Political Blogs Research Articles

Figurative Narratives in Political Blogging: Linguocognitive Perspective

Introduction. Recent years have seen a significant shift towards the pervasive use of figurative narratives in mediated political communication. Narrative practices, previously analyzed exclusively within the framework of literary theory, have become a kind of «language games» of modern politicians in their communication with potential voters and opponents, debates and intricate negotiation processes. The article analyzes figurative narratives of the English- and German-speaking political blogs as a powerful linguistic-cognitive tool for mediated political communication. The purpose of the paper is deep semantic analysis of figurative narratives of political blogs, which, as the authors claim, is a promising direction of research due to the narrative nature of human reasoning. The paper argues that the skillful use of figurative narrative practices based on archetypical plots and cultural references makes it possible to manipulate the consciousness of the electorate to achieve political goals.Methodology and sources. Methodologically, the study is based on the cognitive-discursive approach to narrative analysis and the basic principles of the neural theory of language and metaphor.Results and discussion. Pointing to the manipulative effect of metaphorical framing in narrative, the authors attempt to present a holistic view of narrative as a tool for the formation of political views. The study is based on the premise that narrative employs the rich structure of human representations of events and actions, and the type of metaphor promoted in the narrative affects human understanding of events and the adoption of certain positions on an important public issue by readers of political blogs. The set of metaphors, politicians use, forms a special type of cultural narrative, which the authors interpret as an extended metaphorical narrative.Conclusion. Summarizing the effects of using metaphorically framed narratives in politics, the authors conclude that the narrative communication strategy in political blogging is a targeted impact on a communication partner by referring to various narrative plots; the modification or transformation of the potential and diversity of political narratives, as well as their effectiveness, speaks in favor of their use in domestic and foreign policy communication to contribute to a symmetrical communication space aimed at successful cooperation rather than confrontation.

Hybridism, edutainment, and doubt: Science blogging finding its feet

Blogs have become everyday acquaintances in digital life. Although personal, political, and fashion blogs may be the best known, academics also engage in blogging about research. With fast-expanding digital publishing of all kinds, we may have to rethink the status of blogging in relation to our on-going research. This article discusses the perception of science blogs, and their status as a genre. It explores some blog threads talking about research blogging: are blogs a great way to improve outreach, or just dumbing down? Should we use blogs for publishing serious findings, or brush them aside as edutainment – preferably done by somebody else? Research blogs are explored in the context of science communication and research writing traditions, and their old and new features discussed.

A workflow for analyzing cultural schemas in texts

ABSTRACT Concept class analysis (CoCA) is a method for recovering cultural schemas in texts using a combination of word embedding and community detection models. Like survey-based forms of schematic class analysis (SCA), however, interpreting results can be difficult. Some of these interpretive difficulties are applicable across types of SCA, while others are unique to CoCA. In this paper, we propose a complete workflow for interpreting and analyzing CoCA output. We use the case of social identity schemas in a collection of over 13,000 U.S. political blog posts to outline a number of interpretive and analytical strategies and a robustness check to make sense of the cultural schemas recovered from texts.

The privilege of ‘aggrieved entitlement’: exploring the social bases of antifeminist political players mobilising online

Antifeminist groups have made extensive use of online platforms to mobilise and spread their political ideas. Existing studies of online antifeminism tend to focus their analyses primarily on how masculinities are constructed through antifeminist discourses. This article takes a different approach by exploring how the social position of antifeminist political players is related to their effective use of online platforms. Through an empirical study of an influential antifeminist blogosphere that emerged in Sweden in the mid-2000s, it is shown how the mostly anonymous antifeminist bloggers are, in fact, well-resourced activists who, due to their educational resources and communicative skills, could effectively use political blogs to promote their cause. Consequently, despite their claims of being marginalised and victimised, these predominantly male antifeminist activists actually occupy a privileged position in relation to historically marginalised groups, a position that affords them new possibilities to attack feminist achievements and actors through online platforms.

