Author: Dr. Dennis Nguyen

Media and Communications Researcher with particular interest in online media, transnational discourses, crisis communication, public sphere theory, and empirical methods.

A Network Graph of the EU Web Sphere based on Hyperlinks (UPDATED)

The graph below visualises the hyperlink network of twenty-one political platforms in the EU context for the period between March 2011 and March 2013, which can be seen as one of the most tumultuous phases of the so-called EU crisis.

The  sample includes four major news media websites, three government websites (UK, Germany, Greece), four official EU websites, two think tank websites, four bloggers, and four NGO websites. I extracted all links from a sample of ca. 1320 postings that were published on these websites within the 24 months of intense crisis discourse covered in the analysis. Each node represents a website, while each line or “edge” stands for a unilateral hyperlink connection coming from a source (one of the 21 websites of the sample) to target; the size of a node implies how much content was produced by the respective platform within the focused time span, while  the thickness or “weight” of each line indicates how often a website was linked to from a source.

This graph is only a preliminary, incomplete draft and does not include all news media postings of the total sample yet; still, it gives a few insights in the structure of political online discourses in the EU context (click to enlarge):

EU Media Web
EU online media web sphere based on hyperlinks. The graph created with Gephi.

For starters, one can easily see that each of the sampled platforms had its very own sub-network of connections and references; they appear as centres of separate yet not completely isolated clusters. Could this be tendencies towards “silo formation” and fragmentation in the EU web discourse? At least the hyperlink pattern in the sample implies such a development, though the same must not necessarily apply to the actual content level and the network of non-hyperlink in-text references that might have emerged there. Still, looking at the structure of hyperlink networks provides access to the fabric of the transnational debate on the EU crisis and forms an adequate starting point for a more detailed discussion.

Apart from the smaller clusters around each node there seem to be ties between politically-ideologically similar websites; for example, in the upper half official EU web presence form a interconnected sub-network; on the right Eurosceptic websites appear to “amass”; the pro-European/federalist NGO Europa Union Deutschland mainly linked to a selection of like-minded sources, too. However, there are a few outliers that need closer examination, such as the “detached” sub-cluster around the extremely anti-European website Team Europe.

It is also interesting to observe that most websites link to themselves, as indicated by the coloured circles attached to the central nodes. Again, the bigger or “thicker” it is, the more often a particulate website tended to place a hyperlink to its own content within its postings.

These are just a few preliminary reflections and the initial observations need a more detailed discussion against the background of web-/public sphere theory and transnational communication. Nevertheless, this network graph highlights some interesting implications and provides further proof that at least a rudimentary transnational web sphere emerged in the EU crisis context.

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2015 – The Year the Crisis Returns?

2014 was a relatively “calm” year in the Eurozone and the crisis seemed to have lost most of its urgency. Not for citizens directly affected by structural reforms, austerity policies, stalling economic life, and high unemployment rates but for public political communicators across Europe . Eventually, this translated into reduced topicality and newsworthiness for public media communication.

However, the prospects for a success of left-wing party Syriza in the Greek elections as well as mounting economic problems in Italy have already started to rekindle the transnational crisis discourse. Hence, 2015 could turn out to be a decisive year for a still lingering and largely unresolved crisis in Europe. One that has long left the economic dimension and equally affects politics as well as cultural formations. Though Greece will probably remain in the “eye of the storm” for some time, the Italian crisis theatre could also gain relevance. Here are just a few early signs for this “relapse”:

Eurozone must act before deflation grips

Banks Ready Contingency Plans in Case of Greek Eurozone Exit

Merkel insists she wants Greece to remain in eurozone

Greece’d Lightning and the Italian Stallion

Image courtesy of https://unsplash.com

Convergence in the News Media Discourse (Online) on the EU Crisis shown in Network Graphs

Here are a few graphs that I’ve created with Gephi, a very powerful tool for network graphs; the software is open source and you can download it for free. It might seem a bit intimidating to people who have absolutely no experience with network analysis software but there are tons of helpful tutorials out there, especially on YouTube. I will compile a list with my favourite ones in a follow-up post soon. It’s also good to have some knowledge about either Excel or SPSS (best both), as you will need data tables for calculating the network graphs (in CSV).

I use Gephi for the visualisation of  hyperlink patterns in online content but also for mapping relations between political actors, organisation, and, as in the present case, nation-states. For example, the  graphs below show what countries were mentioned and with which other nation-states they were most frequently contextualised/linked to in EU crisis content from three European news media websites (Guardian, EKathimerini, and Spiegel Online, click to enlarge). I extracted the data from over 13.000 online articles published between March 2011 and March 2013.

