Ideation and identification resources to represent corruption and ethical crisis in blog comments of cybernewspapers

Abstract

The social movements marginalized from the Chilean public sphere by the dominance of hegemonic discourse practices do not necessarily couple with the groups actively mobilized in the streets (Mayol, 2012). In fact, most social movements constitute discourse communities, whose only place of encounter is the digital arena (Montecino & Arancibia, 2013; Woodly, 2008). In this virtual public space, blog comments to editorials and opinion columns aim to make visible the discourse practices that attempt to naturalize state of affairs at variance with ethical issues (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012). Consequently, the emergence of a new order of discourse has caused public allegations over corruption cases to be largely debated in blog comments. Indeed, these public testimonies have become a delegitimized political discourse. This virtual demonstration portrays the ethical crisis that our Chilean society is undergoing. The objective of this article is to make visible the configuration of judgment and social sanction in the discourse of grassroots nettizens. With this purpose, the comments gathered from March to October of 2013 were analyzed to establish the connection between social actors, processes and circumstances through the identification of ideation and identification resources (Martin & Rose, 2007; Van Leeuwen, 2008). The results show that the construal of conflict and censure depicts a reality that hides under the same country —Chile— two parallel realities. On the one hand, the existence of private schools and clinics for an elite, and, on the other, the public counterparts for a vast segment of underprivileged population (Atria, 2013). This investigation is part of the research project FONDECYT 1120784: The discourse representation of poverty in Chilean cyber newspapers