YouTube as a site of debate through populist politics: the case of a Turkish protest pop video

Abstract

During and immediately after the 2013 anti-government protests in Turkey, while there was almost complete state control over mainstream media, anti-government pop videos posted on YouTube became a symbolic rallying point for protest movements and attracted vast amounts of posted comments. These were widely shared and became sung in public places and during clashes with the police. These videos and the comments posted below them can be examined in the light of scholarly debates about the role of social media in public debate and protest movements. For critical discourse analysis, this provides the challenge to analyse the discourses realised in both the video and in the comments themselves. In popular music studies, it has been suggested that pop songs have been unsuccessful at communicating more than populist political sentiments. From a discursive point of view, the paper shows that this is indeed the case for one Turkish iconic protest video. It also finds that comments do not deal with the actual events represented in the video but seek to frame these in terms of wider forms of allegiances to, and betrayal of, a true Turkish people and in the light of homogenised and reduced forms of history.

Critical Discourse Analysis and the challenges and opportunities of social media

“…In the broader field of Critical Discourse Studies there has also been work, for example, on the way in which social media provides sites of alternative political views on things like racism, where mainstream new media tend to remain highly focused only on elite persons and officials (Van Zoonen, 2007). In CDA, some scholars have begun to explore the way that social media can be researched for the kinds of competing discourses that can be found around mainstream news media (Way, 2015). But as regards news, and specifically in CDA itself, this is an area that still remains to be explored.…”

Istanbul sounding like revolution: the role of music in the Gezi Park Occupy movement

“…However, it has been suggested in the case of one protest song in the English language, ‘Spring of War’ by The Ringo Jets, that social media only functioned to spread populist ideas. This conclusion was drawn after the analysis of a debate on Youtube (Way 2015). However, Youtube does not seem to be the best arena for political debates among the different social media, as there are methodological limitations (Thelwall 2014).…”

Counter-Discourse Activism on Social Media: The Case of Challenging “Poverty Porn” Television

“…Despite the textual focus of CDA, this methodology does not discredit non-textual content, and indeed in recent years there has been a growing appreciation of multimodal approaches to CDA that study how text, talk, images, film and other forms of media combine to enact and re-enact discourses (see Manchin and Mayr, 2012). More recently, discourse analysis has been used to study discourses on social media, including how power is legitimised and delegitimised within Iraqi political communities on Facebook (Al-Tahmazi 2015) and how politically charged YouTube videos and comments interact to promote alternate discourses around the same media (Way 2015). Building on this work, our use of CDA was in an analysis of various textual and non-textual content (interview transcripts, Twitter comments, Facebook posts, Instagram images and YouTube videos and comments) as a way of examining the work of the activist across these different platforms and how discourses were designed and deployed by them and engaged with by audiences.…”