Dialogue of the Deaf: Listening on Twitter and Democratic Responsiveness during the 2015 South African State of the Nation Address

Abstract

This chapter investigates the use of social media as a channel of communication between citizens and government. It draws on the concept of ‘listening’ in democratic communication (Couldry, N., Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2010; Dobson, A., Listening for Democracy: Recognition, Representation, Reconciliation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). In the run-up to the 2015 State of the Nation Address, the South African presidency conducted a listening exercise on Twitter, which failed on all counts. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses of Twitter conversations, the chapter evaluates the quality of listening and identifies the reasons for the collapse of the conversation. The findings suggest that while poorly performed listening campaigns can result in spiralling frustration among citizens, social media platforms like Twitter can also provide opportunities for governments to listen in a manner that serves a more positive relationship with citizens.

Appendix: Qualitative Coding Scheme

All replies to Presidency tweets were categorised according to their function (Table 10.1). Based on Macnamara’s notion of instrumental listening and Dobson’s argument of the risk of listening ‘too late’ in the case of cynical publics, we also summarised the function of the tweets according to whether they dismissed or engaged with the listening process attempted by Zuma.

Table 10.1 Function of replies to Presidency tweets

The categories were derived inductively and then distilled. Self-promotions were classified as dismissal of Zuma’s listening exercise. Calls for Zuma to resign or ‘pay back the money’ were consistently categorised as a dismissal of Zuma as illegitimate, rather than as a constructive critique of a specific situation. The summary categories of dismissal and engagement in the second column refer to the public’s reactions to the Presidency’s performance of listening: do they take it seriously as an attempt to engage in dialogue as part of the democratic process, or do they dismiss it as a rhetorical exercise or as too late?

In addition, we categorised each tweet according to its tone, using the following categories: humorous, polite, serious, cynical, hopeful, aggressive, pleading. We allowed the allocation of more than one of these categories per tweet.