Reference to Self and Other in the Digital Public Sphere: The Case of Political Blogs

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze how a political blog author (Spanish Alejo Vidal-Quadras) establishes the reference to self and other in his blog entries. We furthermore look into how the commentators to this blog react and establish reference to self and other in the digital public sphere. More concretely, we show that they not only take up the references established by the main blog author but also create new references. These allow, on the one hand, for profiling themselves as part of a group and, on the other hand, identifying their interlocutor among the variety of possible interlocutors in the digital public sphere. By addressing different interlocutors, the commentators turn the comments section into a dialogic space, a dimension that is lacking in the main blog entries. However, the fact that they almost invariably identify interlocutors other than Vidal-Quadras but address Vidal-Quadras without explicitly identifying him, shows that Vidal-Quadras remains the main ratified interlocutor in view of his ownership of the blog. This paper shows then how participants in the digital public sphere create a complex relationship of self and other reference in political blogs.

Untangling the relationship between work pressure and emotions in social media: a quantitative empirical study of construction industry

“…Moreover, acquaintances tend to show the content of highly emotional posts, and their curiosity is driven by psychological cues (Fieseler et al, 2015). In particular, when the commentators know the antecedents of the user's post, they are more willing to echo the content of the post to show their concern for the user (De Cock and Gonzalez Arias, 2018;Lim et al, 2011). The intense emotional expression in the post indirectly shows the strong reaction under the interference of WP.…”