Culture in mediated interaction: Political defriending on Facebook and the limits of networked individualism

Schwarz, Ori; Shani, Guy

doi:10.1057/s41290-016-0006-6

Cited by 40 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Social network research draws heavily on these ideas in predicting network dynamics. Network research focuses extensively on value homophily in tie formation (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook 2001), which pertains to the A2 and A4 rules, as well as how “unfriending” may result from cultural disagreements (Noel and Nyhan 2011; Schwarz and Shani 2016), which pertains to the A1 and A3 rules (for a review, see Flache et al 2017). While emphasizing different aspects of selection and influence, all these models are consistent with Heider’s overall view that cognitive consistency in group dynamics drives attitude change.…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive Authority and the Constraint of Attitude Change in Groups

Rawlings

2020

Am Sociol Rev

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Are individuals’ attitudes constrained such that it is difficult to change one attitude without also changing other attitudes? Given a lack of longitudinal studies in real-world settings, it remains unclear if individuals have coherent attitude systems at all—and, if they do, what produces attitude constraint. I argue and show that groups can endogenously produce attitude constraint via cognitive authorities. Within groups, cognitive authorities explicitly link attitudes and generate feelings of connectedness among members, thereby facilitating the interpersonal processing of attitudes. Using data on interpersonal sentiment relations and attitude changes among members of intentional communities, I find cognitive authorities constrain attitudes via two mechanisms: (1) interpersonal tensions when attitudes and sentiment relations are misaligned (i.e., balance dynamics), and (2) social influence processes leading to attitude changes that are concordant with the group’s attitude system (i.e., constraint satisfaction). These findings imply that attitude change models based exclusively on interpersonal contagion or individual drives for cognitive consistency overlook important ways group structures affect how individuals feel and think.

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Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive Authority and the Constraint of Attitude Change in Groups

Rawlings

2020

Am Sociol Rev

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“…In terms of their social and political relevance, Sobieraj et al (2013) looked to the culture of avoidance that has long been seen to characterise American political talk in face-to-face contexts (Eliasoph 1998), arguing that engagement with outrage media may allow audiences to mitigate the risk of social stigmatisation by allowing audiences to engage in new kinds of political conversation. The fear of social stigma has more recently been conceptualised with respect to online discourse (Schwarz and Shani 2016).…”

Section: Media As Resources For Audience Outragementioning

confidence: 99%

Recontextualising partisan outrage online: analysing the public negotiation of Trump support among American conservatives in 2016

Kelly

2020

AI & Soc

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This article conceptualises the role of audience agency in the performance of American conservative identities within a hybridised outrage media ecology. Audience agency has been under-theorised in the study of outrage media through an emphasis on outrage as a rhetorical strategy of commercial media institutions. Relatively little has been said about the outrage discourse of audiences. This coincides with a tendency to consider online political talk as transparent and "earnest," thereby failing to recognise the multi-vocality, dynamism, and ambivalence—i.e., performativity—of online user-generated discourse. I argue the concept of recontextualisation offers a means of addressing these shortcomings. I demonstrate this by analysing how the users of the American right-wing partisan media website TheBlaze.com publicly negotiated support for Donald Trump in a below-the-line comment field during the 2016 US presidential election. These processes are situated with respect to the contested, dynamic, and creative construction of partisan identities in the contemporary United States.

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“…Facebook's design offers a fruitful environment for disconnection since it enables the "sharing [of] the same conversations with highly different audiences" (Schwarz and Shani, 2016). And because people are exposed to the political opinions of their Facebook friends, as well as other bits of information they may not have been privy to otherwise, propaganda becomes an effective tool for disconnection and polarization.…”

Section: Digital Disconnectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effects of Participatory Propaganda: From Socialization to Internalization of Conflicts

Asmolov¹

2019

Journal of Design and Science

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It is October of 1986. I am one of 25 children in the preschool group of a kindergarten in the Leninsky district of Moscow. It is the "quiet hour" in the middle of the day when children are supposed to nap, but I cannot sleep. I am very worried. Every evening, after the "Spokoynoy Nochi, Malyshi" (Goodnight, Kids) children's show on television at 8:45 pm, I watch the evening news program "Vremya" (Time). Last evening I heard that our leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, is going to meet the American leader, Ronald Reagan, in Reykjavík. I cannot understand why Gorbachev is going there. I am sure the Americans are going to kill him. I am also sleepless because I am afraid of nuclear war. At this time "Star Wars" for me is not a movie, but a plan for American military aggression against the people of the Soviet Union. So my parents offered me a new game. They gave me an old radio and taught me how to search for shortwave radio stations. Unlike our TV, which had only six buttons for Journal of Design and Science • Issue 6: Unreal The Effects of Participatory Propaganda: From Socialization to Internalization of Conflicts 3 six channels, the radio offered a range of voices in different languages. The purpose of the game was to scan the short waves and find Russian-speaking stations broadcasting from beyond the borders of the USSR; the so-called "Vrazheskie golosa" (Enemy Voices). It was quite tricky, since the tiniest movements of my fingers would sweep past these stations, and their wavelengths sometimes changed in order to avoid being jammed by the Soviet government. I learned very quickly how to recognize Radio Freedom, the Voice of Israel, the Voice of America and the BBC. (Who could imagine that 30 years later I would have an office in Bush House, where the BBC Russian Service was broadcasting from at that time, and is now part of King's College London!) I really enjoyed my parents' new game. For the first time in my life, I was actively involved in searching for news. I also started to sleep better during the "quiet hour" at kindergarten. Through that radio game I learned that the same events can be described in very different ways. Although I wasn't able to understand many things, it highlighted the polyphony of voices and framings. I was lucky to have this experience just then, in 1986. Only a year later, "glasnost," a new policy of media openness, began to influence Soviet TV, and the "enemy voices" lost their unique value as a window onto an alternative reality. The image of me as a child sitting in my bedroom in front of the radio and searching for "enemy voices" comes back as I think about how the Internet has changed propaganda. In 1986 that old shortwave radio was a physical mediator between me as a user and the global environment. It brought new meanings directly into my bedroom. I didn't know that what I heard was called "anti-Soviet propaganda." Similarly, I hadn't known that the news I watched on TV was propaganda, either. What really mattered was the range of voices brought to me by these various tools of medi...

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Culture in mediated interaction: Political defriending on Facebook and the limits of networked individualism

Cited by 40 publications

References 38 publications

Cognitive Authority and the Constraint of Attitude Change in Groups

Cognitive Authority and the Constraint of Attitude Change in Groups

Recontextualising partisan outrage online: analysing the public negotiation of Trump support among American conservatives in 2016

The Effects of Participatory Propaganda: From Socialization to Internalization of Conflicts

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