Operationalizing deliberation (2)

Just a quick note.

For our research seminar, I finally put together a paper containing what hopefully will remain as basic pillars of my conceptualization and operationalization of deliberation. I start from a basic definition, review some existing conceptual approaches and coding schemes, and finally arrive at the conclusions that

a.) Deliberaton can mean any number of things, and so in order to analyze it, its context must be considered, and

b.) in the specific context that I’m examining deliberation (in the discussions on social news sites about the 2008 US presidential election), discussions should meet the following criteria in order to qualify as such:

• exposure of heterogeneous views;
• external openness (accessability);
• internal openness (equal communicative rights);
• argumentativeness (the use of rational and relevant arguments);
• reciprocity, and
• reflexivity.

More on this coding scheme later; say, after our seminar discussion.

Operationalizing deliberation

I’ve been, for some time, working on conceptualizing and operationalizing “deliberation” – after all, this is what I’ll look for in analysing the discussions on social news websites.

Janssen and Kies (2005) offer a comprehensive rundown on previous attempts at pinning down what deliberation is. Steenbergen et al. (2003) go so far as creating a “Discourse Quality Index” to measure political deliberation; and both papers are openly endorsed by Habermas (2005) himself. What is interesting is that, although it has been noted (by Bohman, Mutz, Sunstein and others) that the presence of conflicting views, the clashing of opinions is an essential part of deliberation, the presence or absence of contradicting arguments does not feature any of the operationalization attempts mentioned in these papers.

How come?

AR; Blogs as alternative

A refreshing article by Linda Jean Kenix from the University of Canterbury – just published in JCMC – tries to set the record straight about “the state of the blogosphere” – that is, can we refer to that as some kind of alternative media?

Not really, if we define “alternative media” along the lines suggested by Atton or Atkinson: in opposition to the mainstream. Where the mainstream is profit-oriented, hierarchical, exclusive, manipulative and conformist, there alternative should be just the opposite.

But a look at some popular and not-so popular blogs does not seem to confirm that the blogosphere would be anything like that. Results of the content analysis of four blogs offering political commentary – in bullet points:

• binary and reductive analysis, instead of in-depth, extensive analysis of issues
• dependent reporting – that is, dependent on the mainstream media, with virtually no evidence of original reporting (cf. my own results about social news sites recycling mainstream material)
• one-way communication between bloggers and audience (the comment area is not the place to interact with the author of the blog)
• caustic commentary and childish communicative practices – like some kind of sandbox for the kids, away from the ears of adults
• coded language and partisan tone – often seemingly elitist, and being just as hierarchical as the mainstream media
• highly personalized though, and
• fostering only apathetic online “participation”

So it makes more sense to think of the blogosphere as somewhere on the border between mainstream and alternative, extending and drawing upon practices (and, I might add, resources) of the mainstream; and adding a personalized touch to it.

It’s good to see a paper that tries to question the optimism in the “networked public sphere of blogs” by empirically analyzing them. But much as I like Kenix’s work, I wonder why she doesn’t offer a clear conceptualization of blogs. She describes at great length what “blogs” as such usually are like, but she then takes the variety as a given. Sure, this makes sense from a certain point of view, but what I’m trying to say is that saying that “blogs are like this” needs to be, by definition, so broad as not to be able to offer any firm, precise point of orientation.

SOME blogs are like this, and SOME blogs are like that; SOME are undoubtedly part of the alternative media, while SOME are by definition part of the mainstream; and unless these distinctions are made, and the two categories separated, I don’t think there is much point in an overall analysis.

From the point of view of communication studies, the blogosphere is not one thing. Or at least it shouldn’t be one analytical unit. FTW!

Kenix, Linda Jean (2009): “Blogs as Alternative” in JCMC 14, 790-822.

AR; Against Deliberation

…so is the title of an essay by Lynn M. Sanders, originally published in 1997 in Political Theory. (No link this time.) What is this about?

Well, deliberation, says Sanders, is perhaps too often regarded as some kind of panacea for the problems of democracies. An overly enthusiastic belief in the powers of deliberation overlooks its perceived problems: most importantly, that its prerequisites might easily exclude the disenfranchised from taking part – which is all the more dangerous since it is claimed that deliberation will eliminate such problems of political discussion.

Sanders illustrates the problem through the example of US juries: for example, how those of higher socio-economic status tend to be perceived as having better arguments than others.

