Sotsiaalse resonantsi juhtumite analüüs: avalikkuse tähelepanu koondumine ning sellega arvestamine lehetoimetustes
Date
2006
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Abstract
Description
This bachelor thesis studies events of social resonance. The paper tries to explain the
acumination of public attention and the influences media texts apply to this process. The
author of the research paper uses critical discourse analysis to study six different events of
social resonance – articles on the internet and comments posted by the readers. In addition
there were four qualitative interviews made with newspaper editors, to get an insight into the
influence comments pose to editors’ work.
As theoretical basis of the study, it was important to understand the way social resonance
occurs and what types of social resonance are there. It was also necessary to see how different
cognitive processes form attitudes and beliefs towards different topics and explain the way the
term ‘discourse’ can be used when studying interpretations. The first chapter gives an
overview of these notions. The second chapter describes the objects of study and clarifies the
use of critical discourse analysis and qualitative interview methods in this paper. After that the
results of the research are presented, which give a qualitative overview of the analyzed
articles, comments and the interviews conducted.
The objectives of this research were to analyze events of social resonance and try to explain,
how the attention of the public sphere concentrates, and to revise the authors’ previous
findings.
On the basis of the analysis these findings could be made:
• The readers turn their attention to these aspects and details of media texts, which
relate to their attitudes and experiences. On the other hand the problems and
discourses in the focus of the articles get the most attention.
• The comments given to the texts depend directly on texts themselves: the diversity
of the content of comments depends on the number of possible interpretations; the conflicts and characters constructed in the articles are accepted by the
commentators; the number of comments given depends on the topic of the article.
• There are discourses in the Estonian society, that are used for interpreting very
diverse field of subjects: the Soviet discourse, the Christian discourse, Estonian
national and societal discourse.
• Internet commentary is an instrument for the newspaper editors for supervising
their work and assessing the tonality of a segment of the public. The feedback
helps editors in planning their work.
• Newspaper editors have a quite profound awareness of the wavelengths of public
attention and attitudes, capturing these wavelengths are a part of journalists’
everyday job.
• The different types of social resonance: discourse based- and event based,
described in an authors’ previous thesis were found adequate.
These results are not by any means fundamental or irrefutable. The methods used in the paper
are constructive and subjective, so a lot depended on the interpretations made by the author.
The results are subjective and need to be verified.
It would be beneficial to go onwards with studying these processes. Understanding how the
public sphere operates helps better comprehension of the society and social reality. In the
future it would be suitable to study social resonance more thoroughly using a variety of
methods. One could concentrate for example on the interpretation processes of the public, or
show how the media tries to influence public attention.
Keywords
H Social Sciences (General), bakalaureusetööd