ZeMKI 2025

Diagnosing Destructive Polarisation in Public Discourse: The Practice Mapping Framework

Axel Bruns, Katharina Esau, Kateryna Kasianenko, Tariq Choucair, and Vish Padinjaredath Suresh 

• 23 Oct. 2025 – Paper presented at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference, Bremen

Presentation Slides

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, and at least since Adamic & Glance’s famous study of patterns in the networks amongst US political bloggers (2005), much scholarly attention has been devoted to concepts like ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, with very limited empirical success: the core problem in the contemporary landscape of public debate is not that partisans are sealed off from one another by personal choice or algorithmic curation, as these theories would propose, but that, even when directly confronted with counter-attitudinal information and perspectives, they inherently reject these and refuse to engage constructively with their antagonists (Bruns, 2019).

Our focus must therefore necessarily shift to polarisation as a major driver of societal divisions: perceived or actual polarisation between political and social groups – based in issue differences, ideological positions, or affective responses, polarisation undermines meaningful debate, compromise, and consensus-building between opposing groups. Even this apparently straightforward concept of polarisation must be further developed, however: clear distinctions between competing issue and ideology positions can be productive if they enable citizens and decision-makers to choose their preferred course of action, but such agonistic competition can turn into antagonistic division once one or more sides of a debate abandon their commitment to engaging with their opponents, and to working towards consensus or at least compromise.

Our work has identified several symptoms of this shift towards explicitly destructive forms of polarisation: (a) breakdown of communication; (b) discrediting and dismissing of information; (c) erasure of complexities; (d) exacerbated attention to and space for extreme voices; and (e) exclusion through emotions. To operationalise these in further empirical research – and in potential interventions aimed at encouraging more respectful and constructive forms of reciprocal engagement between antagonists where this is still possible – it is crucial, however, to diagnose these symptoms more reliably and systematically as they manifest in public communication. This begins with the identification of the various discourse positions in a given communicative context, and an assessment of their relative positioning towards each other.

To facilitate this, this paper introduces the novel methodological framework of practice mapping. Advancing beyond conventional network analyses, practice mapping draws on social media data or comparable media datasets to extract the common practices – actions as well as interactions – of individual actors in the communicative context and systematically compare their similarities across the actor population; this enables the identification of clusters and (potentially) communities of practice which represent specific discursive positions within the debate, and of the discursive alliances and antagonisms that connect or divide these groups.

Having identified these groups, it is then possible to diagnose the symptoms of destructive polarisation in the communicative practices that define them, thereby assessing the level of dysfunctionality in a given discursive context. Taking a longitudinal perspective, finally, the practice mapping framework also supports the tracking of the dynamics of these interrelationships over time, to assess whether the symptoms of destructive polarisation are intensifying or dissipating.

References

Adamic, L.A., & Glance, N. (2005). The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog. In J. Adibi et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Link Discovery (LinkKDD ’05) (pp. 36–43). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/1134271.1134277 

Bruns, A. (2019). Are Filter Bubbles Real? Polity.