21 Everyday online conversation, emotion and political action
21 Everyday online conversation, emotion and political action
Daniel Jackson, Bournemouth University, Scott Wright, University of Melbourne and Todd Graham, University of Groningen
Creating public spaces that foster political talk amongst citizens is challenging business. Tell people that it’s a ‘political’ space and (however well designed) you will invariably find it is used by political junkies, and is largely ignored by those who don’t self-identify as ‘political’. Consequently, many commentators will observe said disengagement by the majority of citizens, and complain of political apathy.
But what if we are looking for the wrong things, and in the wrong places? In our recent work, we have been arguing that a) we need to move beyond the now well studied formally ‘political’ spaces, and see what is going on in everyday lifestyle communities, and b) we need to reconceive political talk as less narrow, less normative and rational, and instead embrace the vernacular, expressive and porous characteristics of everyday public speech.
And of course, emotions are an important link to both of these issues. If we accept the public sphere is becoming more emotionalised, then we can begin to conceive the nature of political engagement itself, as well as the spaces in which we look for it.
In this spirit, for about the last four years, we have been examining political talk in non-political online forums: how it emerges, what happens when it does emerge, and what we can learn about issues of technology, community, political engagement and citizenship. We set our focus outside of political flashpoints such as elections, protests or social movements, and instead root our analysis in the everyday. Our empirical focus has been on three popular, general interest UK-based forums: www.netmums.com, www.digitalspy.com and www.moneysavingexpert.com. These websites cover salient aspects of contemporary culture: consumption, media and family. But first and foremost they are spaces embedded in everyday life where people come to share personal experiences and dilemmas, discuss their interests, meet likeminded people, and have fun.
At this point we would like to share with you a minor revelation that our study revealed. Across the three forums, over 50% of all discussions that were political at some point led to political action. Further details about the design of the study, what types of political actions we found, and who they were directed at can be found in our journal articles. In the remainder of this article, we want to reflect on some of the fundamental questions our study provoked: what is it about these spaces that seemed to foster political action, and secondly, why was one of the forums (DigitalSpy) the exception, with little political action emerging from everyday talk?
In our article in Information, Communication and Society, we develop this argument further, but here we offer three ruminations on how the characteristics of the online platform/ community sha