A node’s size indicates how often a specific country was named; the bigger it is, the more frequent it was mentioned or referred to in the sample. The lines (also called edges) show what countries were named together in the analysed content and their “thickness” indicates how often that occurred. For example, Germany and Greece have a very thick connection across all platforms, which tells us that they were particularly often linked to each other in the EU crisis discourse; considering Germany’s dominant role in the EU bailout negotiations for Greece, this is little surprising.

Guardian Online Nations Network EU Crisis 2011-2013
Guardian Online Nations Network EU Crisis 2011-2013
EKathimerini EU crisis graph
Ekathimerini Nations Network EU Crisis 2011-2013
SPON Nations EU Crisis
SPON Nations Network EU Crisis 2011-2013

Still, the similarities across the four different European news media sites indicate significant tendencies towards discursive convergence in the EU crisis debate. The same can be said of Le Monde for which I have created the same kind of graph. Each platform seems to put particular emphasis on its own national context (UK, Greece, Germany, France etc.) but in sum the networks between countries  that are somehow involved in the EU crisis discourse look very similar. This type of graph thus allows to analyse the set of entities that are involved in a particular political discourse and enables a more detailed evaluation of how their relations to each other are portrayed in media content.

Multiple Fragmentation and Conflict: The EU Crisis’ Affect on Migrant Discourses in Europe

As mentioned in the previous post I’ll present a paper at an upcoming conference in Giessen this November. I collaborate with another PhD candidate from Hull who works on the Greek “crisis theatre” and we decided to focus on the role of migration in the related political debates. Read here the preliminary draft:

The sovereign debt crises in the Eurozone initiated for many European countries a period of economic turmoil that inevitably affected political discourses in a national and transnational dimension. The real threat of a collapse of the euro, the conflict between necessary integration and the preservation of sovereignty, as well as a European political leadership that is often perceived as obscure or even indecisive, caused many to doubt the sustainability of the EU; the same factors also showed the limits to transnational solidarity as well social cohesion within the union. This particularly applies to the public discourse on as well as political handling of migration and related issues in Europe. Economic and political challenges transformed into cultural conflicts that heavily affected how migration was framed throughout the EU with dangerous oversimplifications and hostilities towards new arrivals from outside Europe often dominating public debates; not to mention the lack of agency for the extremely diverse social group in focus, which experienced tendencies of de-humanisation in the (transnational) political discourse. In this respect, a rift between Southern European “entry countries” and their Northern neighbours also emerged as a result of lacking cooperation in the management of the related challenges (e.g. Lampedusa).

The present paper discusses the different fault lines that materialised in the intersection of austerity politics, crisis policies, migration, and the resulting conflicts by conducting a complementary analysis of political online media content from a selection of EU members, such as Greece, Italy, Germany, and the UK. It outlines how different cultural, social, and political backgrounds determined the perception and evaluation of the crisis and its affect on local as well as transnational migrant debates; it further explores how the crisis spawned a transnational media public sphere that, despite significant tendencies towards discursive convergence, was moulded by conflict and fragmentation. In this regard, the marginalisation of social minorities (e.g. migrants) and a considerable gender gap in the respective online debates are characteristic for the overall crisis discourse.

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Conference: Material Matters in Times of Crisis Capitalism

Later this year I’ll contribute to a panel that discusses the role of online media in the crisis discourse at a conference in Giessen, Germany. The event’s title is “Material Matters in Times of Crisis Capitalism. Transnational, Feminist, and Decolonial Approaches“. It will take place between the 13th and 15th of November. Among the esteemed cast of keynote speakers are academic heavyweights such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Rhoda Reddock.

In my paper I will focus on the lack of representation of various marginalised groups in online media debates based on political communication in what I describe as the transnational web sphere on the EU and Eurozone crisis – a digital public sphere that transcends the cultural, social, and political borders of individual nation states and that serves as the discursive context for communicative actions on the crisis. During the empirical analysis of crisis related web content I noticed that women are hardly partaking in the relevant online debates; they are almost invisible, at least as active communicators, i.e. participants in the respective online platforms (as commentators, observers, reporters etc.).

A significant gender gap still seems to persist when it comes to the social composition of the group of people who struggle for meaning in the crisis discourse. At least that’s the case for the European context. Moreover, it emerged that migrants often lack any agency in the crisis debate as well; they are mostly depicted as a somewhat “faceless” challenge or problem, not unlike a natural disaster. Migrant flows increased during the height of the crisis, especially when the Arab revolutions in Libya and Syria accelerated, and the arrival of refugees triggered heated political debates and conflicts across the EU and in its Southern areas in particular (e.g. Lampedusa); other examples are the partly very hostile and heavily medialised debates on the integration/disintegration of Roma and Sinti but also fears over work migration within the EU as a result of the Eurozone crisis.

