Beyond “Political” Communicative Spaces: Talking Politics on the Wife Swap Discussion Forum

Everyday political talk in the Internet-based public sphere

“…Moreover, once we move away from partisan-based newsgroups, a somewhat different picture emerges. For example, my own research of reader comment sections and reality TV, news media and government sponsored forums found that in all cases degrading exchanges -to lower in character, quality, esteem or rank another participant and/or participant's positionrepresented less than 15% of posts (Graham, 2010a(Graham, , 2010b(Graham, , 2012a(Graham, , 2012bGraham & Witschge, 2003;Graham & Wright, 2013). These findings are supported by other studies of various forum types (Hagemann, 2002;Halpern & Gibbs, 2013;Jensen, 2003;Papacharissi, 2004;Ruiz et al, 2011;Winkler, 2005).…”

“…My own research, which has covered a variety of forum types from news media message boards to political talk in third spaces, has revealed that participants tend to engage with each other rather than talk past one another (Graham, 2010a(Graham, , 2010b(Graham, , 2011(Graham, , 2012aGraham & Witschge, 2003;Graham & Wright, 2013). For example, my analysis of over 3000 posts from the reader comment sections of the Guardian found that more than half of the posts were engaged in reciprocal exchange, which was typically rational and critical in nature (Graham, 2012b).…”

“…Researchers have investigated informal political talk in a variety of online forums, which include (Usenet) newsgroups (Davis, 2005;Hill & Hughes, 1998;Papacharissi, 2004;Schneider, 1997;Wilhelm, 1999;Zhang, Cao, & Tran, 2013); news media sponsored forums -newspapers (Graham, 2010b;Schutz, 2000;Strandberg, 2008;Tanner, 2001;Tsaliki, 2002); forums hosted by political parties and governments -excluding e-consultations (Dunne, 2009;Graham & Witschge, 2003;Hagemann, 2002;Jankowski & Van Os, 2004;Winkler, 2005); online deliberative initiatives (Dahlberg, 2001b); comparisons between different types (Brants, 2002;Graham, 2011;Jensen, 2003); third spaces -non-political forums (Graham, , 2010a(Graham, , 2012a; other platforms such as chat (Stromer-Galley & Martinson, 2009), blogs (Koop & Jansen, 2009) and readers' comments (Graham, 2012b;Ruiz, Domingo, Micó, & Díaz-Noci, 2011); and social media network sites such as Facebook and YouTube (Halpern & Gibbs, 2013;Robertson, Vatrapu, & Medina, 2010). 4 Studies here focus on measuring the deliberativeness of political talk as a means of determining the extent to which the Internet is conducive to (particular) conditions of deliberation.…”

From everyday conversation to political action: Talking austerity in online ‘third spaces’

“…the deliberativeness of such talk) has received much attention in previous research, focusing on, for example, Usenet newsgroups (Schneider, 1996), news media-sponsored forums (Graham, 2011), forums hosted by governments (Wright, 2007), online deliberative initiatives (Dahlberg, 2001), other political platforms such as blogs (Koop and Jansen, 2009) and readers' comments (Ruiz et al, 2011) and social media network sites such as Facebook and YouTube (Halpern and Gibbs, 2013). However, outside of a handful of small-scale studies (Graham, 2010(Graham, , 2012Graham and Harju, 2011;Graham and Wright, 2014;Jackson et al, 2013;Van Zoonen, 2007), we know very little about the way political talk is performed in non-political third spaces. In this study, we therefore explore the communicative form of political talk.…”

“…Although there have been a growing number of studies that have focused on analysing political discussion in third spaces, such as those attached to reality TV (Graham, 2010(Graham, , 2012Graham and Harju, 2011); film communities (Van Zoonen, 2007); and personal finance, media and family (Graham and Wright, 2014;Jackson et al, 2013), they have focused primarily on the quality and nature of political talk. While this provides us with important insights, it tells us little about the extent to which such talk contributes to political action.…”