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Public Sphere in Crisis Mode: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Influenced Public Discourse and User Behaviour in the Swiss Twitter-sphere
In modern democracies, large societal crises like the COVID-19 pandemic are accompanied by intensified public discourse about which policies and strategies are adequate to fight the crisis. In such times, the public sphere switches to crisis mode with fundamentally different communicative dynamics c...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Routledge
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8336575/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34393592 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2021.1923622 |
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author | Rauchfleisch, Adrian Vogler, Daniel Eisenegger, Mark |
author_facet | Rauchfleisch, Adrian Vogler, Daniel Eisenegger, Mark |
author_sort | Rauchfleisch, Adrian |
collection | PubMed |
description | In modern democracies, large societal crises like the COVID-19 pandemic are accompanied by intensified public discourse about which policies and strategies are adequate to fight the crisis. In such times, the public sphere switches to crisis mode with fundamentally different communicative dynamics compared to routinised periods. Data from social media platforms like Twitter offers new possibilities to study such dynamics. However, comprehensive studies on how crises affect discourse in distinct national publics are missing up to now. Based on 1,762,262 tweets referring to COVID-19 written between 1 January and 30 April 2020 by 56,418 validated Swiss users, we illustrate how the lockdown of public life in Switzerland affected the discourse in the Swiss Twitter-sphere. Based on public sphere theories, we identify four crisis-related dimensions for our analysis. We show that the pandemic led to a narrowing of the topic agenda and to a more inwardly oriented public sphere with increased Twitter activity by experts. Furthermore, actors from the social periphery were able to reach the centre of public discourse with their tweets. Overall our study shows how methodological innovation allows us to better connect an empirical analysis with the concept of a public sphere as a communication network. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8336575 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Routledge |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-83365752021-08-13 Public Sphere in Crisis Mode: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Influenced Public Discourse and User Behaviour in the Swiss Twitter-sphere Rauchfleisch, Adrian Vogler, Daniel Eisenegger, Mark Javnost Articles In modern democracies, large societal crises like the COVID-19 pandemic are accompanied by intensified public discourse about which policies and strategies are adequate to fight the crisis. In such times, the public sphere switches to crisis mode with fundamentally different communicative dynamics compared to routinised periods. Data from social media platforms like Twitter offers new possibilities to study such dynamics. However, comprehensive studies on how crises affect discourse in distinct national publics are missing up to now. Based on 1,762,262 tweets referring to COVID-19 written between 1 January and 30 April 2020 by 56,418 validated Swiss users, we illustrate how the lockdown of public life in Switzerland affected the discourse in the Swiss Twitter-sphere. Based on public sphere theories, we identify four crisis-related dimensions for our analysis. We show that the pandemic led to a narrowing of the topic agenda and to a more inwardly oriented public sphere with increased Twitter activity by experts. Furthermore, actors from the social periphery were able to reach the centre of public discourse with their tweets. Overall our study shows how methodological innovation allows us to better connect an empirical analysis with the concept of a public sphere as a communication network. Routledge 2021-05-26 /pmc/articles/PMC8336575/ /pubmed/34393592 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2021.1923622 Text en © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) ), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. |
spellingShingle | Articles Rauchfleisch, Adrian Vogler, Daniel Eisenegger, Mark Public Sphere in Crisis Mode: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Influenced Public Discourse and User Behaviour in the Swiss Twitter-sphere |
title | Public Sphere in Crisis Mode: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Influenced Public Discourse and User Behaviour in the Swiss Twitter-sphere |
title_full | Public Sphere in Crisis Mode: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Influenced Public Discourse and User Behaviour in the Swiss Twitter-sphere |
title_fullStr | Public Sphere in Crisis Mode: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Influenced Public Discourse and User Behaviour in the Swiss Twitter-sphere |
title_full_unstemmed | Public Sphere in Crisis Mode: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Influenced Public Discourse and User Behaviour in the Swiss Twitter-sphere |
title_short | Public Sphere in Crisis Mode: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Influenced Public Discourse and User Behaviour in the Swiss Twitter-sphere |
title_sort | public sphere in crisis mode: how the covid-19 pandemic influenced public discourse and user behaviour in the swiss twitter-sphere |
topic | Articles |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8336575/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34393592 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2021.1923622 |
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