BloominTension: An Exploration of Socially Mediated Advocacy

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2020-05-24

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Abstract

​As an early form of a larger investigation of digital discourse, my project investigates how advocacy functioned through a Facebook group during a precise window of operations. Initially seeking to determine how controversies circulate between actants within discourse communities on social media, my project was constrained by restrictive updates to Facebook during data collection and analysis. While mapping the interactions of these discursive exchanges can help scholars better understand modes of digitally mediated information, my project serves as a micro-case study. Focusing on the development of and advocacy group that spawned in response to tensions at the Bloomington Farmer’s Market, I documented the interactions that occurred in the summer and fall of 2019. I then parsed a sample of the social media engagements to determine some of the utilities of the group page. Drawing from current scholarship on attitudes around social media use, as well as digital news engagement and the responses to news validity, my sampling of controversy in the Bloomington community explores not just the locally situated controversy but also digital users and discourse as a representation of a digital “community of practice”—a sociolinguistic idea that language primes and reinforces attitudes through both performative usage and mere exposure within the members of the community. I hope this case study can inform further projects that explore the ways that such social media groups are part of a larger ecology of community deliberation.

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Social Media Advocacy, No Space for Hate, Discourse Analysis

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