Nekvapil1998
| Nekvapil1998 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Nekvapil1998 |
| Author(s) | Jirí Nekvapil, Ivan Leudar |
| Title | Masmediální utváření dialogických sítí a politické identity: případ Demokratické strany Sudety |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Politics, Identity, Media, Czech, Mass media |
| Publisher | |
| Year | 1998 |
| Language | Czech |
| City | |
| Month | |
| Journal | Slovo a slovesnost |
| Volume | 59 |
| Number | 1 |
| Pages | 30-52 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | |
| ISBN | |
| Organization | |
| Institution | |
| School | |
| Type | |
| Edition | |
| Series | |
| Howpublished | |
| Book title | |
| Chapter | |
Abstract
Six days after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia on 6th of January 1993 an article appeared in the Czech national daily Rudé Právo. It reported two events – a meeting of the preparatory commitee of the Democratic Party of Sudets (DPS), and a subsequent news conference given by its chairman, Jaroslav Blühmel. The party and its chairman were previously almost publicly unknown. The two events, however, turned out to be politically significant. What J. Blühmel had argued was reported in most Czech mass media, and his claims elicited public reactions from major Czech politicians. The materials we analyzed included most of the articles in Czech national newspapers during the period which dealt with J. Blühmel and the DPS, together with a relevant TV program. We focused on two problems. First, how was the political identity of a previously unknown political body and of its representative established and contested in public debates. Second, what discursive practices of the participants allowed the emergence of a ’distributed discursive network’?
Our analysis made use of ethnomethodologically oriented conversational analysis which deals with use of categories in talk (e. g. Hester and Eglin, 1997). ’Democratic Party of [52]Sudets’ was, to begin with, inter-subjectively empty. One of our aims was to demonstrate how it was fleshed out by binding to it views, intentions and actions of its incumbents. We have found that in the case of the DPS this was by no means a consensual matter. J. Blühmel and the Czech participants never converged in their debates on a common definition of the party’s identity. It remained a disjunctive and contested category, situated in political conflict.
The emergence of the discursive network was supported by the contextualizing strategies of participants. Newspaper articles typically ignored the local context in which talk was produced, and instead they presented it in relation to the talk by other politicians elsewhere. In the TV debate a complementary strategy was observed. Those present in the studio did not orient their arguments just at each other, but also at politically relevant but absent parties. This discursive network was distributed in one more way. On occasions participants demonstrably did not react to a specific speech event but rather to sets of events, such as, for instance, assertions made on several occasions and reported in several places. We offer the term ’distributed discursive network’ not as a theory of talk but as a useful concept.
Notes
Emergence of dialogical networks and political identity in mass media: The case of Democratic Party of Sudets („Sudetenland“)