MASS MILITARY PSYCHOSIS IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA: THE PERFORMATIVE DIMENSION OF COUNTERMEASURES

The article examines how to counteract the mass militaristic psychosis (MMP) in modern Russia that is unfolded in discourses and narratives of the hostile media and is consistent with societal psyche intentions. The study’s purpose is to substantiate the methods (collective and individual) counteracting causes, manifestations and consequences of MMP in the aggressor country in the context of the performative approach in psychotherapy. Research methods: analysis of everyday discourse and media content to identify leading intentions of ideological influence, including observation and comparative analysis of the effectiveness of various psychotherapeutic methods, and axiopsychological reinterpretation of some psychotherapeutic practices. The results. The study revealed limited possibilities for implementing psychological education and encouraging critical thinking of the militaristic propaganda recipients. Instead, in the era of dominance of performance, when contemplation has been replaced with actions, the techniques of “emotional judo” become useful that introducing careful counterarguments to remove leaders – demagogues and dictators – from power and to apply real changes in life circumstances (primarily, to achieve Ukraine’s victory in the war). The forms of individual resistance to MMP, the imperial “rashism” ideology are derived from M. Seligman's PERMA formula. This is an axio-psychological interpretation of its emotional, intellectual, communicative and physical (acts) components. The article considers types of shaming used by political bloggers due to the total influence of Internet communications and widely spread invective practices in media content. The features of limited shaming in counter-propaganda are described. Conclusions. The antidote to MMP in the latest era of Meta-modernism means the performative exposition of its causes, manifestations and consequences to achieve real value transformation in the population affected by the imperial ideology. Axiopsychological reinterpretation of the positive psychological formula PERMA consists of the following steps: emotional rejection, reflexive criticism, value-orientation unity, reliance on a sense of dignity, defense of universal values and the will to defeat an existential enemy.

The impact of Public Health Emergency (PHE) on the news dissemination strength: Evidence from Chinese-Speaking Vloggers on YouTube.

News dissemination plays a vital role in supporting people to incorporate beneficial actions during public health emergencies, thereby significantly reducing the adverse influences of events. Based on big data from YouTube, this research study takes the declaration of COVID-19 National Public Health Emergency (PHE) as the event impact and employs a DiD model to investigate the effect of PHE on the news dissemination strength of relevant videos. The study findings indicate that the views, comments, and likes on relevant videos significantly increased during the COVID-19 public health emergency. Moreover, the public's response to PHE has been rapid, with the highest growth in comments and views on videos observed within the first week of the public health emergency, followed by a gradual decline and returning to normal levels within four weeks. In addition, during the COVID-19 public health emergency, in the context of different types of media, lifestyle bloggers, local media, and institutional media demonstrated higher growth in the news dissemination strength of relevant videos as compared to news & political bloggers, foreign media, and personal media, respectively. Further, the audience attracted by related news tends to display a certain level of stickiness, therefore this audience may subscribe to these channels during public health emergencies, which confirms the incentive mechanisms of social media platforms to foster relevant news dissemination during public health emergencies. The proposed findings provide essential insights into effective news dissemination in potential future public health events.

Emily Hund. The influencer industry: The quest for authenticity on social media

The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media, written by American media researcher Emily Hund, takes the reader on a scouting expedition into the U. S. influencer industry. Hund is a well-established author in social media influencer research, where her works on gender dynamics in the influencer industry have been particularly notable (e. g., Duffy & Hund, 2015, 2019). These works look at social media influence from a creative industry’s angle, and The Influencer Industry also stands in this lineage. Although the title does not make it clear, the book offers, first and foremost, a chronological history of the influencer industry in the United States. Beginning with the advent of political bloggers in the late 1990s, each chapter focuses on a specific period and the overarching developmental milestones Hund identifies as constituting the period. This way, Hund provides a much-needed historical perspective on the influencer industry. However, the book wants to be more than that – and it definitely is – in that it also reflects on how the influencer industry impacts contemporary forms of sociation.

