The communitarian strand

Online public spaces that are predominantly communitarian uphold the cultivation of social cohesion and group identity above the fulfilment of individual desires. The five measures associated with this [strand] – ideological fragmentation, mobilisation,

Chapter 5 – Methodology 111 community identification, in-group reciprocity and in-group questioning – all reflect this overarching goal (Freelon 2010 p1180).

Ideological fragmentation/homophily

Ideological homophily is commonly associated with Cass Sunstein (2009) amongst others, whereby he conceptualises The Daily Me. This refers to the technological capabilities which allow internet users to streamline their media feeds (as well as a multitude of other interests, such as television, shopping and music) to be restricted to their own personal interests and favourites. Ideological homophily is commonly referred to as fragmentation, a potential result of which is a self-marginalised citizenry who exist in their own media bubble through a lack of exposure to differing perspectives and points of view. Previously, media users may well have chosen their newspapers and other media in line with their own political preferences but never to the extent which the internet both enables and encourages. Whilst Sunstein focuses upon the negative democratic impact of ideological homophily, others, such as Fraser (1990), take a more positive, communitarian view of a citizenry which is enabled politically through communication with those sharing the same political preferences. Here then, there is an intuitively welcome possibility that individuals who may be put off political participation through the fear of intimidation or being shouted down by other more vocal and perhaps more knowledgeable participants, find a safer place where this is less likely to be the case. As the individual becomes more politically active and emboldened through communication with like-minded individuals, they may latterly have the confidence to participate in the wider, more adversarial, public sphere. Agonism and Ideological homophily as described by Sunstein share concerns regarding the impact of an unwillingness (whether deliberate or not) to firstly hear the opposing side of view and secondly, to acknowledge the legitimacy of that counter position. The communitarian view of ideological fragmentation can be seen as a channel in which the passion which is an essential part of the political finds a space to grow and eventually emerge into the wider (virtual) public sphere.

Identifying and coding ideological homophily presented a more significant challenge than many of the other coding categories within the study. In a similar way to the complexity of coding reflexivity (as discussed in the previous section), ideological homophily is not a dialogue trait which can be ascertained through the examination of individual tweets, or even conversations on Twitter, or blog posts on other platforms. This led to homophily within this study mainly being focused upon the numerous broader discussions of ‘Twitter bubbles’ and

‘echo chambers’ which were relatively prevalent on Twitter during the campaign. Instead, the identification/quantification of abstract concepts such as ideological homophily would require

Chapter 5 – Methodology 112 a different approach. This would likely necessitate any specific attempt to study ideological homophily to be done in conjunction with research participants, rather than remote analysis of forum posts, through means such as research questionnaires ideally triangulated with research interviews exploring the online information consumption habits of those particular research subjects.

Mobilisation

Freelon refers to Mutz (2006) in suggesting that those with communitarian traits that are active in online forums are more likely to mobilise politically than the liberal individualist or deliberative. In doing so, the resultant political action may remain online in the form of activities such as petition signing and financial donation or progress offline to perhaps attending political meetings or protesting in organised political rallies. The empirical study addresses the difference between political engagement and mobilisation as the two were often inappropriately intermingled during the independence referendum.

Political engagement invokes a sense of those referred to as engaging, likely through media, with the democratic process, and following the arguments on either side of the debate.

Whereas mobilisation suggests manifest participation in support of one group or another in one of the ways previously referred to. The empirical study is concerned with those that were mobilised to participate politically through social media. Two of the core features of Mouffe’s agonism are those of conflict and passion which by definition suggest mobilised participation and therefore appear to sit comfortably with both respective models.

The fact that this study was centred upon a particularly participative UK vote, (as demonstrated by the final turnout of 84.6%) and included research demographics of activists and politicians during the campaign meant that tweets relating to mobilisation were unsurprisingly abundant. The focus, again, however, was upon identifying exemplars of such examples of possible mobilisation rather than a quantitative endeavour. It became apparent though that future studies aimed at quantifying such activity would likely be suited to a design based upon the targeting of precise terminology. There was a proliferation of Tweets that were prefaced with language such as ‘join us’, ‘come along’ and other such phrases that denoted direct calls to mobilise. Of course, other more subtle language designed to engage people through means such as encouragement to watch video clips of speeches and such like would be more challenging to incorporate into quantitative research designs. A carefully designed categorisation of such language could, however, be beneficial as a starting point in mining for text relating to mobilisation in larger datasets in future campaign studies.

Chapter 5 – Methodology 113 Community Identification

Freelon includes community identification in his model with an emphasis on discourse analysis showing how individuals perceive themselves to be part of a distinct group or movement.

Freelon states that:

Several studies unconnected with the online deliberation literature have used community language such as ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’, as operational measures of identification with the online community in question (Cassell et al. 2006; Birchmeier et al. 2005) (Freelon 2010 p.1181).

Whilst detailed discourse analysis is not part of this study, identity is central to much of the debate which took place, which is perhaps unsurprising in the context of a vote upon the constitution of Scotland and the United Kingdom. Identity is another of Mouffe’s theoretical bases of agonistic pluralism and similarly to the last unit of analysis of mobilisation, sits comfortably with both respective models.

For those wishing to identify the emergence of communities within particular forums, perhaps during political debates, or campaigns focused upon research subjects with initial, undecided allegiance, the use of community language as defined here could be particularly useful. Within the collection and coding of data within this project, which was not focused upon quantitative judgements, whereby the majority of Twitter users seemingly already had ultimate allegiance to one side, or the other, prolonged discourse analysis was deemed to be inappropriate. The type of community language detailed above, however, helped to quickly identify numerous exemplars of community identification which are presented in the following results chapter.

Intra-ideological questioning and response

Intra-ideological questioning and response refers to conversation between community members and is classified by Steibel and Esteves (2015) as a further indication of individuals perceiving themselves to be a member of a broader community. Reciprocation between members of the same community, largely without major disagreement, distinguishes communitarian response from that of deliberation. Evidence of response between groups from the same side of the independence debate but from separate groups or organisations, could be seen as evidence of a broader movement rather than simply groups sharing a common goal. The capabilities of internet2.0 for conversation, would in democratic terms, be seen as a welcome progression from monologue as previously discussed. Moving from basic response to actual questioning, Intra-ideological questioning as argued by Stromer-Galley (2007) in Freelon (2010) is a subset of reciprocity and again strengthens community ties as a specific

Chapter 5 – Methodology 114 response is required, the act of which builds relationships within communities, the absence of which may fracture that community. Evidence of Intra-ideological response and questioning could be again seen as components of identity building in line with agonistic norms.

In practice, manually identifying and coding intra-ideological questioning on Twitter during the referendum campaign presented challenges. Identifying initial tweets which were an appeal to other recognised accounts, including a question, was relatively straightforward. However, identifying if such a tweet had been responded to, is not immediately apparent from the ‘front page’ of one’s Twitter feed. This necessitated a fairly lengthy, repetitive process in order to assess if messages had been replied to. This coding category would lend itself to an approach such as the method presented by Graham (2008) in order to analyse open questioning and the presence, or otherwise, of reciprocation from account holders within the same side of the debate. The process of doing so manually, however, would remain a relatively arduous one.