| dc.description.abstract | This thesis examines online discourse on news and opinion websites based in the Irish Republic over the period 2010-2013. It arose from an absence of literature on both online communications practices here and the rapid reconfiguration of the Irish mediascape at this time. I seek to understand how users of these sites present themselves, express their viewpoints and engage in the discursive production of the society in which they live. There are nine sites, divided into three categories for analysis: individual blogs, group blogs and online news sites; three sites in each category. All of these spaces are concerned with political and social matters within Irish public culture. I position this enquiry with reference to a much earlier work examining public discourse, ideology and identity in the Irish print media (Peillon, 1982). The primary research question asks how we understand the production of these texts by individuals, and what this tells us about the social imaginary in a society undergoing shock, disruption and revelation. The discussions all occurred after the bailout provided to Ireland by the Troika in 2010, following near-total economic collapse. It was thus a time of frenzied and intense public conversation. Three themes emerge which are used as an organising structure for the thesis. These are, firstly, the positioning and evident self-perception of the commentators within the spaces examined; secondly, the depiction and reproduction of social groups, particularly class, in Ireland, and finally, the overarching question of national identity. At this time Ireland was, I argue, ‘re-branded’ at an official level to become widely promoted as the ‘digital island.’ The veracity of such a contention, its underlying assumptions and its connection to individual practices were among primary concerns that motivated this thesis. I work with a two-pronged theoretical framework in this research. The first of these is the reactivation of Habermas’s (1991) public sphere in analysis of digital media; the second is an adaptation of communicative capital, following Dean (2003; 2005; 2010). I disrupt and develop both of these theoretical stances. I argue for a reconfiguration of public sphere that takes a broad view of ‘the political,’ moving away from a preoccupation with solely democratic and civic concerns into the wider realm of ideology as it manifests in the practices of everyday life. I reinterpret Dean’s rendering of communicative capital, taking it away from a Marxist definition of capital to a Bourdieusian (1986) conception that considers its relationship to his suite of major capitals: cultural, social and economic. I do so in order to use it at three levels of analysis: micro, concerning the individual, miso, relating to groups and class, and macro, addressing the corporate and national discourses. Whereas Dean has foregrounded the numerical aspect of this form of communicative production, suggesting we discount the identity of speakers and interpretations of content, these are precisely the matters I concentrate on in this thesis. The work is grounded in sociology, positioning itself also within the critical media studies field. The methods used are cultural studies and qualitative discourse analysis. The thesis argues that communicative capital is generated, displayed and exchanged in the sites I examine by the adoption of strategies available to those with high levels of both cultural capital and digital literacy. People who enjoy voice in other aspects of public life are most adept at transferring this into spaces of online discourse. This finding diminishes – but crucially does not totally obliterate – the potential for such sites to operate effectively as public spheres. | |
