far-) right networked public sphere. We investigate whether it has come to a convergence of topics between the right and the extreme far-right. We analyze the topics nine right-wing outlets, ranging from Fox News to the Neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, covered in 2015/2016 during the US presidential election. We show through topic modeling of 21,919 articles how Breitbart established itself as a media outlet between the extreme far-right and mainstream right by both covering more extreme and more classic conservative topics. We show through time series clustering how Breitbart and Fox News converged in their coverage of Islam and immigration. Finally, we show through hyperlink analysis that the connection between the far-right and the mainstream right is mostly one-sided; while the alternative outlets link to more established ones, the established outlets mostly ignore the outlets from the far-right.
Debates around climate change are a prominent example of polarized online communication. We examine the German climate hyperlink network and evaluate the degree to which it is shaped by mainstream ...and skeptical views. By combining the theoretical frameworks of the networked public sphere and counterpublics, we describe the relation between publics and counterpublics and discuss the role of hyperlinks in delineating communities. Our analysis of blogrolls and link lists shows the debate’s structures to be polarized along factional lines with political and scientific institutions supporting the mainstream “climate-friendly” position. We find that skeptics form a counterpublic that is only loosely connected to the mainstream as neither skeptics nor the mainstream want to be affiliated with each other. Skeptics, thus, are mostly excluded within the German online climate network. However, skeptics are part of an “alliance of antagonism” with other groups, such as conspiracy theorists, men’s right groups, and right-wing sites.
Networks are almost ubiquitous in the social sciences, in terms of method and structure. Dominant discourses around networks–concerning their purported democratic, progressive values and ...capacities–also impact how they are approached in research. This article illustrates the potential of this impact by tracing the trajectory and findings of a project focused on networked discussion of an Internet privacy debate. Using mixed methods—hyperlink network mapping, textual analysis (qualitative and quantitative), and semi-structured interviews—I examine online framing of a controversial data protection concept, the Right to be Forgotten. Initial, more “traditional” research approaches allowed for insight only into the most central and visible frames and sources. This led to a reorientation of research approach. In attempt to diversify sources and framings, I began focusing on the margins and off the “networked public sphere.” This article thus also recounts the significant empirical findings that resulted from such reflexivity and reorientation.
In recent years, a growing literature in journalism studies has discussed the increasing importance of social media in European and American news production. Adding to this body of work, we explore ...how Indian and foreign correspondents reporting from India used social media during the coverage of the Delhi gang rape; how journalists represented the public sphere in their social media usage; and, what this representation says about the future of India’s public sphere. Throughout our analysis, Manuel Castells’ discussion of ‘space of flows’ informs our examination of journalists’ social media uses. Our article reveals that while the coverage of the Delhi gang rape highlights an emerging, participatory nature of storytelling by journalists, this new-found inclusiveness remains exclusive to the urban, educated, connected middle and upper classes. We also find that today in India, social media usage is rearticulated around pre-existing journalistic practices and norms common to both Indian reporters working for English-language media houses and foreign correspondents stationed in India.
How have digital technologies affected the market logics and economization that constitute the underlying governing rationality of neoliberalism? This essay unfurls five theses that further develop ...the concept of technoliberalism, the intensification of neoliberalism through computational technology, in the context of the networked public sphere: (1) technoliberalism names the dominant governing rationality in cultures where digital computation technology suffuses everyday life; (2) technoliberalism replaces public, democratically accountable power with the private, technical expertise of digital technology firms; (3) technoliberalism focuses on contriving technical systems to change culture at the expense of democratic argument and deliberation; (4) technoliberalism intensifies the commodification of attention, resulting in undemocratic forms of “noopower”; and (5) technoliberalism standardizes subjectivities through grammatization. Each thesis complicates the prospects of democratic deliberation in the networked public sphere and articulates lines of communication research necessary for keeping democratic practices vibrant.
This study explores the structure and content of the Arabic blogosphere using link analysis, term frequency analysis, and human coding of individual blogs. We identified a base network of ...approximately 35,000 Arabic-language blogs, mapped the 6000 most-connected blogs, and hand coded over 3000. The study is a baseline assessment of the networked public sphere in the Arabic-speaking world, which mainly clusters nationally. We found the most politically active areas of the network to be clusters of bloggers in Egypt, Kuwait, Syria, and the Levant, as well as an ‘English Bridge’ group. Differences among these indicate variability in how online practices are embedded in local political contexts. Bloggers are focused mainly on domestic political issues; concern for Palestine is the one issue that unites the entire network. Bloggers link preferentially to the top Web 2.0 sites (e.g. YouTube and Wikipedia), followed by pan-Arab mainstream media sources, such as Al Jazeera.
•The social media debate on TCM did not appear to facilitate problem solving.•Users typically communicated only with users who shared their viewpoints.•The debate facilitated the formation of ...subculture groups in cyberspace.•The study exemplified a plural but fragmented, decentralized but networked public sphere.
By analyzing the social media posts published by the scientific community and conventional media organizations, the study explored the recent social media debates on Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). A combination of textual analysis and content analysis revealed two main findings. First, different networks of expertise on Weibo generated conflicting discourses about TCM: while the scientific community contributed the overwhelming majority of posts that criticized TCM, conventional media outlets were much more likely to promote TCM without skepticism. Implications of the finding is discussed. Second, the social media debate did not appear to facilitate problem solving, evidenced by the fact that only a small portion of the posts included rational comments about the controversy. In addition, users typically communicated only with users who shared their viewpoints, resulting in few communications between groups. The trend illustrates the fragmentation of China’s networked public sphere on Weibo.
This article locates Portugal in the discussion on the transition from a normative public sphere (Habermas, 1968/1989, 1998) to a new networked public sphere (Benkler, 2006), powered by the internet, ...global networked society and participative and interactive cultures. We use data from the public participation module of the 2018 Digital news report published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which surveyed a representative sample of the Portuguese population. The results point to the existence and appropriation of many forms of public participation in cyberspace. Users share news, comment on news, take part in online votes, etc., on press websites and social media. Nonetheless, the collected data point to a type of online public participation that determines the slow constitution and consolidation of a new networked public sphere in Portugal.
The author examines consequences of expansion strategies of commercial network media, and compares them to ideals of open and accessible public communication. These strategies level out the falling ...rates of profits that the increased productivity of labour is bringing. Counter-measures of media industries manipulate the amounts of variable and constant capital (outsourcing of labour, shifting of depreciation costs on users, and specialisation). These processes, which are specific to platform business models, ultimately give rise to fragmentation, individualisation and ideological homogenisation of the peripheral public. The public becomes ideologically similar to the centres of power, whereas its critical potential and, consequently, its effective political freedom decreases. While both the political and the economic subsystems and the public alike use network communication to organise their activities, interaction between the two social domains (the system and the lifeworld) resembles an ‘interactive top-down communication structure’. Inclusion of citizens-consumers into the productivity race renders interactivity similar to one-way communication.
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