Research Information System
Researching Social Media Use: Identity, Community and Political Dissent, Leicester, United Kingdom, 02 July 2016, pp.2, (Summary Text)
Commenting Sadiq Khan’s Election on Facebook, Newspapers’ Facebook Pages as a Deliberative Public Sphere or Hate Forums?
It can be argued that Sadiq Khan being elected as the mayor of London was a very historic moment, not just because he is a Muslim and that decision was made even though there have been many arguments that he is extremist but because he took office in a time when far right in Europe was on the rise with the help of refugee crisis and terrorist acts have been conducted by radical Islamists and in the middle of debates about cultural differences between Islam and Western culture (specifically multiculturalism and cultural diversity debates). In my opinion, culture, religion, political violence and politics are not the only parameters of the proposed East/ West conflict. As a basic observation, it can be proposed that with advent of the ICTs, individuals’ role as a communicative actor has come to be accepted as one of the main characteristics of the new media environment (Castells (2007)’ mass-self communication Volkmer (2014)’s micro-networks and Jenkins (2006 and 2014)’ participatory culture, convergence culture and spreadable media). Of course, there have been massive transformations in people’s habits to use media thanks to ICTs, however it should be emphasized that some conventional media organizations didn’t suffer too much from it like New York Times (NYT), which not only succeeds to have a solid digital subscribers model with one million subscribers but also through its social media accounts it achieves to provide a high level of interactivity between the ones who follow its accounts, which means that it provided a forum among its followers no matter where they live. In the current research, I seek to understand whether the interactivity the abovementioned forum provides among the followers of NYT is suitable for an ideal speech situation or it leads to spiral of distorted communication.
Keywords: Muslim Question, Saqid Khan, East/ West conflict, Facebook, New York Times