Hybrid News (in the) Making: A Content and Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis of Political Live Blogs on the 2020 US Presidential Debates

ABSTRACT Political journalism continues to be the main source of political information in deliberative democracies. However, the advent of hybrid media systems during the last decade(s) has altered how journalists cover politics and how audiences consume relevant content. In this context, live blogging has emerged as a web-based alternative to traditional TV broadcasting. To explore whether and in which forms the trend toward hybrid media systems is empirically traceable in current journalism practice, the present study focuses on political live blogging from four popular media outlets covering the two 2020 US presidential TV debates. It applies a discourse-oriented, mixed-methods, corpus-based approach and specifically considers sourcing practices as well as the normalization of professional role conceptions and practices of objectivity. Results suggest that political live blogging establishes multi-layered and multi-authored discourse that places strong emphasis on accountability and disclosure transparency by updating and linking information, while maintaining the journalistic gatekeeping/gatewatching function. It further emerges that political live blogs are characterized by an informal tone but also by a continuation of traditional news media practices as regards objectivity, as instantiated by the salience of debate topics and political terms and by a clear delineation of information from opinion and contextualization.

Имплицитное выражение политической позиции в жанре политического блога

The article analyses the ways of implicit expression of the political stance of bloggers. The relevance of the topic under study is determined by the increased influence of non-institutional means of communication on political processes. Blogs, social networks, and messengers have become an important tool of communication among members of civil society, as well as platforms for expressing citizens’ positions. The expression of a blogger’s political position does not always occur directly and explicitly. The purpose of this article is to identify, describe, and analyze implicit ways of expressing a political position in a political blog. The features of the implicit expression of a political position depend, first of all, on the degree of institutionalization of the author and their professional occupation. These parameters formed the basis for the classification of authors of political blogs: official politicians; non-official political persons; journalists, political scientists as well as ordinary people. It is argued that each group of authors express a specific political position. In this respect, official politicians implicitly express patriotism, concern for the people, all this serves as a means of improving the credibility of a politician. In addition, the implicit expression of the position of the political force whose interests are represented by politicians serves as a tool for fighting during elections or referendums. Non-official politicians implicitly express oppositional views. Journalists, political scientists as well as ordinary people, can implicitly express a wide range of political beliefs – from pro-government to oppositional.

In Pursuit of a “Safe” Space for Political Participation: A Study of Selected WhatsApp Communities in Kenya

Kenya has a history of media censorship and citizen surveillance. The advent of social media is laudable for contributing to freedom of speech and accountability in Kenya. Studies show that WhatsApp, through its group formation affordance, has largely contributed to political participation in Kenya and beyond. Kenyans see it as a ”safe” place away from government surveillance, a carry-over of authoritarian rule. This is especially so since WhatsApp is considered as private media compared to other social media platforms. For instance, many political bloggers on Twitter and Facebook perceived to be anti-establishment have been arrested and charged, but only accountable arrests have been made in connection to WhatsApp activities despite government threats. This article argues that although actors, both human and non-human, act to construct a safe community for political participation on WhatsApp, modes of exclusion and inclusion arise from the socio-technological interaction which could pose a threat to the newly founded ”safe space”. Though the study site is in Kenya, this article grapples with issues other scholars of social media and politics grapple with globally, that is, safety, security, surveillance, and political participation, among others.

SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF ARABIC LOANWORDS IN MALAYSIAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Loanwords are words borrowed from one language and incorporated into another. They may originate from a wide range of languages and can be modified to adhere to the phonological and grammatical conventions of the receiving language. The Malay language consists of a vast number of words borrowed from various languages, including Arabic. Arabic loanwords have helped develop the Malay language by enriching and diversifying its vocabulary. While Arabic loanwords are used extensively within the Islamic religious context, they are also employed in other fields, including politics. In Malaysia, where Malay is the official language, the use of Arabic loanwords is common in the political sense. Some Arabic loanwords related to politics have become so integrated into Malay that the pronunciation no longer sounds foreign, while others maintain the sound characteristics of Arabic. This study analyzed the use of Arabic loanwords in the current Malaysian political discourse via mainstream media, specifically newspapers and political blogs, from 2022 to 2023. The Arabic loanwords were then comparatively analyzed in terms of their lexical meaning in the donor and receiving language, as well as their contextual meaning in Malaysian politics. The findings of this study suggest that the intermixing between Islam and politics in Malaysia may have fueled the pervasiveness and trendiness of the use of Arabic loanwords in lieu of equivalent native words and loanwords of English origin, and competing loanword equivalents which have been phonologically modified.

