Pablo Santcovsky
Departament de Periodisme i Ciències de la Comunicació
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Relations between mainstream media discourses and users discourses in youtube: a case study about the cyberpresence of the palestinian-israeli conflict

This paper tackles a new approach of the undeniable media dimension of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (PIC). The aim of our research is to study the presence of this conflict in the autobroadcasting platform called YouTube, and more specifically how users construct their discourse generating contents in it. In this way, we approach pragmatically the videos generated and the attached comments by users to those videos as well. One of the main hypotheses is expressed as it follows: comments written by users of YouTube on videos about the PIC reproduce dominant frames about the conflict. Dominant frames emerge from the conventional mediated dimension of the conflict in the mainstream media. However, discourses related to the feeblest part of that political contest seem to get a higher presence in YouTube, so we can imagine some kind of new form of political expression. The used methodology appears from different academic traditions. We have combined frame analysis (Goffman, 2006) with some aspects of audiovisual pragmatics (Pericot, 2002) and macro-propositional analysis of discourse (Van dijk, 1977, 1981). Therefore we consider the discourse as a social practice developed by humans in social context.