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Technologically Mediated Political Discourse During a Nationally Televised GOP Primary Debate
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Copyright Year | 2015 |
| Abstract | Social media creates a geographically independent commons that transforms citizen participation in political discourse. In our study, we examine 185,420 publically available Twitter messages (hashtags #CNNDebate and #gopdebate) during a Republican Primary Debate in November 2011, hosted by CNN and viewed by over 3.5 million individuals in the United States. Through analysis of how individuals use the syntactical features of Twitter such as at-mentions, at-reply’s and URLs we identify how activity differs at different phases of a televised debate and who the subjects of this discourse are. Understanding how individuals engage with each other in an open forum has broad implications for understanding social media’s effect on civic engagement and information diffusion among elected officials, candidates and citizens. Our findings suggest that a significant number of the syntactical features specific to Twitter are utilized to relay information, engage in discourse and create new threads of discourse related to issues that are brought up during the debate. Although syntactical features signaling conversation are used, actual engagement is limited. RUNNING HEAD: GOP PRIMARY DEBATE ON TWITTER 3 Introduction As more individuals use technology to acquire political information and participate in the political process, understanding the technological features that enable discourse and the networks of discourse that result from this activity becomes increasingly important (Lazer, 2011). Political discourse in the physical world was historically constrained by the geographic proximity of participants — people talk about political and social issues with others whom they already know and who are geographically close (Bearman & Parigi, 2004; Huckfeldt & Sprague, 1987). Newer technologies, such as social networking sites (SNS), facilitate discourse independent of geography and pre-existing relationships. In this new medium, citizens form ties with individuals they already know, but are also able to engage with a diffuse, growing and geographically diverse groups of people around events and topics of interest. Political discourse is one of the most common forms of activity on social networking sites. In the 2010 United States Election, 73% of individuals used a social networking site, specifically Facebook or Twitter, to obtain political information, including news about candidates, information about political events and candidate policy stances (Rainie, 2011). Social networking sites (SNS) are also influencing relationships surrounding political matters. In a 2012 Pew study, 10% of users say they have blocked, un-friended or hidden another individual’s comment as a result of the political content (Rainie & Smith, 2012). Similarly, 47% of users of SNS have hit the “like” button while 38% have responded with a positive comment to another individual’s political comments on a SNS (Rainie & Smith, 2012). One of the recent developments in technologically mediated political discourse is the use of social media as a back channel where discourse about real time political events occurs. Electoral debates provide a contextually focused laboratory for the examination of such RUNNING HEAD: GOP PRIMARY DEBATE ON TWITTER 4 discourse in the current political environment as they are widely covered by news organizations and discussed in social media. Previous research on technologically mediated interactions around political debates highlights how individuals have been able to submit questions for participants of a debate as opposed to being able to engage with each other in the context of the debate (Ricke, 2010). Examining real-time civil discourse related to debates on a larger scale emerges as a possibility due to the adoption of Twitter. Previous methodological approaches to political debate research in the United States do not correlate the effects of specific statements or content during the debate with shifts in attitudes (Fridkin, Kenney, Gershon, & Woodall, 2008; Lanoue & Schrott, 1989b). Most previous studies of political debates rely on non-representative, geographically bounded samples that examine only the time period of the debate as opposed to the activity before and after the event (Zhu, Milavsky, & Biswas, 1994). The lack of consistent analysis methods across studies limits broader insight. Using Twitter as a laboratory for examining discourse during a televised debate eliminates prior geographic sampling limitations and allows for analysis to occur at a more granular level. The existing body of research examining Twitter as a tool for civil discourse around political debates in the United States focuses on event identification and topical analysis (Diakopoulos & Shamma, 2010; Shamma, Kennedy, & Churchill, 2009; Shamma, Kennedy, & Churchill, 2010b; Shamma, Kennedy, & Churchill, 2010b). These findings from previous studies on technologically mediated debate discourse are more broadly situated in the discourse surrounding event identification and back channel communication related to live TV instead of the relationship between information technology and politics (Doughty, Rowland, & Lawson, RUNNING HEAD: GOP PRIMARY DEBATE ON TWITTER 5 2011; Lanagan & Smeaton, 2011). We build on this work by examining how citizens and politicians engage with each other and how this changes based on the time of the activity. Of the select studies that have been published related to political discourse and debates on Twitter, there are only two that examine primary election debates. Prior work on primary debates is limited mostly due to the timing of Presidential elections and Twitter’s popularity. Hu et al. (2012) examined Twitter in the context of a primary debate by attempting to identify the types of topics and events that were ongoing and whether the discourse at that time was related to what was happening on TV (Hu, John, Seligmann, & Wang, 2012). The other study was conducted in part by the two authors of the paper, as part of a larger effort to validate Twitter collection methodologies. This study examined communities of discourse related to the 2012 South Carolina GOP Primary Debate and how different hashtags were used by different groups of individuals (Black, Mascaro, Gallagher, & Goggins, 2012). This study found that hashtags were adopted differently depending on the device used and the intent of the discourse. We build on earlier work in this study by presenting an analysis of Twitter activity related to a political debate in the United States. Through analysis of the data tweeted using #cnndebate and #gopdebate related to a November 2011 Republican primary debate, it is possible to identify how Twitter’s syntactical features are used by citizens to engage differently depending on the time relative to the debate. Our analysis demonstrates how citizens use Twitter to engage with others while viewing the debate and how citizens use the medium to highlight information related to debate participants and moderators through technologically appropriated means such as hashtags, at-mentions and at-replys. We expect that the slicing of the data into three pieces (pre-debate, debate, post-debate) would allow us to identify differences in user behavior relative to debate activity. Our findings RUNNING HEAD: GOP PRIMARY DEBATE ON TWITTER 6 suggest that there are distinctly different uses of the syntactical features in Twitter depending on the time period (before, during and after the debate). These findings have implications for future debate research and understanding how individuals utilize Twitter as both a back channel for communication and a context for political discourse. |
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| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5048b911e4b0bd178ab30a09/t/556b530be4b0a6971d62550e/1433096971805/MascaroGoggins2015Uploaded.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Addison Disease Archives & Museum Informatics Attitude Backchannel Communications Media Community Emergence Entity Name Part Qualifier - adopted Geography Hashtag Holographic principle Information Sciences Interaction Large Like button Real-time transcription Relay Device Component Sampling (signal processing) Scientific Publication Situated Smith–Volterra–Cantor set Social media Social network Television Thrombocytopenia message |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
