Discourse of influence – participation and opinions in digital and print media

Abstract

In democratic societies, exchange of written opinion is fundamental, but since the 1990s, public debate has gradually moved away from print media platforms to digital media platforms. In order to understand how a shift from print to digital media in opinion-oriented writing may have consequences for interaction and participation, it is relevant to investigate interpersonal aspects of opinion-oriented texts situated in digital and print media. The aim of the study is to explore and compare writers’ attitudes and the construction of the writer-reader-relationship in digital media (represented by Twitter) and (traditionally) print media (represented by letters to the editor, LEs). Bakhtinian dialogism and appraisal theory form the theoretical backdrop of the study. Results show that in the LEs, writers tend to take a negative general value position, but in the tweets, the writers’ attitude is more often either positive or negative, making Twitter a more diverse platform. Furthermore, attitudinal meaning is more transparent in the LEs, indicating that tweets are more often specialized, and readers who are not familiar with the context and interactional style of specific writers may be excluded from the communication. Another result is that a shift from print to digital media platforms seems to turn the focus of discussion more towards attitudes and perspectives in general, and less towards writers’ own attitudes. Therefore, digital media opinion exchange can be understood as a meta-discussion of attitudes, while print media rather transmit writers’ personal attitudes.