Social networking sites as embedded tools of political communication : an innovative form of communication about Europe ? An analysis of practices and uses of Twitter and Facebook in the European Parliament

Roginsky, Sandrine
(2013) ECREA - Political Communication Section — Location: Université de Milan, Italie (19.September.2013)

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(en) The objective of this paper is to assess whether the use of social networking-sites by political actors at the European level presents some form of media and communication innovation. The lack of EU legitimacy is often viewed as a communication deficit (De Vreese & al, 2006; Meyer, 1999), and therefore Meyer highlights the role of political communication in legitimating governance. More recently, taking into account the evolution of communication tools, Blumler and Coleman (2010:147) note that “with the emergence and evolution of the Internet, in its many shapes and guises, there has been a range of hopes and speculations about its redemptive potential”. At the European level, this belief is even stronger. Thus Lilleker and Koc-Michalska (2011) emphasize the potential the Internet offers for legitimizing the European Parliament as a democratic institution. This presentation proposes to examine whether new public and political communicative spaces are emerging in the European Parliament as a result of the use of Internet, and more specifically social networking-sites, by political actors. Coleman and Moss consider three communicative characteristics of the blogs which all relate to impression management (Goffman, 1959): “politicians attempts to seem like ordinary people” (Coleman and Moss, 2008:9), they develop relationships with citizens which are live, spontaneous and direct, they are both “conversing with and listening to the public” (Coleman and Moss, 2008:9). All those three characteristics are today attributed to social media platforms by academics. Therefore there is an injunction for political actors to use web 2.0 tools in order to interact with citizens and allow a deliberative democracy to emerge. My presentation looks at the use of two social networking-sites (Twitter and Facebook) by Members of the European Parliament (MEP). The approach is original in that it focuses on MEPs’ usages and practices “behind the scene” of Internet. Drawing on a significant number of interviews with MEPs and political assistants but also on participant observation in the field between 2010 and 2012, it aims at better understanding how MEPs are integrating SNS into their everyday routines and whether and how it changes communicational patterns, both inside and outside the organization and political work. Doing so, it questions the relationships between professional politicians and journalists as well as the notions of e-discussion and interactivity. Given the scope of this research, the theoretical framework integrates both a political communication approach as well as a more sociological approach to mediated communication and the Internet. My research highlights how the injunction of interpersonal communication is imposed on MEPs and how it leads to the re-arrangement of the political and communicational skills and tasks within MEPs teams. It shows that web 2.0 tools do not fundamentally alter political action and communication but rather fit into a larger apparatus of various tools with distinctive objectives. Social networking-sites are embedded in a more comprehensive approach to communication, aiming at articulating various types of discourses of MEPs and adjusting language to audiences on a single platform.
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Roginsky, S. (2013). Social networking sites as embedded tools of political communication : an innovative form of communication about Europe ? An analysis of practices and uses of Twitter and Facebook in the European Parliament. ECREA - Political Communication Section, Université de Milan, Italie. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/46898