Facebook as “third space”: Triggers of political talk in news about nonpublic affairs

ABSTRACT

This paper builds on recent work on “third spaces” to analyze political talk in comments on news about nonpublic affairs. It draws on content and discourse analyses of comments on news published by a leading Costa Rican media organization on Facebook. The article develops five categories of issues that triggered political talk (institutionality, identity, political inclinations, factual aspects, and criticism of the media) and examines the discursive strategies through which these comments became political. This allowed to broaden understanding of the political relevance of discussions about nonpublic affairs on social media.

KEYWORDS:

• Facebook
• Latin America
• online deliberation
• political talk
• political discourse analysis
• popular culture
• social media

Acknowledgments

We thank Carolina Carazo and Baptiste Kotras for their most helpful suggestions about previous versions of this manuscript, as well as Mariana Álvarez, Pedro Campos, Daniel Ramírez, and Brayan Rodríguez for their assistance in collecting and analyzing the data.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Espacio de Estudios Avanzados de la Universidad de Costa Rica (UCREA)

Notes on contributors

Ignacio Siles

Ignacio Siles is professor of media and technology studies in the School of Communication and researcher in the Centro de Investigación en Comunicación (CICOM) at Universidad de Costa Rica. He is the author of A Transnational History of the Internet in Central America, 1985-2000 (2020, Palgrave Macmillan) and Networked Selves: Trajectories of Blogging in the United States and France (2017, Peter Lang), along with several articles on the relationship between technology, communication, and society.

Larissa Tristán-Jiménez

Larissa Tristán-Jiménez is associate professor of media and social communication in the School of Communication and subdirector of the Centro de Investigación en Comunicación (CICOM) at Universidad de Costa Rica. She has published articles on discourse analysis, migration, urban studies, and political communication.