Trying not to fall out: the importance of non-political social ties in online political conversation

ABSTRACT

This paper explores evidence from a large scale, mixed methods investigation into political conversation in various online niches, uncovering a model of deliberation in which shared cultural or social ties – non-political ties – seem to play an important role in holding a quorum together and encouraging exchange of diverse opinion without breakdown of the community. A shared sense of community identity is important within this model, but robust and stable individual identities – usually in the form of pseudonyms, but which sometimes translate to offline identities among sub-sections of the community – play an important role, too. These shared community spaces may offer democratic benefits by facilitating the testing of balkanised perspectives found within personalised digital media structures against diverse counter-perspectives.

KEYWORDS:

• Deliberation
• community
• online conversation
• politics
• digital methods
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Christopher Birchall is a Lecturer in Digital Media, co-convener of the Digital Culture research group and member of the Political Communication and Centre for Digital Citizenship research groups at the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds. With a background in computer science and extensive experience in professional digital media production, his current research interests include the relationship between digital technologies, interpersonal communication and citizenship. Recent projects have developed digital methods and analysed their application to the study and practice of digital citizenship and political communication in online, mobile and digital spaces. Responding to the increased quantification of people and public, current efforts include investigations into methods of knowing and describing humans using data and numbers and the impacts of such descriptions on the subjects themselves [email: [email protected]].