‘Show me your phone!’: Affect, neoliberal rationality and nationalism in Türkiye’s street interviews

Beginning in 2018 and climaxing by the end of 2021, economic problems in Türkiye have been a significant subject matter of the country. Hence, taking a great deal of attention, street interviews broadcasted on YouTube have concentrated on the Turkish economy. They have showed that the great majority of Turkish citizens complain about the way Turkish economy is. However, disagreeing and going against the majority, with their similar tendencies, opinions, and reactions, a number of interviewees who personally state that they are from low-income groups and supporters of Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) tend to bend the fact about the Turkish economy as they not only present their own economic circumstances better than they actually are but also reject the existence of the economic distress the country has been going through even though it is admitted by the state authorities. As an answer to such a contradiction, this study suggests that it could be explained through the theoretical framework of Nietzschean concept of ressentiment and concentrates on victimization, polarization, revaluation, blaming others for failures, and glorification of sufferings which are both the essential ingredients of the ressentiment and tangible issues in the street interviews. In line with this purpose, it, first, presents the way Turkish economy has been and the ressentiment triggering discourses of the state authorities. Then, in order to have a first-hand information about both the interviews and the interviewees, it conducts a semi-structured interview with Mehmet Koyuncu-the interviewer of a popular YouTube channel called Sade Vatandaş (Ordinary Citizen)-exemplifying the subject by analyzing the responses of the interviewees.

Exemplification research has consistently shown effects of vox pops’ exemplars on audience judgments, whereby people tend to follow the opinion of a few fellow citizens. In this study, we gain some insight into why—and especially for whom—ordinary citizens are such influential “opinion-givers.” Importantly, we look at populist attitudes as a potential moderator for exemplification effects by comparing news reports containing vox pops with purely journalistic news reports providing the same arguments. In a web-based experiment, we show that both perceptual and persuasive effects are moderated by participants’ populist attitudes, and thus, their resonance with the “voice of the people.”

Perceptions of public opinion can influence attitudes and behaviour. Studies based on experiments show that when people encounter aggregate cues, such as opinion polls, and exemplar cues, such as ‘vox pop’ interviews, they gain a sense of public consensus about policy issues and political actors, even if the cues are not representative of public opinion. Social media have given rise to new public opinion cues, such as ‘likes’, shares, and comments, and these have even weaker links with real public opinion. However, these new cues activate powerful social endorsement affordances and, as a result, may influence perceptions of public opinion. We trace the effects of these new cues in the hybrid media system and explain how they constrain professional journalism’s role as mediator of the public’s attitudes. Social media cues can influence audiences’ perceptions of news and politics. Journalists’ use of social media cues in their reporting can also influence audience perceptions of politics and of journalism itself. The production and circulation of cues can be skewed by disinformation campaigns based on orchestrated botnets and commenting sock puppets. Due to their influence, fabricated public opinion cues on social media can render social media users, news audiences and journalists more vulnerable to manipulation and deception.

Social Media in Mainland China: Weak Democracy, Emergent Civil Society

This study applied news framing theory with mixed quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse news items (N = 1348) about ordinary Arabs on Al Jazeera Arabic, Al Arabiya and Nile News TV shortly before the Arab Spring. Results show that ordinary Arab citizen representation was low. Overall, there were significant differences in networks’ framing of ordinary people. Importance, negativity and conflict values dominated the news featuring ordinary citizens. Arab news networks did not provide adequate time for citizens to voice opinions, and limited representation occurred via vox pop, footage and indirect reference. Networks employed negative sentimental framing (protest and rejection, economic problems, victimization, health problems and mistrust in governments) and mainly portrayed citizens of countries undergoing crises and wars. Arab television news should prioritize sharing the opinions, concerns and successes of ordinary Arab people and engage in constructive journalism rather than concentrating on problem frames without offering solutions.

