What Drives Issue Spill-Overs from Online to Offline Media?

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Barbara Pfetsch, whose focus is on media agenda building in online and offline media. She suggests that research is needed to assess the impact of the Net on public debate: how could one go about this work? There have been hopes that the Net may lead to greater public participation and deliberation; also, however, what is the discursive opportunity structure which is provided by the Net? What is the potential for new civil society actors to enter the debate, and how may they be included in the process?

What theoretical and empirical approaches may be suited to researching these questions? First, there is an elite bias in traditional mass media; they tend to exclude ‘outside’, non-mainstream actors, and the hope is that the Net removes such biases. Second, media agenda building depends on local contexts: the political system, the media system, and the constellation of current conflicts in a country, for example. How does traditional media agenda setting change because of the Internet, as new challengers make their views heard?

Barbara suggests that spill-overs from online to offline communication need to be examined; this includes ‘direct’ (online to offline, e.g. through journalists sourcing ideas from online spaces) as well as ‘double’ (online to offline to online / offline to online to offline, e.g. when online activities are driven by offline groups of political challengers) spill-overs. The conditions of spill-overs need to be examined, and the nature of the online communication preceding spill-overs must examine the interlinked structure of issue networks with some local (country, language region) specificity.

Barbara’s hypothesis is that coalitions of online actors are needed in order to effect a spill-over into traditional media, and that political competition between traditional media outlets provides a more fertile ground for such spill-overs. Additionally, issues which link up to latent conflicts in a society are more likely to generate spill-overs, she suggests. Such contextual conditions are likely to promote spill-overs, then, and this needs to be studied and proven by further, appropriately designed research.

Such work could study the online communication networks of political challengers, test spill-over conditions, and assess the spill-over processes in detail; this requires novel research methodologies which are able to deal effectively with large online datasets, as well as detailed analyses of mainstream media.