ABSTRACT
We describe our approach of applying critical theory and social network analysis (SNA) to examine several types of social and political commentary on Twitter networks, including affective, rhetorical, and rational appeals. Our ensuing argument is that the use of emotional appeals in social media posts about political topics degrades the quality of civic discourse and abandons reasoning in democratic self-governance. This occurs when contemporary narratives of cultural politics are mediated through the network-making mechanics of social media platforms, whose rules emphasize connections between users and not the truth or quality of the content they produce. This network-mediated shift in the public conversation demands our critical attention and requires an SNA that is at once expansive enough in scale to encompass the vast amounts of data circulating in these networks and sufficiently nuanced to allow us to decipher the meaning of the content composing the network at a fine level of detail. This emerging complexity of public discourse in the digital era led us to develop a method of network analysis informed by humanistic reasoning. We anticipate how a critically informed SNA can make a difference in understanding the implications of this network-mediated social discourse for the future of democratic self-governance.