We are living in the age of photography. Photography and visual social media flood our communication channels and become embodied in our daily activities. People who can afford the medium of photography – people who are described here as ‘citizens of photography’ – use these channels to articulate and represent their grievances. These exemplify a form of visual activism and articulation that have long been discussed in social movement studies, yet the links between photography and social movements could benefit from further examination. Drawing on a socio-environmental movement case in Cambodia, this article interrogates how photographic and visual representations and social media shape the outcomes of collective action by discontented citizens. I argue that the ubiquity of visual devices and digital access to visual social media facilitates underprivileged citizens in grassroots movements to aesthetically exert influence on their targets in order to leverage their demands effectively. Beyond considering images as messengers and mediatization, the power of visual images inspires and provokes action: participation in the protest, and re-production and re-circulation of the images on social media. The power of visual images – produced by ordinary citizens – is the performative force that brings about change in the era of social media.

The news media scenario in India has been transformed substantially in the post-liberalization period as privatization and deregulation have facilitated cross-border flows of capital and technology. Online news media, a new yet popular segment, has emerged in the past decade in the wake of India's rapid integration into the global economy. This article focuses on online news reporting of the last general election in India: the 2009 Lok Sabhā election. Although there are an impressive number of studies regarding online social networking or new media in the global context, scant attention has been paid to the Indian subcontinent, the involvement of Indian politicians and political journalists with online media. Considering these aspects, this article explores how online media in India are changing the established political culture, albeit in a limited manner, and raises the issues that interweave notions of modernity, class-consciousness, and emerging participatory practices. The article seeks to make sense of how Indian journalism is transforming through social media use by analysing three different stakeholders during the Indian general election: politicians, political journalists and ordinary citizens. The very fact of “being” or “using” social media, it argues, becomes an “enticing” aspect for politicians to relate to the young, urban, upwardly mobile middle-class citizens of India and becomes pivotal in the discursive construction of a binary between the “old” politics/politicians and the “new” politics/politicians in present-day India.

By means of a large-scale manual content analysis of Dutch economic news coverage in 2015 (n = 4251 articles), we compare the use of “every day” sources by online and offline outlets. The use of those sources is argued to increase news consumers’ attentiveness to the news item. We investigate whether online outlets use the “ordinary citizen” less frequently, both generally speaking as well as a source, while relying more on social media posts. Our empirical analysis focuses on a comparison between two online quality outlets (nrc.nl and vk.nl), two online popular outlets (nu.nl and telegraaf.nl), two offline quality outlets (NRC Handelsblad and de Volkskrant) and two offline popular outlets (Algemeen Dablad and de Telegraaf). Overall, results suggest a limited use of ordinary citizens as news sources, and even less use of social media. Multivariate logistic regression models, controlling for the length of news items as well as the day of publishing, ‘show that offline outlets use ordinary citizens more often, while online outlets rely more on social media’. Additionally, we find the differences between popular and quality outlets a lot less pronounced, with the latter only making slight more use of social media sources.

This article examines representations and discussions of Eileen Gu, a biracial athlete who represented China in the 2022 Winter Olympics and won two gold medals and one silver medal, on Chinese state-owned and social media. Despite Gu’s unprecedented achievement, her identity drew controversy in China. This comparative study of media discourses on Gu reveals how Chinese identity is contested in a global context. The analysis suggests that state-owned and social media use different rhetoric to discuss Gu’s Chinese identity as either a state of being or a process of becoming. State-owned media highlight Chinese identity as a “being” by emphasizing Gu’s kinship and cultural ties to China, thus acknowledging her essentialized identity as a Chinese. Social media, represented by Zhihu , underscore Chinese identity as a “becoming” that is not only based on connections to China but also on reiterated performances of Chinese culture and commitment. Social media users largely negate Gu’s Chinese identity due to her perceived failure to provide sufficient evidence that she has become Chinese. The two modes of rhetoric reflect the state’s and ordinary citizens’ respective relationships with global elites, which have shaped their varied framings of Gu.

