Do user comments belong to journalistic articles? A brief visual history of user interaction on selected German and American news websites 1996–2024

Abstract

The chapter reconstructs a brief history of online commenting, based on the position comments have to journalistic articles on news websites. Its key assumption is derived from paratext theory: Changes in spatial and temporal proximity of texts in the periphery of a main text––such as comments on the same web page as a journalistic article as compared to posts in a separate forum––indicate controversies over relevance of participants in a public discourse. Studying transformations of online comments is thus considered an access point to studying histories of public spheres. With help of a software the authors and colleagues developed, changes in commenting sections are traced and visualized. These changes are detected in a data sample of archived web pages provided by the Internet Archive.