Correspondence -

- or in fact just an exchange of e-mails with my supervisor Tarmo Malmberg. Once again, this is as much of a reminder for myself as it is anything else.

“Dear András,

[...]
On the basis of your presentation on Friday, I figure out the two main questions of your thesis as the following.

(1) You have to deduce from Habermas’s normative theory of democracy such variables or issues that can be researched empirically, which means operationalizing them to a sufficient extent.

(2) You have to analyse the empirical data in such a way as to enable assessment of the degree of the health of American democracy on the basis of your sample.

The first step

The first stage of my phd research project concerns the content analysis of social news sites. I use the term “social news site” referring to websites that act as aggregators or filters of content on the internet, built around the idea that the community of users submits various pieces, and selects – through voting – the ones that are the most worthy of attention. (Examples include Digg and Newsvine.)

There are two basic entry points to examine the relations between the public sphere and social news sites. First, social news sites seem interesting because they accommodate public discussion – and, by the nature of this discussion (ie. it takes place in writing, and it creates its own archives (=is documentated instantly)), it is technically feasible to retrieve and analyze this discussion. What is it about, is it reasoned, critical argumentation, or just shouting abuse at one another? How do participants cope with the fact that they argue with total strangers, hiding behind screen names? (Does this anonymity actually help the conversation?) I plan to study this problem in the second part of the research project.

Second, social news sites are peculiar because they also provide the material about which discussion takes place (at least on the surface); notably, the articles themselves. Social news sites are, well, news sites (even if they only process previously released material). In this sense, they are part of the media. The question here is how they compare to organs of the established, mainstream media.