This is the final abstract of my PhD thesis submitted last month:
The Internet has become an increasingly relevant space for political communication not only in national but also transnational contexts. This particularly applies for political discourses related to Europe, the EU, and the impact of the global economic crisis, which translated into a regional EU crisis. Political “publicness” is not limited to the mass media and there is considerable potential for the emergence of transnational web spheres as various communicators step into the digital public and disperse their viewpoints on the entailed social, economic, and political challenges.
There is still a lack of applicable theoretical concepts as well as empirical insights. The present project addresses this lacuna: firstly, by proposing an integrative theoretical framework for the identification and classification of transnational web spheres; secondly, by conducting a complementary frame- and network analysis of a representative sample of political online media content that focuses on issues related to EU politics during the Eurozone crisis.
The study sets out to evaluate whether public communicators in Europe formed a transnational web sphere or rather reinforced discourses that were fragmented along national and political fault lines. It further focuses on the question of how they framed Europe, the EU, and the EU-crisis. It is proposed that the analysis of both the content and underlying networks of web communication enables the critical observation of the complex and often conflict-loaded interrelations between the transnational and national dimension; this also opens the way for analysing how key actors communicate political concepts, ideas, affiliations, and identities.
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Dennis Nguyen 
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