With the expanding digital public sphere, social media have worked as tools that construct and maintain the boundaries and descriptors of social identity among members, by portraying and reinforcing content shared by communities and cultures. Religious leaders and groups have used social media to make themselves more visible and to communicate their faith’s mission. The scope of this study is to use Henri Tajfel’s social identity theory to examine the viewers’ comments on the content created by a religious individual/group for the production, shaping, and reproduction of the Muslim identity through YouTube. We have used Corpus Linguistics (CL) methods to examine relative frequencies and emerging statistical significance of lexical patterns in viewers’ comments. This analysis shows that a strong “we” versus “you” dichotomization exists between the in-group, Muslims, and the out-group, persons who are systematically degraded as being low-informed religious, or non-religious, in street interviews.

Disaster Management is a method for saving lives and property that has been built over many years at great expense and effort. Forecasting demand, determining needs, procuring, storing, and handling inventory and coordination, and distributing relief to reduce losses before, during, and after any disaster are all important aspects of disaster management. Since natural disasters strike without warning, disaster management requires well-organized and coordinated planning before, during, and after the event. The use of ICT-based co-production can significantly improve disaster management by effectively and conveniently performing different operations to include diverse stakeholders. This study focuses on citizens utilizing social media in Disaster Management anchored on the co-production theory, as the framework in analyzing the interaction of citizens with the government through social media platform. Co-production theory considers other stakeholders outside an organization by their input toward producing products or services. Using qualitative case study design, this research was able to identify the factors that lead citizens to use social media during disaster and crisis situations using reflexive thematic analysis technique, for locating, analyzing, and interpreting meaning patterns (themes) in qualitative data. Findings indicated that using social media it will strengthen the communication between citizens and government or with the constituents, the ability to generate situational awareness about the crisis and disaster situations. The factors that lead citizens to used social media are the “Socialization” and “Altruism” themes. Those themes come from the interview conducted and transcribed the audio recordings into text conversation, collecting all the common among codes and produces themes. How social media facilitate citizens in co-producing valuable information includes “Collective Action,” “Collaboration,” and “Venue for Engagement” themes. The researchers further urge that this research be expanded to include not only ordinary citizens who use social media, but also social media leaders and community organizations, as they play an important role in society during disasters. The government may have all the means and equipment needed to mitigate disaster risks, but citizens, particularly community leaders, have the knowledge and expertise that the government needs to act and respond in those unfortunate situations.KeywordsDisaster managementCo-productionReflexive thematic analysisSocial media

Social media can reach millions within seconds and is therefore one of the most frequently used communication and trust-building tools in pre-, during and post-disaster activities. In the case study presented in this chapter on the Lorestan floods in March 2019, public sector decision-makers and ordinary citizens used a wide variety of mobile-based and web-based technologies (SMS and blogs) and different social media platforms for help, mapping and sending status reports, fund raising, donations and mobilising volunteers for assistance. In this context, the research analysed data to examine the role of social media in disaster response, focusing on their ability of strengthening public willingness to donate and to support relief organisations during and after the 2019 floods in the province of Lorestan, Iran. This chapter explores whether collective action via social media could bring about any improvement to post-disaster management activities, and how social media operate in such contexts. The floods also caused damages in some of the outstanding historical sites of Lorestan. Findings from the manual monitoring of social media posts by major disaster-related actors in Iran reveal that the most common functions of social media in this case have been to inform about relief operations during the crisis, to mobilise the public to help during the crisis and finally to organise human resources for relief operations. Moreover, the study highlights three key themes, namely (a) the distrust of state organisations towards social media, (b) political sensitivities surrounding the application or boycott of social media and (c) lack of sufficient media literacy and the need felt by the state for a centralised control over social media as two main challenges associated with the use of social media by state organisations.

