Civil society, the media and the Internet: changing roles and challenging authorities in digital political communication ecologies

ABSTRACT

The digital transformation has had a profound impact on political communication. It has lowered the access barrier for actors to become publicly visible and reconfigured predominantly vertical flows of information into horizontal communication networks. Media-centric studies hold that these ‘hybrid media systems’ do not subvert the analogue order tout court, as the media still occupy a central role in selection and distribution processes. In contrast to this, social movement scholars interested in digital forms of mobilization show that civil society actors can directly engage their base and the wider public. Because of this focus, the status and role of the media in these connective efforts has remained largely neglected. This study extends the view of both media-centric and social movement research by asking how the media are included in civil society mobilization efforts online and what status and role they have. Analysing the online communication around the UK climate change debate over a 30-month period, we show that while the media account for a substantial amount of the actors in the networks generated by civil society actors and bloggers, they become more marginal with respect to the authority they command. Not only are they replaced by bloggers as focal points in these digital political communication ecologies, they become next to irrelevant in allocating visibility and attention to other actors. This has ambivalent consequences for democratic discourse, as online debates become more inclusive but also more fragmented, lacking common points of reference.

KEYWORDS:

• Internet
• blogs
• civil society
• authority
• media hybridity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Of the original 30 networks, two had to be excluded from further analysis as the downloaded textual data proved to be incomplete.

2 To balance the seeds in terms of their prominence we kept the total number to eight, as there was, in particular, a drop in the ranking of the Google searches regarding the climate sceptical side. The seeds and their mean geodesic distance are given in the Appendix.

3 For a more comprehensive and technical account, see Adam, Häussler, Schmid-Petri, and Reber (2016).

4 The coding in this step was done manually by two trained coders, who retrieved the information from the ‘About’ section on the websites of the actors. Their position sometimes had to be retrieved from posts in the case of bloggers and from editorials on the subject in the case of the media. In these instances we took at least three posts/articles during the period of the data collection and classified the actor with a position if all three displayed the same explicit stance – otherwise they were coded as ‘no position/ambivalent’. The inter-coder reliability was calculated by comparing 150 coded units with a master coding using Krippendorff’s alpha, which yielded good results: 0.891 (actor position), 0.898 (actor type) and 0.927 (actor country).

5 As a result of this decision, some actors are not classified as blogs although their names suggest it. ‘Roger Pielke Jr.’s Blog’, while technically falling into the blog category, explicitly states his affiliation with the University of Colorado, which was coded as a civil society actor.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant number 100017E-135915. Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung.

Notes on contributors

Thomas Häussler

Thomas Häussler is a senior researcher at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Bern. His research interests include social movements and digital mobilization in the networked public sphere, the fragmentation and polarization of the political space, and methodological aspects of computational social science.