A third group who had a hard time to make its voices heard in the crisis discourse and its local manifestations are various ad-hoc protest groups that formed as a response to austerity politics in the so-called crisis states (or PIIGS, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain). Especially public institutions such as governments and the EU hardly ever mentioned nor responded to the multitude of protest movements that emerged across Southern Europe and Greece in particular, which saw strikes on an almost daily basis.

News media platforms also provided only limited space for such groups to explain their viewpoints, motivations, and goals in their own words. These observations can be backed by hard empirical data (statistics/graphs) on the topic menus of political online platforms, the set of represented political actors in media content, and discursive networks that materialised during the height of the EU crisis between 2011 and 2013.

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Mig@Net Transnational Digital Networks, Migration, and Gender

Last year I participated in a large EU funded research venture on the role of digital media in the formation of transnational migrant networks and their affect on gender issues, the Mig@Net Project. My supervisor Dr. Athina Karatzogianni was one of the project’s organisers and I worked with her on the sub-section on ‘Intercultural Conflict and Dialogue’.

Part of the project was the formulation of precise policy recommendations for political decision makers that should help to improve communication with migrant groups in the public through digital media. That’s the part I was responsible for. Read the whole report including my recommendations here.

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Back to Blog and Publication at Kosmopolitica.org

After almost two years of idleness I am back to re-start this blog. I was just too busy with data surveys, analyses, chapters, conferences etc. Put teaching assignments and a part-time job in online marketing on top of that. The past 24 month flew by far too quickly. However, from now on this site will again provide a window to my work, with regular updates.

For starters, check out a publication that was published on Kosmopolitica.org, the website of an ethics think tank chaired by Dr. Martin Gak. I met the latter during a conference we organised in April 2013 on transnational migrant networks in Hull. The article explains why modern politics are almost always embedded within transnational discursive networks and what practitioners in modern politics need to consider when using online communication in a globalised age; it puts particular emphasis on the different dimensions and forms in which transnational discursivity can materialise thanks to communication technology.

Presentation at the PhD Conference in London (LSE), 15th June 2012

After months of reading and drafting for my actual PhD thesis, I finally found some time to post an update on this still very lively blog.

As some of you might already know, I will present a paper at a PhD conference/symposium in London – at the London School of Economics (LSE), to be more precise. I am going to present the findings of my research on the ‘European Blogosphere’ which I conducted in the context of my German MA thesis last year. However, I am currently revising my theoretical framework and take a fresh look at the empirical data I gathered in long weeks of coding. Read here the original proposal that was accepted by the committee. Comments are more than welcome!

The ‘European’ Blogosphere in Times of Global Crisis

Chances and Limits of Transnational Public Spheres on the Internet

Contemporary online media facilitate the exchange of information beyond geo- graphical, social, cultural, as well as political borders – and possibly stimulate com- municative interactions between members of different national backgrounds in a trans- or supranational context. This aspect is of considerable relevance for the aca- demic (and political) discussion on the chances and limits of transnational public spheres as well as ‘postnational’ identities in the context of Europe or the European Union, respectively. Little empirical research on these very issues exists so far. This is quite surprising, especially if one considers the broad dissemination of the Internet on the continent and its obvious potential for the emergence of transnational online discourses.

The present project attempts to narrow this gap by analysing a representative sample of political blogs covering EU-/European issues, published in English and German. Blogs have been repeatedly characterised as particularly suitable online media for open, multilateral debates and are one of the predominant modes of communicative interaction online. The central research questions are: Which topics are considered to be ‘European’? In which discursive networks are the blogs embedded? When do individuals leave their ‘national’ backgrounds behind and engage in discussions on transnational issues? Do participants express a certain identity? If yes, is it rather the national or a post-/transnational one (or a mixture of both)? To gather sufficient data, the complementary content analysis integrated quantitative and qualitative aspects.

This paper will finally show how we can observe transnational online public spheres as context-depending, dynamic communicative phenomena and that both the na- tional as well as transnational dimension do not exclude each other but do exist in parallel and often overlap. The ‘European’ blogosphere, however, appears to remain an elite project of limited social scope.

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Publication Project II: Censorship, Online Media, and Digital Culture

As stated in an earlier post, I am currently working on a number of research projects alongside my PhD. In the first of these ventures I collaborate with Tomi Oladepo from Warwick University for an analysis of transnational online public spheres in Africa and Europe. A second one will deal with forms of and conditions for censorship in digital culture.  This second project will be conducted in cooperation with my colleague Jennifer Eickelmann from the Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany). She is also a PhD student (as well as lecturer) and currently works on (postmodern) modes and techniques of content production on the Internet. Before that, she finished her MA in 2010 with a high quality thesis on performance, resistance, and Youtube. You can read one of her articles here (in German).

