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In:From Text to Political Positions: Text analysis across disciplines
Edited by Bertie Kaal, Isa Maks and Annemarie van Elfrinkhof
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 55] 2014
► pp. 245–268

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Participation and recontextualisation in New Media

Political Discourse Analysis and YouTube

Published online: 7 May 2014
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.55.12boy
The chapter explores the ways in which viewer comments are exploited by the YouTube community to interact with political discourse. The corpus-based study, based on three speeches by Barack Obama, aims to uncover the linguistic means adopted in text comments for positive and negative presentation and for recontextualisation of the speeches. In line with Critical Discourse Analysis, the work is premised on the assumption that the speeches rebroadcast on YouTube reshape linguistic and social practice by providing a wider reception and more direct access to institutionalized political discourse. Specifically, the work explores how interaction in the form of text comments influences the medium of YouTube, the discourse community and the genre of political speech. On a theoretical level the work considers the important issues of online identity and participation in the public sphere, with a focus on the various ways recontextualisation is exploited by commenters.
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