Abstract
In a discussion of political discussion on social media, this chapter argues that the production of offensive discourse in the political domain is enacted within definable “participation frameworks”. The structured performance of offence is constituted by such key components such Offence Giver, Offence Taker, Target of Offence and Audience. However, these are modulated in late modern societies, such that digitalisation and social media platforms allow resemiotisation to initiate differences in the terms within frameworks are activated in subsequent reiterations, especially in the transition between private or face-to-face offensiveness or between connected individuals and publicly oriented offensiveness. Moreover, while claims to authenticity dominate in the rationalisation of such offence, its direction against the groups and priorities associated with progressive politics has implications for the conditions of the contemporary public sphere.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bennett, Owen. 2018. “Jo Marney Confronted with Racist Comments in Car-Crash ‘This Morning’ Interview.” Huffington Post, February 22. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jo-marney-this-morning-henry-bolton_uk_5a8ea964e4b077f5bfeba7a2.
Brighenti, Andrea. 2007. Visibility: A Category for the Social Sciences.” Current Sociology 55 (3): 323–342.
Cameron, Deborah. 1994. Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge.
Cowburn, Ashley. 2018. “Toby Young Deletes Thousands of Tweets Amid Row Over His Universities Regulator Appointment.” The Independent, January 3. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/toby-young-twitter-delete-tweets-universities-regulator-appointment-ofs-office-for-students-a8139841.html.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Drake, Philip, and Michael Higgins. 2006. “‘I’m a Celebrity, Get Me into Politics’: The Political Celebrity and the Celebrity Politician.” In Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture, edited by Su Holmes and Sean Redmond, 87–100. London: Routledge.
Dunant, Sarah, ed. 1994. The War of the Words: The Political Correctness Debate. London: Virago.
Ekstrom, Mats, and Bengt Johansson. 2008. “Talk Scandals.” Media, Culture & Society 30 (1): 61–79.
Enli, Gunner. 2015. Mediated Authenticity. New York: Peter Lang.
Fairclough, Norman. 2003. “‘Political Correctness’: The Politics of Culture and Language.” Discourse & Society 14 (1): 17–28.
Foster, Dawn. 2018. “Free Speech Works Both Ways, as Toby Young Is Finding Out.” The Guardian, January 4. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/04/free-speech-toby-young-office-for-students.
Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1930/1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, 276. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Habermas, Jurgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hall, Stuart. 1994. “Some ‘Politically Incorrect’ Pathways Through PC.” In The War of the Words: The Political Correctness Debate, edited by Sarah Dunant. London: Virago.
Higgins, Michael. 2013. “Governmentality, Populism and Empowerment: David Cameron’s Rhetoric of the Big Society.” In The Media, Political Participation and Empowerment, edited by Richard Scullion, Roman Gerodimos, Dan Jackson, and Darren Lilleker, 58–70. Abingdon: Routledge.
Higgins, Michael, and Angela Smith. 2013. “My Husband; My Hero: Selling the Political Spouses in the 2010 General Election.” Journal of Political Marketing 12 (2/3): 197–210.
Higgins, Michael, and Angela Smith. 2017. Belligerent Broadcasting. London: Routledge.
Iedema, Rick. 2003. “Multimodality, Resemiotization: Extending the Analysis of Discourse as a Multi-semiotic Practice.” Visual Communication 2 (1): 29–57.
Kreiss, Daniel, and Philip N. Howard. 2010. “New Challenges for Political Privacy: Lessons from the First US Presidential Race in the Web 2.0 Era.” International Journal of Communication 4: 1032–1050.
Labov, William. 1972. “Rules for Ritual Insults.” In Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular, 297–353. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lyon, David. 2002. “Surveillance Studies: Understanding Visibility, Mobility and the Phenetic Fix.” Surveillance & Society 1 (1): 1–7.
Montgomery, Martin. 2017. “Post-truth Politics? Authenticity, Populism and the Political Discourses of Donald Trump.” Journal of Language and Politics 16 (4): 619–639.
Owen, Glen. 2018. “‘Meghan’s Seed Will Taint Our Royal Family’: UKIP Chief’s Glamour Model Lover, 25, Is Suspended from the Party Over Racist Texts About Prince Harry’s Wife-to-Be.” Daily Mail, January 13. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5266657/Ukip-leaders-girlfriends-racist-Meghan-Markle-messages.html.
Perry, Ruth. 1992. “A Short History of the Term Political Correct.” In Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding, edited by Patricia Aufderheide, 71–79. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press.
Peters, John Durham. 1995. “Historical Tensions in the Concept of Public Opinion.” In Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent, edited by Theodore L. Glasser and Charles T. Salmon, 3–32. New York: Guilford.
Scollon, Ron, and Suzy Wong Scollon. 2003. Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. London: Routledge.
Smith, Angela. 2016. “Mediated Political Masculinities: The Commander-In-Chief vs The New Man.” Social Semiotics 26 (1): 94–110.
Smith, Angela. 2018. “Gender in ‘Crisis’, Everyday Sexism and the Twittersphere.” In Crisis and the Media, edited by Marianna Patrona, 231–260. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Suhr, Stephanie, and Sally Johnson. 2003. “Revisiting PC: Introduction to Special Issue on Political Correctness.” Discourse and Society 14 (1): 5–16.
Talbot, Mary. 2007. “Political Correctness and Freedom of Speech.” In Handbook of Language and Communication: Diversity and Change, edited by M. Hellinger and A. Pauwels, 751–764. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Thompson, John B. 1995. The Media and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Thompson, John B. 2005. “The New Visibility.” Theory, Culture & Society 22 (6): 31–51.
Trottier, Daniel. 2017a. “Digital Vigilantism as Weaponisation of Visibility.” Philosophy & Technology 30: 55–72.
Trottier, Daniel. 2017b. “Scandal Mining: Political Nobodies and Remediated Visibility.” Media, Culture & Society. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0163443717734408.
Tuchman, Gaye. 1972. “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen’s Notions of Objectivity.” American Journal of Sociology 77 (4): 660–679.
Wardle, Claire. 2017. “Fake News: It’s Complicated.” Accessed August 30, 2018. https://medium.com/1st-draft/fake-news-its-complicated-d0f773766c79.
Weintraub, Jeff. 1997. “The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction.” In Public and Private in Thought and Practice, edited by Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar, 1–42. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Young, Toby. 2014. “I Am Living Proof That ‘Two-tier’ Exams Work.” The Spectator, June 30. https://www.spectator.co.uk/2012/06/i-am-living-proof-that-two-tier-exams-work/.
Zappavignana, Michelle. 2011. Ambient Affiliation: A Linguistic Perspective on Twitter. New Media & Society 13 (5): 788–806.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Montgomery, M., Higgins, M., Smith, A. (2019). Political Offensiveness in the Mediated Public Sphere: The Performative Play of Alignments. In: Graefer, A. (eds) Media and the Politics of Offence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17574-0_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17574-0_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-17573-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-17574-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)