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Author‟s preprint of an article to appear in Critical Discourse Studies 7/4 (November
2010) pp. 263-275. For the published version, see http://www.informaworld.com.
Stance-taking and public discussion in blogs
Greg Myers
Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster,
United Kingdom
Department of Linguistics and English Language
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YT
United Kingdom
Blogs, which can be written and read by anyone with a computer and an internet
connection, would seem to expand the possibilities for engagement in public sphere
debates. And indeed, blogs are full of the kind of vocabulary that suggests intense
discussion. But a closer look at the way this vocabulary is used in context suggests that
the main concern of writers is self presentation, positioning themselves in a crowded
forum, in what has been called stance-taking. When writers mark their stances, for
instance by saying I think, they enact different ways of signalling a relation to others,
marking disagreement, enacting surprise, and ironicising previous contributions. All
these moves are ways of presenting one's own contribution as distinctive, showing one's
entitlement to a position. In this paper, I use concordance tools to identify strings that
are very frequent in a corpus of blogs, relative to a general corpus of written texts, focus
on those relatively frequent words that mark stance, and analyse these markers in
context. I argue that the prominence of stance-taking indicates the priority of individual
positioning over collective and deliberative discussion.
Keywords: blogs, stance, public sphere, irony
Acknowledgements: My thanks to Sofia Lampropoulou, Ruth Wodak, and Lilie Chouliaraki for their
comments on this paper.
Introduction
The cover of a collection of essays, The Uses of Blogs (Bruns & Jacobs, 2006), shows
serried ranks of radio microphones, as if blogs were replacing the one-to-many voice
of a mass medium with many voices.
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This transformation of the media landscape,
with on-line media where users produce as well as consume the content (what Bruns
calls 'produsage' (Bruns & Jacobs, 2006: 6)) has been the focus of a great deal of
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attention and hope from critical media studies. Many media scholars have seen in the
rise of press and broadcast media a shift in which 'the classic community of publics is
being transformed into a society of masses' (Mills, 1956: 300). As Mills says, much
of our understanding of democratic processes depends on the idea of a public or
publics:
In a public, as we may understand the term, 1) virtually as many people express opinions
as receive them. (2) Public communications are so organized that there is a chance
immediately and effectively to answer back any opinion expressed in public. Opinion
formed by such discussion (3) readily finds an outlet in effective action, even against – if
necessary – the prevailing system of authority. And (4) authoritative institutions do not
penetrate the public, which is more or less autonomous in its operations (Mills, 1956:
303-4)
In contrast, in a mass (and in mass media), only a few people get to express opinions,
there is limited feedback, the discussions lead to no action, or to carefully channelled
actions, and the forums of discussion are controlled by the authorities (see also
Habermas, 1991 [1962]: 249). Enthusiasts for blogs have argued they satisfy criterion
(3) for a real public, when they bring down a powerful Member of Congress or
coordinate a presidential campaign, and the enthusiasts celebrate blogs' independence
of government and mainstream media institutions (criterion 4). Whether they are in
fact so effective and independent, I will leave to other studies. But they certainly do
allow as many people to express opinions as receive them (criterion 1), since almost
anyone with an internet connection to read a blog could also write one. And most
blogs make it easy to answer back by posting comments (criterion 2). They seem to
fit some of the demands for a public sphere (see also Fairclough, 2000; Wodak &
Wright, 2006).
After ten years of blogging, critical media analysts have reason to feel
disenchanted. The problems are not to do with the technical affordances of
accessibility or feedback, but with the way discussion takes place in this forum.
Though anyone can express an opinion, a few well-known blogs get most of the
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attention, and postings from the mass of bloggers come to wider notice only when
they are picked out by one of the 'A-list'. Though anyone can respond, comments also
lead to flaming, trolling, and threadjacking (turning a discussion to one‟s own
hobbyhorse). Blogs are just as likely to spread unfounded rumours as to give
channels for progressive action. And while they are proudly independent of
mainstream media, they are not independent of prevailing ideologies and
institutionally-organised campaigns.
