Sotsiaalse resonantsi juhtumite analüüs: avalikkuse tähelepanu koondumine ning sellega arvestamine lehetoimetustes

This bachelor thesis studies events of social resonance. The paper tries to explain the acumination of public attention and the influences media texts apply to this process. The author of the research paper uses critical discourse analysis to study six different events of social resonance – articles on the internet and comments posted by the readers. In addition there were four qualitative interviews made with newspaper editors, to get an insight into the influence comments pose to editors’ work. As theoretical basis of the study, it was important to understand the way social resonance occurs and what types of social resonance are there. It was also necessary to see how different cognitive processes form attitudes and beliefs towards different topics and explain the way the term ‘discourse’ can be used when studying interpretations. The first chapter gives an overview of these notions. The second chapter describes the objects of study and clarifies the use of critical discourse analysis and qualitative interview methods in this paper. After that the results of the research are presented, which give a qualitative overview of the analyzed articles, comments and the interviews conducted. The objectives of this research were to analyze events of social resonance and try to explain, how the attention of the public sphere concentrates, and to revise the authors’ previous findings. On the basis of the analysis these findings could be made: • The readers turn their attention to these aspects and details of media texts, which relate to their attitudes and experiences. On the other hand the problems and discourses in the focus of the articles get the most attention. • The comments given to the texts depend directly on texts themselves: the diversity of the content of comments depends on the number of possible interpretations; the conflicts and characters constructed in the articles are accepted by the commentators; the number of comments given depends on the topic of the article. • There are discourses in the Estonian society, that are used for interpreting very diverse field of subjects: the Soviet discourse, the Christian discourse, Estonian national and societal discourse. • Internet commentary is an instrument for the newspaper editors for supervising their work and assessing the tonality of a segment of the public. The feedback helps editors in planning their work. • Newspaper editors have a quite profound awareness of the wavelengths of public attention and attitudes, capturing these wavelengths are a part of journalists’ everyday job. • The different types of social resonance: discourse based- and event based, described in an authors’ previous thesis were found adequate. These results are not by any means fundamental or irrefutable. The methods used in the paper are constructive and subjective, so a lot depended on the interpretations made by the author. The results are subjective and need to be verified. It would be beneficial to go onwards with studying these processes. Understanding how the public sphere operates helps better comprehension of the society and social reality. In the future it would be suitable to study social resonance more thoroughly using a variety of methods. One could concentrate for example on the interpretation processes of the public, or show how the media tries to influence public attention