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Human Affairs

Postdisciplinary Humanities & Social Sciences Quarterly

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Volume 24, Issue 4

Issues

Alerts and affairs in the “brigádnik” dossier. The trajectory of public problems in (and beyond) online discussion spaces

Simon Smith
Published Online: 2014-10-02 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/s13374-014-0238-5

Abstract

This article describes the covert seeding by political parties of forums and blogs hosted by one of the leading Slovak daily newspapers, and the techniques developed by journalists, administrators, bloggers and discussants to defend these ‘public spheres’ against perceived colonisation by professional political communicators acting under false identities. We follow a trajectory of accusatory forms and registers—a collective inquiry which gathered and evaluated evidence to support public accusations. The episode demonstrates the vulnerability of the sociotechnical systems used by the media to host e-participation as well as their capacities for self-regulation. It shows how citizens, journalists and party political communicators are engaged in complex boundary struggles for the appropriation and regulation of these new spaces of sociability in order to qualify the forms of knowledge that emerge there, agree conventions for the expression of disquiet and negotiate practically enforcable definitions distinguishing political marketing from free public debate.

Keywords: e-participation; alert; affair; online discussion; journalism

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About the article

Published Online: 2014-10-02

Published in Print: 2014-10-01


Citation Information: Human Affairs, Volume 24, Issue 4, Pages 423–436, ISSN (Online) 1337-401X, ISSN (Print) 1210-3055, DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/s13374-014-0238-5.

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© 2014 Institute for Research in Social Communication, Slovak Academy of Sciences. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. BY-NC-ND 3.0

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