Media discourses of public participation

This chapter discusses public participation in media discourses as a complex and essentially politicized area that lies at the intersection of various fields, calling for an interdisciplinary approach from various perspectives such as those provided by discourse analysis, communication studies and political science. It argues that users’ engagement with the media is inherently political; not just because of its frequent critical nature, with users demanding the accountability of public figures and questioning public policies and actions, but also because of their often ambivalent relationship to the mainstream media, reflecting the frequent distrust in the existing power structures. In its main part, the chapter deconstructs some of the potential problems with various kinds of digitally mediated public participation. It notes how context collapse contributes to the merger of the private vs. public spheres, and how that can result in accidental and dispreferred participation. In this connection, the chapter argues that public participation is framed by the dominant political forces and power structures, and the national legal frameworks that typically constrain the complete freedom to exercise one’s discursive participatory options.