PhD Dissertation Defence: Pavel Rodin "Voices in the Arena"

Please note: the dissertation defence will be held in English.

Summary in English

VOICES IN THE ARENA: A Participation-Centred Study of Multivocal Risk and Crisis Communication on Social Media

The extensive changes in media and communication technologies of recent decades have significantly affected risk and crisis communication, which today occur in a complex media environment where many different actors communicate. Social media promote and facilitate participation, enabling lay people to create, maintain and share their crisis narratives alongside official information and media reporting. Lay voices thus contribute to what has been called multivocal risk and crisis communication (Frandsen & Johansen, 2016).

Traditional theoretical and practical approaches to risk and crisis communication have been centred primarily around organisations and strategic communication by institutional actors (Sellnow & Seeger, 2021). In contrast, this dissertation focuses on lay social media users, i.e., individuals acting and communicating on social media in the capacity of private persons and not representing organisations, authorities, or other institutions.

The dissertation draws on the social constructivist approach, which suggests that risk and crisis are social constructs based on interpretations and negotiations by multiple audiences, in contrast with the essentialist approach, which, in its turn, is grounded in physical characteristics of risks and crises (Falkheimer & Heide, 2006; Frandsen & Johansen, 2016). Thus, the social constructivist approach focuses on people, their interpretations and actions rather than the crisis per se. It means that from the audience perspective some situations can be interpreted as crises causing crisis-related reactions and behaviour despite limited risk, and vice versa, tangible or immediate danger can be overlooked or interpreted as not threatening and, therefore, not leading to the perception of an emergency.

Participation (from the Latin participat-, “shared in”) is a multidimensional concept that broadly refers to the act of taking part in an activity or event (Cambridge, 2023). The spread of social media and Web 2.0 technologies facilitated the development of a distinct type of online participation (Oser, Hooghe, & Marien, 2013). Lay social media users create, share, and comment on content in ways not previously imagined (Jenkins et al., 2013). Such communicative contributions can both support and challenge official risk and crisis communication, lead to greater exposure of particular views, and by that influence public discourse and opinion.

Aim and Research Questions

The primary aim of this dissertation is:  

to explore the multivocality of risk and crisis communication from the perspective of lay social media users’ participation.

The dissertation draws on the Rhetorical Arena Theory (RAT) conceptual framework. A “rhetorical arena”, according to Frandsen and Johansen (2023), is a social space that opens up during a crisis in which multiple voices communicate to, with, against, or about each other. These voices may come from different actors, including organisations, authorities, politicians, activists, experts, the media, and lay people. In its essence, the RAT provides an overarching heuristic framework and a valuable conceptual lens to approach the communicative complexity of risk and crisis communication aiming “to identify, describe, and explain multiple communicative processes inside the arena” (Frandsen & Johansen, 2016, p. 142).

The RAT framework consists of two interrelated perspectives: macro and micro. The macro perspective considers all of the voices and the communicative processes in the arena during a specific situation. It focuses on patterns of interactions between the voices and actors that compose the arena and “bring the crisis into a mediated existence” (Hearit & Courtright, 2003, p. 87). In comparison, the micro perspective of the RAT focuses on the characteristics of communicative contributions and processes as well as specific actors composing the rhetorical arena (Frandsen & Johansen, 2016).

Originally, the research using the RAT framework focused on a broad and all-encompassing rhetorical arena (Frandsen & Johansen, 2005, 2010). However, according to Coombs and Holladay (2014), the rhetorical arena can be broken down into several sub-arenas, i.e., distinct social spaces delimited from the larger arena by physical, social, or symbolic boundaries. The sub-arena concept has proven useful and was welcomed and supported by the RAT’s founders (Frandsen & Johansen, 2023).

One proposed method to delimit sub-arenas is the communication channel (Coombs & Holladay, 2014). However, social media consist of multiple independent content producers, such as organisations, authorities, and the news media and also lay social media users participating in risk and crisis communication on the same communication channel. Currently, there is limited knowledge on how such lay online participation affects the communicative processes and discourses in the rhetorical sub-arenas on social media. This thus forms the first research question (RQ 1) of this dissertation:

1. In what ways does lay online participation contribute to the content of risk and crisis communication in different rhetorical sub-arenas on social media?

The micro perspective of the rhetorical arena brings the focus to particular actors and their characteristics. The existing body of research, however, overlooked the motivations of different actors to communicate on rhetorical sub-arenas. Motivations are one of the key parameters of online participation (Dahlgren, 2011), and it corresponds to the internal processes that activate, guide, and maintain human behaviour (Baron, 1991). The second research question of this dissertation aims to explore this further:

1. What characterises and affects motivations for lay online participation in multivocal risk and crisis communication?

Finally, the RAT implies that relationships between different actors shape communication in the rhetorical arena. However, some aspects have not yet been explored. For instance, Palmieri and Musi (2020) suggest extending the RAT approach by looking at the role of trust. Previous research demonstrates that trust in institutions is essential in the perception of risk prevention, crisis management, behaviour in crisis, and crisis communication (Cornia, Dressel, & Pfeil, 2014). The third research question asks:

1. In what ways does institutional trust affect lay participation in risk and crisis communication on social media?

Three Sub-Studies

This dissertation includes three studies of risk and crisis communication in the situation related to public health: the first sub-study analyses communication during the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak, whereas the second and the third sub-studies investigate online participation in vaccination communication in Sweden during 2018-2020.

