1.- DESCRIPCIÓN DEL PERFIL CLÍNICO DEL PACIENTE

Introduction

This chapter discusses findings of the content analysis to evaluate the extent to which blogging is able to promote liberal democratic practices and enrich political life in electoral politics. It evaluates blog posts for patterns of blog use, with particular focus on some aspects of blogging identified as potentially liberating, such as expressing opinions, passing on information to readers and mobilising readers to take part in public rallies and to vote in the 2008 general election. It also highlights more specific uses of blogging as an election campaign tool, such as passing on information about campaign activities, information on electoral candidates, raising election funds and recruiting volunteers. The chapter also discusses findings to examine the extent to which the blog posts and comments are able to accommodate alternative or dissenting views and generate public discussion. The socio-economic background of the people behind the blogs is also highlighted in this chapter in an attempt to understand whether blogging is a reflection of the social and ideological structures of society. There are four major results found in the content analysis. Firstly, the findings revealed the pattern of blog use among politician-bloggers when compared with non-candidate bloggers in the general election. Secondly, the content analysis indicated that blogging was more commonly used to

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express opinions and dissenting views but limited in facilitating public discussion. Thirdly, the Malaysian blogosphere was, expectedly, more sympathetic towards the opposition than the ruling coalition, given the tight control of the mainstream media by the ruling regime. More importantly, the results suggest that blogging can be a tool used to sway public opinion in an election. At that time, it was used to specifically tarnish the reputation of the then prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. The considerable use of pseudonymous blogs to frame the former premier in a negative light and the use of other blogs as external sources to create blog contents suggested some attempt at managing the information flows in the Malaysian blogosphere. Finally, the analysis revealed a blogosphere dominated by elites in the society. This further indicates the possibility that the blogosphere agenda can be appropriated by existing elites in the country.

Raising funds and recruiting volunteers did not seem to be the main goal of blogging among politician-bloggers during the 2008 election. The content analysis revealed that blogging was rarely used by politician- bloggers, who had a direct stake at the election, for those purposes. However, the politician-bloggers did make use of their blogs to disseminate information on campaign activities and to promote electoral candidates more so than the other groups of bloggers examined. The use of blogs by politician-bloggers to mobilise political action was considerable when it came to encouraging readers to take part in protest rallies in 2007

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and to vote in the 2008 general election. Thus, blogging can facilitate ways of campaigning among politician-bloggers in terms of keeping readers informed of election campaign activities and candidates. However, unlike in the United States, blogging is minimally used to collect election funds and recruit volunteers by politician-bloggers in Malaysia.

An ongoing debate regarding blogs is the ability to provide spaces for public discussion. The potential of blogging to generate public discussion has been described as a form of „democratisation‟ of the Malaysian society (Tang, 2006; Tan & Zawawi, 2008). To obtain an understanding of the extent to which blogging could promote public debates, the comments of readers were examined. They were evaluated on whether they discussed the blog posts, whether the bloggers replied to points raised by their readers and whether the comments discussed points raised by other readers. The analysis suggests that blogging does not appear to have generated discussion or engaged readers extensively on public discourse, which are important functions of deliberative democracy. Almost half of the total 383 comments analysed did not discuss the blog posts. The bloggers only occasionally responded to the readers and discussions among readers were rather limited, indicating a lack of focused discussion on the blogs. Analysing the comments gave some indication on the role of blogs in facilitating discussion but in-depth interviews with the research participants, discussed in the next three chapters, provided a clearer picture on the subject.

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In an environment of tight media control by a ruling regime that stifles dissenting opinions, blogging has been deemed as a platform for free speech, including the promotion of alternative or opposition views (Margolis & Resnick, 2000; Kulikova & Perlmutter, 2007; Abdul Rashid, 2009; Mohd Azizuddin & Zengeni, 2010). The analysis suggests a Malaysian blogosphere that overwhelmingly supports the opposition, with a particular emphasis on personality politics. The content analysis demonstrates that the blog views are highly supportive of the opposition but critical of the ruling coalition and the former premier. Blog posts that contained a supportive tone were more frequently directed at the opposition than the ruling coalition. Blog posts urging readers to vote and those containing information on campaign activities and candidates in the election were focused on the opposition, rather than the ruling coalition. Conversely, blog posts that contained a critical tone were primarily targeting the ruling regime, including the then prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and government departments and agencies. The focus on framing the personality of Abdullah Ahmad Badawi in a negative light suggests the occurrence of mediated scandals in the blogosphere that is happening not only in the realm of traditional communication media, as documented by Thompson (2000). It is also occurring in the realm of the new communication media. This was supported by interviews with partisan bloggers, discussed in Chapter Eight, who revealed the use of

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blogs to sway public opinion25 by framing the national leadership in a negative light. This indicates that blogging is able to promote dissenting opinions in the Malaysian blogosphere.

The use of external sources to create blog contents suggests an effort to highlight each other‟s postings to change public opinion towards the national leadership. The content analysis found that the mainstream media were the most common source used to create blog contents. More importantly, the use of online social media, particularly other blogs, was the second highest external source used to publish blog contents. This showed that some of the bloggers were highlighting each other‟s contents in an attempt to change public opinion towards the national leadership. The finding wass supported by interviews with some of the partisan bloggers, who indicated that there were collaborative efforts to manage information flow to sway public perception on particular leaders in the lead-up to the 2008 general election. A discussion on the matter is available in Chapter Eight.

In an effort to understand the possibility of dominance on the blogosphere, in particular the question of power and control, the content analysis investigated the people behind the blogs. For this, the individuals behind the blogs were examined in terms of their ethnicity, occupation and

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This follows the understanding that the concept of framing and priming can provide an insight into how the mainstream news media can be a form of political communication to sway public opinion (Entman, 2007), as discussed in Chapter Two. Blogs, as an online platform for political communication, can be used in the same manner, as highlighted in Chapter Three.

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whether they disclosed or hid their identities on their blogs. The ethnicity of bloggers reflects a broad representation of the various ethnic groups in the Malaysian society but the analysis also suggests a dominance of media and political elites. A high presence of pseudonymous bloggers can indicate a fear of the laws that curb freedom of expression in the country. On the other hand, the pseudonymous blogs could have been set up for purposes of propaganda, as revealed by the partisan bloggers in Chapter Eight. An analysis of the individuals behind the blogs demonstrates a dominance of media and political elites in the Malaysian blogosphere. This chapter will now set out to detail the findings of the content analysis. It will first discuss the extent to which blogging can change ways of campaigning and mobilise readers for political action. It proceeds with an evaluation of readers‟ feedback to assess the extent to which blogging can generate public discussion. The next set of discussion highlights a strong partisan element in the Malaysian blogosphere which is overwhelmingly dominated by support for opposition politics instead of the ruling coalition. It then addresses findings on the common use of social online media to create blog contents. Finally, it highlights findings to demonstrate a dominance of media and political elites in the blogosphere, an indication that the blogosphere mirrors existing social and ideological structures of Malaysian society.