Scott Wright

University of Melbourne | MSD · School of Culture and Communication

This article analyzes the nature of debate on “below the line” comment fields at the United Kingdom’s Guardian, and how, if at all, such debates are impacting journalism practice. The article combines a content analysis of 3,792 comments across eighty-five articles that focused on the UN Climate Change Summit, with ten interviews with journalists,...

This article explores ongoing debates about whether new media empowers individuals at the expense of formal organizations, and how the nature of organizations/organizing is changing. Focusing on Downing Street E-petitions, it presents a content analysis of over 33,000 accepted petitions, analyzing who or what ‘sponsored’ each petition alongside int...

Empirical studies of online debate almost universally observe a “dominant” minority of posters. Informed by theories of deliberative democracy, these are typically framed negatively—yet research into their impact on debate is scant. To address this, a typology of what we call super-participation (super-posters, agenda-setters and facilitators) is d...

Within democratic theory, the deliberative variant has assumed pre-eminence. It represents for many the ideal of democracy, and in pursuit of this ideal, online discussion forums have been proposed as solutions to the practical limits to mass deliberation. Critics have pointed to evidence which suggests that online discussion has tended to undermin...

The suggestion that new media might revolutionize politics persists as one of the most influential and popular discourses. There has been a burgeoning scholarly response, often framed through the polarising ‘revolution’ and ‘normalization’ ‘schools’ (Davis, 2009; Margolis and Resnick, 2000). This article argues that the schism between revolution an...

Over the past two decades with the rise of digital media, newspapers across Western democracies have been increasingly adopting new forms of online participatory journalism. During this time, “below the line” comment spaces have grown to be one of the most popular forms of user-generated content. Comment spaces are thought to perform a multitude of...

Based on longitudinal research design (2006-2017), this article analyses how Guardian journalists engage in "below the line" comment spaces; what factors shape this engagement; and how this has evolved over time. The article combines a large-scale quantitative analysis of the total number of comments made (n = 110,263,661) and a manual content anal...

This article investigates how and why data journalism has evolved in Australia. Using semi-structured interviews with Australian data journalists, we examine how they view their role in news organisations; the structure of Australian data journalism within and beyond Australian newsrooms; and how their practice has changed and the factors that driv...

This article assesses how social movement actors strategically use a hybrid mix of social and traditional media to organise political actions in an attempt to influence media and public agendas. Using the case study of the Anti-Media Monopoly Movement in Taiwan, it investigates how the activists’ use of social and mainstream media contributed towar...

This special issue examines user comments as a specific type of interpersonal public online communication in which people are allowed to post comments below the content from professional communicators, such as journalists, politicians, ompanies, and service providers. Numerous studies have tracked the development f these “below the line” comments (...

This paper takes forward a new agenda for online deliberation - the study of everyday political talk in 'non-political' online ‘third spaces’ - online communities devoted to issues such as parenting, food or sports (author 2012a, b). Online deliberation research has identified a series of problems with online debate: it often polarises with like-mi...

Creating public spaces that foster political talk amongst citizens is challenging business. Tell people that it’s a ‘political’ space and (however well designed) you will invariably find it is used by political junkies, and is largely ignored by those who don’t self-identify as ‘political’. Consequently, many commentators will observe said disengag...

This article identifies a series of issues that are thought to afflict the online public sphere: political polarisation, avoidance, incivility and discursive inequality. It argues that these issues are more likely to affect politically focused online spaces such as political discussion forums, Facebook groups or political hashtags. The article argu...

This article draws on an empirical analysis of the testimonies of Chinese journalists to (re)consider the nature of professionalism in contemporary Chinese journalism. We draw on earlier work by a number of scholars to develop an analysis of the testimonies in order to trace both how professionalism is shaped by cultural, social, organizational, in...

This article explores the theoretical and methodological challenges of collecting and analysing everyday online political talk in China, and outlines our approach to defining and coding such talk. In so doing, the article is designed to encourage further research in this area, taking forward a new agenda for online deliberation (Wright, 2012a), and...

Theoretical and empirical research into online politics to date has primarily focused on what might be called formal politics or on how activists and social movements utilize social media to pursue their goals. However, in this chapter, we argue that there is much to be gained by investigating how political talk and engagement emerges in everyday,...