We will discuss in our article contemporary forms of censorship in cyberspace –  i.e. the multidimensional practice of information control that often combines social, cultural, and political modes of sanctioning content production as well as -distribution. It will focus on the disciplining of the expression of utterances as a mode of power, so to say. Forms of ‘censorship’ need thereby to be assessed against their specific cultural and historical (i.e. discursive) background since they emerge in various different contexts and are subject to constant change; the same goes of course for the definition of concepts like ‘classified information’ or ‘political correctness’. As Wikileaks and the follow-up discussion it caused have shown, the issue of controlling what can be made publicly available and what not is an urgent matter today – not only as regards criticism on totalitarian regimes but especially when it comes to assess the extents of freedom in liberal democracies. However, one has not necessarily to discuss extraordinary political events to address and discuss the issue. In fact, censorship is an inherent part of our everyday live and determines our communicative behaviour both off- and online in multiple ways. Each culture displays it own laws and rules to control what an individual can say and which utterances have to be sanctioned. The historical background and actual context of a statement (as an umbrella term for any sort of text) is in this respect often the determining factor for the implementation/non-implementation of censorship. Regarding contemporary practices of postmodern content production, censorship -as an instrument of monopolising ideas- can also thwart and impede the creation of the “new” by artists, users etc. To create something new, the practice of quoting and reassembling the already available is indispensable (Mathy/Dietrich 1998). Yet many professional content producers try to protect their ‘intellectual property’, sometimes with relatively harsh measures. Hence,  censorship is also a powerful tool for established hegemonies to diminish the creative (subversive) potential of the “networked information economy” (Benkler 2006).

We will provide a taxonomy of modes of censorship and discuss to what extent the Web actually provides the means for genuine social, cultural, and political resistance. Some of the main questions we have to address are: Who does exert control on the Web? What technological and what cultural sanctions exist? What legitimations and justifications do governments (or corporations) refer to when they attempt to apply forms of censorship (i.e. under what circumstances does it emerge)? What factors determine the current notion of ‘political correctness’ in societal discourses? The project is still in a very early stage and the theoretical framework, methodology, as well as actual subject-matter-of-consideration still need to be defined.

Literature:

Benkler, Yochai (2006): The Wealth of Networks. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Mathy, Dietrich (1998): “Vorab ergänzend”, in: Hilmes, Carola/Mathy, Dientrich (eds.): Dasselbe noch einmal: Die Ästehtik der Wiederholung. Westdeutscher Verlag.

Publication Project I: The Transnational Blogosphere in Africa and Europe

Within the three years of a PhD programme, a student should publish at least one to two articles and present an equal amount of papers at conferences. Hence, I started to plan a number of smaller research projects that will hopefully be published in one of the many renowned academic journals next year. The first of these articles deals with transnational communication on blogs – a topic I have recently discussed in my German MA thesis. However, this time I will cooperate with my former classmate Tomi Oladepo who is a PhD student at Warwick University. She also works on digital public spheres, political communication, and participation (she wrote a brilliant MA thesis on similar issues at Coventry university). We can therefore easily and productively exploit the synergies of the work on our PhD dissertations to produce some high quality side projects.

In the planned publication we will provide a theoretical approach on the digital public sphere and political communication online – developing our thoughts by critically summarizing the respective academic discourses in communication science, media studies, sociology, and political science. We will then expand the discussion by taking a closer look on forms of transnationalism online – and empirically prove to what extent blogs offer a platform for political discourse beyond national borders. One of our main interests deals thereby with the question on who defines him/herself as an ‘African’ or ‘European’, respectively, and how they communicate such an transnational identity: When, where and why do individuals (users) of different national backgrounds come together online and discuss what kind of political issues? Can we detect hints to a common ground or a transnational identity (as “Africans” rather than Nigerians  or Congolese for instance, or “Europeans” instead of Germans or British). Who participates? What do they say? What networks can we identify? By contrasting Africa and Europe, we will hopefully be able to point to some substantial differences but also similarities between both geographical spaces and their digital extensions (mainly due to historical and, most importantly, economic aspects):

  • in the manner of utilizing digital media for political purposes,
  • in the composition of public online discourses and the role of the ‘national’,
  • in the structure on networks of political blogs focusing transnational issues,
  • in the patterns of communicative interaction, referencing, linking etc.,
  • in the reflection on the state as well as progress of cultural and political integration.

You can take a look at  some examples for our prospective subject-matters-of-consideration here and here. We still have to define our methodological approach but we`ll probably apply a form of content analysis in order to collect sufficient data for proving our theses, considering both qualitative and quantitative aspects. Nevertheless, we are still in the very early stages of planning and we might come up with a totally different epistemological perspective and instrument. At the moment, we’re aiming for publication in the second half of 2012. Until then we’ll provide updates on the project on this and Tomi’s blog, find the link above.

Please feel free to share your thoughts.

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