Towards an ethnographic approach to social media discourses

Abstract

Abstract This chapter intends to show how the arena of political debate has relocated from Parliament to Facebook in contemporary Greece and explore the parameters and impact of such relocation in discourses of contemporary political polemics. It explores the way social media spaces combine bottom-up and top-down discourses and their repercussions for discourses of national identity. We assume that social media dominate current politics not only as a source of official announcements but, quite contrarily, that platforms such as Facebook enable communication between civilians and politicians and shape a new public sphere with a new discursive dynamic. In line with studies on the Self and the Other in digital discourses of identity (e.g., KhosraviNik and Sarkhoh 2018 ), the chapter particularly focuses on the dispute over the name ‘Macedonia’ in Greek digital discourses. The chapter considers the research on the impact of social media on current politics and proposes an ethnographic approach for the analysis of social media discourse by integrating traditions in discourse studies, anthropology, and digital ethnography ( Androutsopoulos 2008 ; Horst and Miller 2012 ; Hine 2015 ; KhosraviNik and Unger 2016 ).

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