Who Leads the Twitter Tango?

Abstract

By reconsidering the complexities of the journalist–politician relationship, the study pursues the metaphor of tango introduced by Herbert J. Gans and analyses the online interplay in Twitter conversations between journalistic and political actors. Various types of conversations emerged through the quantitative analysis of the tweets, which ranged from seeking mutual affection, through monitoring–advocating connections and information sharing to unbridgeable advocacy. According to the interviewed journalistic and political actors, such tweets were shaped by their subjective considerations of boundaries in their Twitter repertoires as the principles of social media networking have not been institutionalized in either Slovenian newsrooms or parties. The results revealed that neither journalists nor politicians led the Twitter tango, but instead whether these actors engaged in Twitter conversations as either initiators or respondents. The identified boundary dynamics of the Twitter tango indicate that social media are a particular venue for the articulation of journalist–politician relationships, which in some cases are shaped by offline relations. The findings imply that in Slovenia contemporary journalism’s relation to politics is paradoxical because it is shaped by the liquidity of late-modern social communication and the compactness of an elite culture.

KEYWORDS:

• content analysis
• interviews
• journalists
• politicians
• social media