Grammar is a complex phenomenon: it may refer to language users' competence of the rules of a language and of its constitutive systems, and it may refer to the description of such a system in a codified text, a reference grammar. In the analysis of political debate—as in other discourse‐based studies—the strategic use of grammar, that is, linguistic forms and their discursive functions in context, has become the focus of investigation. This holds for the strategic use of pronouns or agentless passives to enhance or deflect responsibility, the strategic use of tense, aspect, and modality to attenuate speaker commitment, the strategic use of verb semantics to do leadership in context targeting competence and responsiveness, or the use of quotations, small stories, and social and regional dialects to do ordinariness popularizing a debate to align with ordinary citizens. Political debate comprises parliamentary debates in societal institutions as well as media debates in traditional media and in social media. The political debates may take place between the elites of society, sometimes integrating ordinary citizens (or their voices). With the advent of social media, political debate has been expanded to media users' commenting. With the mediation and medialization of political debate in and across social media, political debate has become a very important kind of mediated discourse, and it is not only the grammar of political debate, which is at issue, but also the grammar of mediated discourse.

ABSTRACTEmpirically grounded in the 2017 Jakarta Gubernatorial Election (Pilkada DKI) case, this article discusses the relationship of social media and electoral politics in Indonesia. There is no doubt that sectarianism and racism played significant roles in the election and social media, which were heavily utilized during the campaign, contributed to the increasing polarization among Indonesians. However, it is misleading to frame the contestation among ordinary citizens on social media in an oppositional binary, such as democratic versus undemocratic forces, pluralism versus sectarianism, or rational versus racist voters. Marked by the utilization of volunteers, buzzers, and micro-celebrities, the Pilkada DKI exemplifies the practice of post-truth politics in marketing the brand. While encouraging freedom of expression, social media also emboldens freedom to hate, where individuals exercise their right to voice their opinions while actively silencing others. Unraveling the complexity of the relationship between social media and electoral politics, I suggest that the mutual shaping between users and algorithms results in the formation of “algorithmic enclaves” that, in turn, produce multiple forms of tribal nationalism. Within these multiple online enclaves, social media users claim and legitimize their own versions of nationalism by excluding equality and justice for others.

The problem considered in the article is connected with the ability of words and standard collocations possessing expressive-evaluative aureoles to signal about the condition of some fragments of collective consciousness. Lexico- phraseological levels of the language is most dynamic due to its immediate connection with man’s mentality and social medium. That is why the evolutions taking place in the social medium get materialized in the semantics and/or vocabulary-unit connotations including the most actual ones. These processes often have quite a long history and are able to obtain a broad resonance among speech agents. The purpose of the article is to analyse the historical dynamics of the common man connotation known from time immemorial and topical up to now. The materials borrowed from authoritative lexicographic sources and used in the present research are informative, quotations from mass media are verified and the comparative and comparative-historical methods used in the process of the study have firmly proved themselves as scientifically effective. The main adjectival component common of the collocation initially was syncretical and later became polysemantic. However, with all the diachronic transformations of its semantics, there was always present the meaning fraught with qualifications of the social status of the man who did not possess either considerable material property or administrative powers. But in the Soviet epoch thanks to the efforts of official propaganda the common man (plural: common people) collocation obtained high ameliorative evaluativity, and what is more, it was widely used in respect to foreign ‘class brothers’. After radical demolition of axiological paradigms connected with perestroika reforms there appeared a different predominant social group in Russia, which is usually called the elite. And the common man collocation turned into a nomination of a representative of the lowest, almost marginal and deprived of rights social caste. Since manipulative demands of the people in power must be provided with the necessary verbal tools such collocations began to appear in the para-governmental discourse as ordinary man and ordinary citizen which semantically were similar to the common man collocation, but unlike it they were not loaded with the connotations of the Soviet times. The results of the research are appropriately substantiated allowing to calibrate semantico-connotative evolutions of the common man collocation at various stages of its historical existence. The conclusions, in accordance with the purpose of the article, testify to the processes which due to predominant axiological prescriptions of the ancient Russian and old Russian periods in the history of the language characterized common man as a person having neither material nor significant social status. In the Soviet epoch this collocation received high ameliorative evaluativity, and in the post-Soviet time it lost its high social status. It was gradually replaced with ordinary man and ordinary citizen, which were almost adequate to the archaic ones. The author’s contribution to obtaining the results consists in the independent approach and choice of the authentic theme, discovering factual materials and consequent usage of the approbated scientific methods.