Letters to Sarah: analysis of email responses to an online editorial

Abstract

An editorial opposing the violence being perpetrated on the Palestinians by the Israeli government that was written on the Common Dreams website prompted several hundred email responses to the author. The essay had been reposted to many listservs and other websites around the world. In a case study approach, we track the repostings and qualitatively and quantitatively analyze the responses to that editorial, to determine the nature of the discourse in an electronic environment. The study found that readers of the essay were prompted to write to the author largely when they agreed with her position because of their political or religious views, linked to their own experience or feelings, wished to relate their own personal stories, and when they were male.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.