Taking forward a new agenda for online political deliberation – the study of everyday political talk in non-political, online ‘third spaces’ – this article examines the dynamics of political talk across three general interest UKbased online forums. The quantitative analysis found that discussions about austerity were just as likely to emerge from n...

This article examines to what extent, and how, people engaging in political talk within 'non-political' discussion forums – online lifestyle communities – leads to political (or personal) action or calls-to-action. The analysis is framed in the context of wider questions of citizenship, civic engagement and political mobilization. To capture everyd...

E-petitions are one of the most widely used and popular E-democracy tools. While hundreds of thousands of E-petitions are created around the world each year, and they receive millions of signatures, critics lament their limited impact on policy and the encouragement of ‘slacktivism’. This raises an interesting question that this article seeks to ad...

Graham et al. untersucht in seinem Beitrag die Dynamiken politischer Mobilisierung in On­line-Communities, die sich mit Lifestyle-Themen befassen. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf alltäglichen politischen Gesprächen in solchen Räumen, die nicht explizit als politische Räume zu betrachten sind, und der Frage ob, und wie, politische Gespräche zivilgesellsch...

To talk about the internet as a civic space requires some preliminary conceptualization; thus, first I briefly discuss two models of democracy – elitist and republican – to show that the ideals of civic participation can vary considerably. This is illuminated by a discussion of the role of the net in electoral and alternative politics. From there I...

Over the past two decades, there has been much debate concerning the Internet’s ability to facilitate and support public deliberation and extend the public sphere (cf. Gimmler 2001; Papacharissi 2002; Dahlgren 2005; Coleman and Blumler 2009). The belief that the Internet may play a significant role in reducing some of the deliberative deficit of We...

In response to a perceived crisis of democracy, governments have trialed a variety of democratic innovations. How to measure the impact of such innovations is both difficult and hotly disputed. This article tests Smith's (2009)57. Smith , G. 2009. Democratic innovations: Designing institutions for citizen participation, Cambridge, , England: Cambr...

This article takes forward a “new” agenda for online deliberation (Wright 2012), by setting out in detail the concept of third space: non-political online spaces where political talk emerges. The concept of third space is heavily influenced by, but ultimately grounded in a critique of, Oldenburg’s (1999) concept of the third place. Rather than thin...

The search task and the system both affect the demand on cognitive resources during information search. In some situations the demands may become too high for a person. This article has a three-fold goal. First, it presents and critiques methods to measure ...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a discussion and analysis of various assumptions and observations about the significance of blogging by politicians, particularly in relation to theories of representation and the public sphere, informed with an empirical study of the practice of politicians' blogs on the Read My Day platform (www.r...

This article analyses how and why councillors blog on the government-funded civic-blogging platform, Read My Day. Through a mixture of content analysis and interviews, the article assesses the kinds of communication being facilitated and how the blogs were used during the 2007 local elections. The analysis and interpretations are framed by a critiq...

The existing literature suggests that MPs will use a weblog to promote their activities to constituents in a very similar way to how they use websites. Yet, the discussion of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 suggests that the nature of this debate is evolving. This ...

This p er empirically analyses whether 'Futurum', the online discussion forum linked to the Convention on the Future of Europe, constituted a public sphere - and, if so, what kind. Although the debates were discursive and had an institutional context, they were not filtered into the convention process and had an unrepresentative group of participan...

This chapter analyzes the European Union's "Futurum" discussion forum, which was intended to help close the gap ("democratic deficit") between institutions and citizens by facilitating a virtual, multilingual, transnational public sphere. Futurum was both an interesting example of how the EU's language policies shape the structure of deliberative e...

Moderators are widely thought to be crucial to the facilitation of high-quality democratic debate, particularly in government-sponsored participatory exercises. There are, however, persistent fears that moderators censor rather than promote free speech, leading to a ‘shadow of control’. This article analyses the relationship between moderation and...

This article analyses the European Union's Futurum discussion forum. The EU hoped that Futurum would help close the acknowledged gap between institutions and citizens by facilitating a virtual, multilingual, transnational public sphere. Futurum was both an interesting example of how the EU's language policies shape the structure of deliberative exp...

This article provides a critique of the Downing Street website. First, government guidelines on website design and content are used as a basis to analyse the content of number-10.gov.uk. I conclude that the website fails to meet the guidelines for content, but this is primarily due to their inapplicability. Secondly, I contest the claim that the we...