The first sub-study presents a content analysis of communication during the Ebola outbreak. The data covers the period from August 1, 2014, to January 31, 2015, and the content includes three rhetorical sub-arenas: (a) 848 news articles from the websites of two major Swedish newspapers, Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet; (b) 47 news posts about the Ebola outbreak which were posted on the official Facebook pages of these news organisation; and (c) 1,661 comments on Facebook. The news media content was collected using Retriever Mediearkivet, and the Facebook content was gathered and anonymised via Netvizz 1.3 application.

The second and the third sub-studies draw on in-depth interviews with social media users. The interviews include questions regarding online participation in vaccination communication on Facebook, their motivations, and trust in the authorities and the news media. In total, eleven interviews with active social media users were conducted. The interviews were collected in three different periods: during the measles outbreak in Gothenburg (the second largest city in Sweden) in 2018 (5 interviews); in 2019 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (4 interviews); and in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic but before the vaccination programme commenced (2 interviews).

Results and Conclusions

The first research question addresses the content of lay online participation on social media. The first sub-study’s findings suggest that lay social media users’ participation creates a distinct sub-arena which differs from other interlinked sub-arenas concerning issue attention, topics, and the information’s tone. Sensational and human-interest stories resulted in separate peaks in attention compared to the news media and the news media posts on Facebook. New topics have emerged while other topics prominent on other rhetorical sub-arenas were absent. Finally, the user-generated comments showed the lowest level of alarmism of all the other analysed sub-arenas.

The second research question analyses lay users’ motivations for participation in risk and crisis communication. The second sub-study identifies three main motivations for lay online participation: personal interest, information brokerage – the need to spread information, and persuasion – the need to influence others. The results also show that sociality of online participation on Facebook is characterised by asynchronous communication, hostility, and communicative loops, and that these factors can hinder or strengthen the motivations of lay social media users.

Additionally, the results show that the visibility on Facebook is characterised by two communication zones, here named “zones of peace” and “zones of fight”. “Zones of peace” represent private or semi-private spaces, such as personal pages or closed groups with pre-approved membership. “Zones of fight”, on the other hand, include public pages and open groups. The zones differ according to which audiences can see communicative contributions by social media users. In the “zone of peace” is it usually friends, family members, followers, – in other words, an audience with congruent opinions. In contrast, the audience of the “zone of fight” can include antagonists or “undecided” users (without a strongly held a priori opinion) which can be influenced. The study results show that the visibility of online participation affects motivations. The participation in the “zones of peace” is often used for self-expression, support, and collaboration, while the “zones of fight” are spaces for argumentation, competition, and fighting for the presence of specific opinions that otherwise are absent in the official risk and crisis communication.

Finally, this dissertation empirically analyses how institutional trust in the authorities and the news media affects lay online participation. The third sub-study breaks down institutional trust into two dimensions: benevolence and competence (Harrison McKnight & Chervany, 2001). Drawing on the interviews, the study identifies three prominent online participation roles based on trust beliefs: the Critics, the Ambassadors, and the Mediators. Where the Critics are characterised by a low degree of trust in benevolence, the Ambassador’s role is taken on by users who have a high degree of trust in the benevolence of institutions, and the Mediator role entails a high degree of trust in the benevolence of institutions but also a distrust in their competence.

Against this background, the communication by the Critics focuses on questioning and disputing official information/recommendations, as well as the news media coverage. The Ambassadors voluntarily endorse and promote official information and participate in debates and discussions on social media in the absence of institutional actors but remain unaffiliated. Their online participation aims to compensate for the deficit of institutional trust among other social media users and add a personal, human dimension to official information. Finally, the Mediators focus on effective communication, reaching target audiences, and using appropriate and intelligible language. Social media users taking on these online participation roles thus become information brokers that selectively challenge, support, or disseminate official information.

In conclusion, the theoretical contributions of this dissertation offer a more in-depth understanding of the complexity of risk and crisis communication on social media. This dissertation has examined the content of risk and crisis communication on news media and user-generated sub-arenas on Facebook and identified points of divergence between interest, topics, and tone of information. Therefore, the dissertation suggests considering content producers and visibility on social media as new criteria to distinguish rhetorical sub-arenas. Additionally, the dissertation has expanded upon the existing micro-perspective of the RAT by analysing motivations of lay online participation. Finally, the effects of institutional trust to lay online participation has been explored and three online participation roles with different degrees of trust in benevolence and competence has been outlined.

The full thesis: https://hdl.handle.net/2077/76557