South African Arab Spring or Democracy to Come? An Analysis of South African Journalists’ Engagement with Citizenry through Twitter

  • Glenda Daniels
Chapter

Abstract

This chapter explores to what extent social media — particularly Twitter — deepens democracy through engagement between journalists and the public. The promise of social media to further the ends of democracy, as in more voices for diversity and more inclusion of those on the margins, is like a rose not yet in full bloom. Nothing illustrates and depicts this more than a quantitative analysis of the usage of Twitter in the Johannesburg newsroom. An analysis of Twitter in the newsroom shows that only 5% of all tweets under analysis were disseminated specifically for engaging with citizenry (Daniels, 2014b, p. 304); journalists say they spend an average of 15 minutes out of every hour on Twitter (Ibid.) and concede that this 5% is a low number. In 2015, subsequent qualitative investigations — namely, interviews — into this 5% result found that the majority of journalists and editors were not surprised that such a small percentage of their tweets were deliberately written to engage with citizenry. Before a full explication of the research data and conclusions, we need a theoretical framing and an explanation of the concepts: What do we mean by “soliciting engagement”? What are “Twitter” and “radical democracy” and “how was this research carried out?”

Keywords

Social Medium Public Sphere Discourse Analysis Public Engagement Twitter Network 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Glenda Daniels 2016

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  • Glenda Daniels

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