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The proponents of cyberspace promise that online discourse will increase political participation and pave the road for a democratic utopia. This article explores the potential for civil discourse in cyberspace by examining the level of civility in 287 discussion threads in political newsgroups. While scholars often use civility and politeness interchangeably, this study argues that this conflation ignores the democratic merit of robust and heated discussion. Therefore, civility was defined in a broader sense, by identifying as civil behaviors that enhance democratic conversation. In support of this distinction, the study results revealed that most messages posted on political newsgroups were civil, and further suggested that because the absence of face-to-face communication fostered more heated discussion, cyberspace might actually promote Lyotard’s vision of democratic emancipation through disagreement and anarchy (Lyotard, 1984). Thus, this study supported the internet’s potential to revive the public sphere, provided that greater diversity and volume of discussion is present.

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This study traces the rhythms of news storytelling on Twitter via the #egypt hashtag. Using computational discourse analysis, we examine news values and the form of news exhibited in #egypt from January 25 to February 25, 2011, pre-and post-resignation of Hosni Mubarak. Results point to a hybridity of old and newer news values, with emphasis on the drama of instantaneity, the crowdsourcing of elites, solidarity, and ambience. The resulting stream of news combines news, opinion, and emotion to the point where discerning one from the other is difficult and doing so misses the point. We offer a theory of affective news to explain the distinctive character of content produced by networked publics in times of political crisis.

Using prior seminal work that places emphasis on news framing and its relevance to sociocultural context, this study describes, maps, and explains evolving patterns of communication on Twitter through the events of the 2011 Egyptian uprisings, which led to the resignation of President Mubarak. Using a multimethodological approach, we conducted a network, content, and discourse analysis of randomly sampled tweets from approximately one million tweets over a month-long time period to study broadcasting and listening practices on Twitter. The findings suggested networked framing and gatekeeping practices that became activated as prominent actors and frames were crowdsourced to prominence. Quantitative findings underscored the significant role of ordinary users who both rose to prominence and elevated others to elite status through networked gatekeeping actions. In depth, discourse analysis of prominent actors and frames highlighted the fluid, iterative processes inherent in networked framing as frames were persistently revised, rearticulated, and redispersed by both crowd and elite. The ambience and affect afforded by the platform further supported conversational practices that enabled combined processes of networked framing and gatekeeping. The findings point to new directions for hybrid and fluid journalisms that rely on subjective pluralism, cocreation, and collaborative curation.