What Will They Think If I Post This? Risks and Returns for Political Expression Across Platforms

This study proposes the concept of “digital Gemeinschaft 2.0,” through examining Rich Ling’s employment of Ferdinand Tönnies’ Gesellschaft (market society) and Gemeinschaft (fellowship), when conceptualizing the “digital Gemeinschaft.” Drawing on 11 in-depth interviews with social media natives in Norway, it identifies three recurring themes, reflecting (1) a Gesellschaft attentiveness, (2) continued Gemeinschaft, with occasional public orientations, and (3) information gathering and learning without direct public partaking. This study emphasizes social media natives’ utilization of social media for maintaining social relationships through an active negotiation and construction of space. A continuous attentiveness to social space is connected to features of Gesellschaft in social media: the utilization of people’s data traces for economic purposes. The social media natives’ online activities are still tied to the market rationales of social media corporations, however, as platforms both facilitate and profit from their practices. The digital Gemeinschaft 2.0 concept hence highlights a continued tension between Gesellschaft and digital Gemeinschaft in social media as both medium and (social and public) space.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Media Natives’ Invisible Online Spaces: Proposing the Concept of Digital Gemeinschaft 2.0

Salte

2022

“…Research has revealed that social media not only afford new tools for political communication (Bode et al, 2014; Theocharis & van Deth, 2018) but as spaces where political communication unfolds, they also enable processes of social and communicative change (Flanagin, 2020). Specifically, social media alter the nature of engagement in the public life (Baym & boyd, 2012), including changes in citizenship norms, for example, due to risk-return calculations (Parviz & Piercy, 2021).…”

Section: Changing Participation Forms Changing Citizenship Normsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, norms can emerge due to individual or collective actions that harm or benefit individuals and collectives (Coleman, 1990; Opp, 2001). Although social media environments induce benefits for individuals’ civic participation (such as political mobilization on an unprecedented scale or political emancipation through self-expression), they also induce harmful experiences that may constrain individual agency (such as hate speech that aims to intimidate and discriminate) (Parviz & Piercy, 2021). In the presence of both harms and benefits, there is reason to believe that there would be a demand for norms (Coleman, 1990) that help people navigate social media environments in a democratic sense.…”

Section: Changing Participation Forms Changing Citizenship Normsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Makes a Good Citizen Online? The Emergence of Discursive Citizenship Norms in Social Media Environments

Gagrčin

Porten-Cheé

Leißner

et al. 2022

The importance of citizenship norms—shared understandings of how citizens ought to participate in society—has been discussed at length in the past two decades, particularly in conversations around changing notions of citizenship in the digital age. Yet, most studies have gravitated between the two poles of dutiful and self-actualizing citizenship. In this study, we explore which citizenship norms people express related to their political participation in social media environments and which affordances and experiences in social media environments shape these norms. Through interviews and focus group discussions, we found that citizenship norms emerge in response to positive and negative experiences in social media environments. We found three groups of norms that are distinctive to the networked environments of social media: individual information care, discourse care, and considered contribution. These can serve as conceptual frames for understanding the normative underpinnings of discursive participation in social media environments from the perspective of ordinary citizens.

“…As social media have greatly expanded the opportunity for personal and political expression, research has attended to how people use platforms to these aims (O'Sullivan & Carr, 2018). In terms of opinion expression, this work has documented the role social media plays as a medium through which citizens can publicly express and discuss their beliefs on different topics and across different contexts (Parviz & Piercy, 2021).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet research on social media opinion expression has tended to focus on sentiment (Ceron et al, 2014) rather than discrete emotions (Hasell & Weeks, 2016) and has generally focused on public expression (Parviz & Piercy, 2021; Waterloo et al, 2018). In this study, we extend prior work by empirically examining the differences between how people manage emotions when communicating publicly and privately.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion Work on Social Media: Differences in Public and Private Emotions about Politics and COVID-19 on Facebook

Van Duyn,

Muddiman

2023

Research has found that individuals may engage with emotions differently depending on social media platforms and/or social norms. Yet it remains unclear how individuals deal with emotions differently depending on whether the communication is public or private or depending on the topic. Using a 2 × 2 experimental design, we find that people engage in emotion work on social media, noting a difference in experienced emotion during the process of opinion expression and expressed emotion in the expression itself across both publicness and the topic of the message. Specifically, we find that those who express an opinion publicly or about politics in general experienced more anger than those who express an opinion privately or about COVID-19, who tended to express more anxiety. Yet patterns of emotional experience and expression were not always consistent. These results suggest individuals experience and express emotions differently depending on the publicness and topic of their communication. We discuss implications for how scholars conceptualize and study political expression on social media.