Mixed membership estimation for social networks

In economics and social science, network data are regularly observed, and a thorough understanding of the network community structure facilitates the comprehension of economic patterns and activities. Consider an undirected network with n nodes and K communities. We model the network using the Degree-Corrected Mixed-Membership (DCMM) model, where for each node i=1,2,…,n, there exists a membership vector πi=(πi(1),πi(2),…,πi(K))′, where πi(k) is the weight that node i puts on community k, 1≤k≤K. In comparison to the well-known stochastic block model (SBM), the DCMM permits both severe degree heterogeneity and mixed memberships, making it more realistic and general. We present an efficient approach, Mixed-SCORE, for estimating the mixed membership vectors of all nodes and the other DCMM parameters. This approach is inspired by the discovery of a delicate simplex structure in the spectral domain. We derive explicit error rates for the Mixed-SCORE algorithm and demonstrate that it is rate-optimal over a broad parameter space. Our findings provide a novel statistical tool for network community analysis, which can be used to understand network formations, extract nodal features, identify unobserved covariates in dyadic regressions, and estimate peer effects. We applied Mixed-SCORE to a political blog network, two trade networks, a co-authorship network, and a citee network, and obtained interpretable results.

A Compressed Sensing Based Least Squares Approach to Semi-supervised Local Cluster Extraction

A least squares semi-supervised local clustering algorithm based on the idea of compressed sensing is proposed to extract clusters from a graph with known adjacency matrix. The algorithm is based on a two-stage approach similar to the one proposed by Lai and Mckenzie (SIAM J Math Data Sci 2:368–395, 2020). However, under a weaker assumption and with less computational complexity, our algorithms are shown to be able to find a desired cluster with high probability. The “one cluster at a time" feature of our method distinguishes it from other global clustering methods. Numerical experiments are conducted on the synthetic data such as stochastic block model and real data such as MNIST, political blogs network, AT &T and YaleB human faces data sets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithms.

Structure recovery and trend estimation for dynamic network analysis

Low‐dimensional parametric models for network dynamics have been successful as inferentially efficient and interpretable tools for modelling network evolution but have difficulty in settings with strong time inhomogeneity (particularly when sharp variation in parameters is possible and covariates are limited). Here, we propose to address this problem via a novel family of block‐structured dynamic exponential‐family random graph models (ERGMs), where the time domain is divided into consecutive blocks and the network parameters are assumed to evolve smoothly within each block. In particular, we let the latent ERGM parameters follow a piecewise polynomial model with an unknown block structure (e.g., change points). We propose an iterative estimation procedure that involves estimating the block structure using trend filtering and fitting ERGMs for networks belonging to the same time block. We demonstrate the utility of the proposed approach using simulation studies and applications to interbank transaction networks and citations among political blogs over the course of an electoral cycle.

The role of a political blog: the case of www.commentary.co.za

With the inception of new technologies and the Internet, media users can consult a variety ofdiverse sources for their daily news. The latest innovations to have an impact on the traditionalnews landscape are weblogs, commonly referred to as blogs. Blogs have become a significantnew way to publish information and engage in conversation about social and political issues. Thispaper explores the role of the political blog, www.commentary.co.za, as a news medium as perceivedby selected Johannesburg bloggers. Through qualitative research, the respondents concurred thatwhile a news blog will probably never replace traditional media, it can be used effectively to promotethe exchange of information and offer new perspectives on issues. In addition to this, they believethat blogs can be a form of participatory journalism and complement journalism.