One component of all these problems is the perceived need in the blogosphere
to present oneself as an individual with entitlement to an opinion. I will argue that the
bloggers, and commenters on blogs, in my sample are constantly concerned with self
presentation, positioning themselves on a crowded terrain of other bloggers and
commenters. The emphasis on individual voice and perspective makes for some
engaging writing, and it may have its own beneficial political role to play. But it does
not have the focus on a shared social project that would be needed for deliberative
discussion. It is not the same as participatory citizenship.
In this paper, I would like to look in detail at the act of marking that a
statement in a blog or comment is an individual perspective. The linguistic features
that particularly interest me are those used in stance-taking ((Biber & Finegan, 1989;
Clift, 2006; DuBois, 2007; Jaffe, 2009). Here is one influential definition of the term
stance:
Stance is a public act by a social actor, achieved dialogically through overt
communicative means, of simultaneously evaluating objects, positioning subjects, and
aligning with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimensions of the sociocultural
field (DuBois 2007: 220).
This broad term covers a range of linguistic features that have long been studied
separately, such as modality, evaluation, evidentiality, hedging, politeness, or
metadiscourse. The advantage of taking them together, following DuBois's definition,
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is that stance-taking focuses our attention of the 'public act' of taking a point of view
rather than on one or another specific grammatical or discourse form. So stance-
taking does not just involve having an opinion on a topic; it involves using that
opinion to align with or disalign with someone else. I have illustrated elsewhere some
of the range of stance devices used in blogs (Myers, 2009: Ch. 6). Here I will take a
different approach, and start with the particular linguistic items, such as cognitive
verbs and a specific use of adverbs, that stand out in my corpus in comparison to a
reference corpus. Besides these common stance-marking items, there are ways of
stance-taking that are not signalled by any specific linguistic feature, so I will discuss
one of the devices – ironic quotation – that is particularly common in blog comments.
Data and Methods
Bloggers argue about many issues, from bread recipes to cosmology, but I
have focused here on discussions of what could be considered public issues. I have
broadened the discussion to include the on-line comments (where the blogger enables
them) as well as the original posts. Though the bloggers get the attention, public
discussion in the blogosphere is as much in the comments as in the blogs. And
comments on the more popular blogs give a wider range of participation than do blogs
themselves; anyone can post (subject to registration and/or moderation in some
cases), and their words will be seen by a much larger number of readers than they
would be if each commenter just posted them on their own (mostly ignored) blog. I
have chosen five blogs that are current and popular and have many comments:
Michelle Malkin (http://michellemalkin.com/)and Yglesias
(http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/) are two well-known US blogs, of the right and
left respectively; both are in Technorati's list of the 100 most popular blogs, based
on how many other blogs link to them.
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Bitch PhD (http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/) and Sepia Mutiny
(http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/) both have several writers, and considerable
readerships for a more focused range of topics. Bitch PhD is no longer just about
the one eponymous academic; it deals with a range of issues from a feminist
perspective. Sepia Mutiny is written by a collective of young people of South
Asian origin (they use the term desis) living in the US, on such topics as their
social lives, Asian celebrities and businesses, politics, careers, and families.
Going Underground (http://london-underground.blogspot.com/), an award-
winning blog by Annie Mole, has posts on all sorts of topics relevant in some way
to the London transport system, from fashions seen on platforms to movie scenes
set in the underground. I include it here because even a special-interest blog takes
up public issues, in this case fares and safety.
In all these five blogs, the bloggers post daily and many commenters respond
within that day, sometimes writing about the original entry, sometimes about other
blogs, and sometimes with no discernable relevance to anything. Typically the
threads tend to fray over time, leading on to other discussions, either because of a
deliberate deviation from the topic by one commenter, or because of the gradual
mutation of one topic into another. For each blog, I started on the same day (23
October 2009) and collected posts and comments until I had more than 10,000 words
of that blog. So this half of my sample was about 50,000 words, in a file I named
'allblogs'.
I took the other half of my sample – another 50,000 words, roughly – from a
rather different kind of web discussion site. Metafilter (http://www.metafilter.com/)
was one of the first popular applications of blogging software, developed by Matthew
Haughey in 1999 to enable members to post short comments with links to a front