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Discursive Equality and Everyday Talk Online: the impact of "superparticipants"

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posted on 2013-02-27, 11:22 authored by Scott Graham Wright, Todd Graham
Empirical studies of online debate almost universally observe a “dominant” minority of posters. Informed by theories of deliberative democracy, these are typically framed negatively – yet research into their impact on debate is scant. To address this, a typology of what we call super-participation (super-posters, agenda-setters and facilitators) is developed and applied to the http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/ forum. Focusing on the first of these, we found 2052 super-posters (0.4%) contributing 47% of 25m+ posts. While super-posters were quantitatively dominant, qualitative content analysis of the discursive practices of 25 superposters (n=40,044) found that most did not attempt to stop other users from posting (curbing) or attack them (flaming). In fact, in contradiction to the received wisdom, super-posters discursively performed a range of positive roles.

History

Citation

Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 2013, in press

Author affiliation

/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE/Department of Media and Communication

Version

  • AO (Author's Original)

Published in

Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

Publisher

Wiley-Blackwell

eissn

1083-6101

Copyright date

2013

Available date

2013-02-27

Publisher version

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12016/abstract

Notes

This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the article which has been accepted for publication in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

Language

en

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