So, on the one hand, deliberation, in theory, might not be so open as it is claimed; and on the other hand, in practice, as it is empirically shown, doesn’t produce the results that it is expected to produce.

What, then, should be the solution? Well, according to the radical view of Sanders, alternative forms of political participation should be sought; and one candidate of that would be the form of “testimony“: a personal, experiential, not-necessarily-rational account of things as they are and as they should be.

There are five points I’d like to make about this argument.

Discussion catalysts

Combining the theoretical background provided by the Katz-Lazarsfeld two-step flow of communication theory (and its subsequent criticism and revisions) with a social roles perspective, a recent JCMC article looked at Usenet discussions to find out whether there is something special about those contributors who create popular threads – and if so, then what is it.

The article, by Itai Himelboim, Eric Gleave and Marc Smith, termed successful conversation starters “discussion catalysts” (DC) – not surprisingly, a small minority among conversants.

Interestingly, 95% of DC thread starting posts contained content imported elsewhere from the web, and about two thirds of this content came from “traditional news organizations,” especially AP, The Washington Post and The New York Times in particular.

So it seems that the two-step flow hypothesis still have some relevance: it is through a small number of participants (DCs, at Katz and Lazarsfeld: opinion leaders) that the larger community is “agitated,” and delivered information originally coming from the mainstream media.

The authors consider the heavy reliance on established media “less encouraging;” they claim that the heavier use of alternative sources of information would be desirable. For reasons cited many times, I don’t fully agree, but the most important point is that to an important extent this is not a question of agreement or disagreement, insofar as the dominant position of the established media is an practical an economic reality.

And as a final remark, I just cannot believe that the JCMC still writes about the “Internet”, with capital I. With the words of Lorelai Gilmore: I don’t even know how to respond to this! It’s 2009 now!

Himelboim, Itai, Eric Gleave and Marc Smith (2009): “Discussion catalysts in online political discussion: Content importers and conversation starters” in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14, 771-789.

In a recent JCMC article, Lu Wei examines different kinds of blog, as regards their “knowledge producing” potential – and tries to look at the socioeconomic differences that might be contributing to the observed difference.

First the results, and then some comments.

Two paragraphs…

from “The Well-Informed Citizen – An Essay on the Social Distribution of Knowledge” by Alfred Schütz. Emphasis added by me.

“The outstanding feature of a man’s life in the modern world is his conviction that his life-world as a whole is neither fully understood by himself nor fully understandable to any of his fellowmen. There is a stock of knowledge theoretically available to everyone, built up by practical experience, science, and technology as warranted insights. But this stock of knowledge is not integrated. It consists of a mere juxtaposition of more or less coherent systems of knowledge which themselves are neither coherent nor even compatible with one another. On the contrary, the abysses between the various attitudes involved in the approach to the specialized systems are themselves a condition of the success of the specialized inquiry.”

Thus the article begins. And so it ends:

AR; political discussion frequency, network size, and heterogeneity of discussions

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Not one of the snappiest titles ever, but the original – from William P. Eveland, Jr. and Myiah Hutchens Hively, is even longer. In their paper they have reviewed considerable amounts of previous research material on political discussion, and on this basis arrived at more accurate and hence more useful conceptualization of notions such as “discussion frequency”, “safe” and “dangerous” discussion, and “heterogeneity” of political discussion.

Finally, they examined how these affect political knowledge (also reconceptualized here), and political participation, through a new survey.

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AR; Agenda setting revisited

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A fresh article by Sharon Meraz studies the agenda-setting power of “elite traditional media” (more specifically, the New York Times and the Washington Post) on the blogosphere, through various issues, and distinguishing between right-leaning, moderate and left-leaning independent blogs.

The results confirm what my own tentative research about social news sites hinted at: that traditional media are still very important, an “A-list force” in setting the agenda of citizen media; but the former no longer hold a monopoly over agenda setting.

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AR; A new(s) sort of democracy?

I started to read Ewan Crawford’s article on the opinion pages in the Scottish quailty dailies in the hope that it would supply some more tips on how to understand, conceptualize and operationalize deliberation – but in this regard I wasn’t really satisfied.

The paper recounts results of a content analysis of two Scottish “broadsheet” daily newspapers, trying to answer the question – to what extent do these contribute deliberative democracy.

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