Media Blogs in the Prosumer Culture: A Study of Social Media Narratives in Indian Political Communication

Abstract

Blogs are one of the most representative examples of the prosumer culture in the media field. Their
impact on political communication has been so strong that over the years almost all top media
publications have adopted and actively promoted blogging as a mainstream activity on their online
platforms. Blogs today symbolize the difference between old and new media and the blogosphere is
considered a public platform where citizens can build powerful social media narrative that could
decide public issues and change political course. The importance of blogs in citizen participation
through informed political communication has been studied by several researchers. Studies have
established that citizen bloggers are successfully setting the agenda and framing issues that
mainstream media picks up. Such is the power of blogs that political representatives too have joined
the blogosphere in a bid to directly communicate with the netizens and influence their voting
behavior. In India too, Web 2.0 saw most media houses going online and actively promoting blogging
on their platform. Given its power to promote participatory democracy, blogging assumes significant
importance in India, the world’s largest democracy. This exploratory study used mixed research
method and collected the data through survey questionnaire, inferential statistics and thematic
analysis to explore one such blogosphere created by a leading national daily of India to find out what
role media blogs are playing in the country and whether blogging is a platform for powerful citizen
communication.