Understanding European Online Publics

Bremen.
The next speaker at this ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference for ECREA 2010 is Asimina Michailidou, whose interest is in online public opinion formation in the European Union. This is deliberately avoiding an examination of party politics or opinion polls, but rather goes straight to online interaction – in this case, in the context of the EU parliamentary elections in 2009. The focus here was on twelve EU nations as well as a number of pan-European opinion and debate sites.

There are a number of methodological challenges with this – across the three areas of sampling, analysis, and interpretation. The project necessarily proceeds from a mixed-methods design, as it attempts to measure the forms and processes of communication on online platforms and investigate the content and participant community.

The project focussed on the EU elections 2009 as a specific unifying object of study. Thematic aspects of this object were relatively anticipatable, while participating actors (beyond the usual suspects) were a little less predictable. The elections function as a ‘Web storm’ in Schneider & Foot’s terminology – a time-limited event that does not quite count as a public sphere in its own right, but holding the potential for the development of one. The limitation of this is that the project can only observe activities in relation to one specific event, of course, and cannot make any more general observations.

The project identified a set of Websites by their popularity in each specific nation, their level of interactive (feedback, comments, debate) features, and the availability of public RSS feeds (i.e. non-subscription sites). RSS feeds were archived, and approached through multi-stage, stratified, random sampling. The project first sampled discussion threads, and then selected the first 20 comments appearing on such discussion threads; this content was captured and saved offline.

Units of analysis were both whole discussion threads, as well as the individual messages appearing in it; this content was classified according to a range of criteria by a team of coders. Such criteria included thematic aspects (implied actor, attitudes towards the EU, views of online communication standards and netiquette, and various cooperative communication patterns – such as content quality, relevance, manner, and opinion justification).

What results from this is a non-normative approach – whatever appears in the public domain, correct or incorrect, has an impact on opinion formation. Data will be analysed quantitatively as well as qualitatively, and contextualised for each country; cross-national comparisons will also be made. Of course what results from this is not representative for overall public opinion in each country, but that’s not the point – rather, the project will be able to identify patterns in online political communication in Europe. Further, of course, the project can only examine public communication in the 12 countries covered, not all 25 EU member states.