An Immigrant as a Blogger in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah

Abstract: The preliminary part of this article outlines the changes that immigrants face in today's era of global mobility and how these changes correlate with the aesthetics of migratory fiction. Then I discuss the identity of a Nigerian immigrant, Ifemelu, in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah and the reasons that led to her dissatisfaction with identitarian politics in the United States and prompted her to start a blog about racism. The article concentrates on the monetization of race through Ifemelu's blog posts and the movement from politicizing race to its capitalization. I assess the grounds for her shift from political blogging in the United States to writing a historical and cultural blog after returning to Nigeria. Her blogging in America became a way of capitalizing on race while in Nigeria, suggesting that cultural and historical blogging is a way to build a new, collective, decolonized identity. Decolonization as an act of refusal must be turned into the act of assertion, an act of refoundation.

The Cultural Logic of the Ordinary: Interactional Semiosis and the (Re)‐Framing of Daily Life among Japanese Younger Adults

This paper considers how Japanesefutsuu“ordinary”‐ness functions as a cultural logic that mediates aspirations and interpretations of a good life under conditions of socioeconomic risk and precarity. Invoking ordinariness can be a tactic for (re)‐framing otherwise marginalized or marginalizing practices within the norm, shifting what counts as ordinary in the process, and pushing back against neoliberally inflected pressures toward marketable, financialized selfhood. Alignments toward ordinariness emerge across diverse discursive planes including political slogans, blogs, and natural conversations, where the ordinary is treated as aspirational under the shadow of its potential loss.

Unpacking the Determinants of Outrage and Recognition in Public Discourse: Insights Across Socio-Cultural Divides, Political Systems, and Media Types

The degree to which civility norms are upheld or violated is an important criterion in evaluating the democratic quality of public debates. We investigate civility across media types, political systems, and levels of socio-cultural division, offering a comparative perspective on how these factors shape levels of civility in public debates around a key question for societies around the world: What is the proper role of religion in public life? Capturing both positive and negative forms of civility (i.e., recognition and outrage) on multiple levels of analysis, we compile and analyze an original large-scale dataset of news items published during August 2015 until July 2016 in six democracies (Australia, Germany, Lebanon, Switzerland, Turkey, and the USA) across three types of media (printed newspapers, news websites, and political blogs). We find that mediated discourse was heavier on outrage in mixed political systems (Germany and Turkey) than in ‘purely’ majoritarian and consensus systems. Public debate in deeply divided countries contained more outrage but also more recognition compared to less divided countries, with newspapers and news websites mitigating outrage discourse compared to political blogs. Blogs also emerged as less nurturing of recognition than newspapers and news websites.

The Aston Forensic Linguistic Databank (FoLD)

The Aston Forensic Linguistic Databank (FoLD) is a permanent,controlled access online repository for forensic linguistic data. We broadlyunderstand forensic linguistics as any academic research with a potential toimprove the delivery of justice through the analysis of language. FoLD thuscomprises a wide range of datasets with relevance to forensic linguistics andlanguage and law, including commercial extortion letters, investigative interviewsin police and other contexts, legal documents, forum posts from far-right onlinegroups, and comment threads from political blogs. This paper outlines how FoLDworks and its potential impact on the general discipline of forensic linguistics.

MissSBM: An R Package for Handling Missing Values in the Stochastic Block Model

The stochastic block model is a popular probabilistic model for random graphs. It is commonly used to cluster network data by aggregating nodes that share similar connectivity patterns into blocks. When fitting a stochastic block model to a partially observed network, it is important to consider the underlying process that generates the missing values, otherwise the inference may be biased. This paper presents missSBM, an R package that fits stochastic block models when the network is partially observed, i.e., the adjacency matrix contains not only 1s or 0s encoding the presence or absence of edges, but also NAs encoding the missing information between pairs of nodes. This package implements a set of algorithms to adjust the binary stochastic block model, possibly in the presence of external covariates, by performing variational inference suitable for several observation processes. Our implementation automatically explores different block numbers to select the most relevant model according to the integrated classification likelihood criterion. The integrated classification likelihood criterion can also help determine which observation process best fits a given dataset. Finally, missSBM can be used to perform imputation of missing entries in the adjacency matrix. We illustrate the package on a network dataset consisting of interactions between political blogs sampled during the 2007 French presidential election.