The paper presents a brief overview of how social media can influence minority interactions by focusing at their features. Starting from the notion of “active minority” (Moscovici, 1981) the aim of the study is to understand how participants of a social mediated community face a critical event by focusing at socio-psychological dimensions that affect their “on line resilience” and how they promote their “social empowerment”. At this purpose was performed a quanti-qualitative analysis - lexicographic and content analysis by means of a software called Taltac (Bolasco, 2013). Results pointed out different socio-psychological processes (self-definition, trust, emotions and values) before and after critical situation emerging by on line discussions.
The link between lack of power and personal resilience in everyday life has been
explored in various social psychology perspectives [
Within this framework the present work explores what means to be part of a minority group built through a social media (in particular, a Facebook group) and what discourses and argumentations are used to face a critical phase in which participants are involved.
The psico-social notions that contribute to understand this process are the construct
of active minority [
To be part of a minority group means to be part not only of a social minority in
quantitative terms but also to have a marginal status and lack of power [
In the influence process minorities have to assume coherent, autonomous and egalitarian behavioural styles; but what are the discourses they construct to solve problems and at the same time to resist and to face critical events?
What are the characteristics of minority thinking? What arguments do people in a minority group use, and how do they construct a strategy to induce an opinion change in their own group or outside of it?
First of all we need to define and distinguish two different types of minority groups, one belonging as social category to the majority but having less power or a different opinion on a given topic (ingroup), and the other belonging to a different social category (outgroup).
This difference looks useful to understand what is the role of trust that members of minorities assume toward different institutions and what are the social organizations they trust in in while looking for possible strategies to face negative events. 2
Social media and social networking seems to be a new way to construct meanings
and to build new forms of relationships away of or in support to “real life”. From this
perspective social media can be used as the main or unique tool to be in touch by
means of what we can name “social mediated communities”: a virtual togetherness of
members that produce discussions and proposals though not in physical presence or
by regular contacts but sharing a social category [
In this sense an interesting dynamics can develop when participants do not personally know each other but they share a common cause or make part of a same social category – like in the case study presented below, of a Facebook group of young university researchers. In this case researchers inform each other by sharing problems in their virtual group, because they acknowledge a competence to its participants, but maybe also because they don’t feel confident to their respective academic real contexts.
Thus, social mediated communities in this case can be a good way to exchange information and support during a critical and problematic phase for their work-life that the researchers face everyday, as in the case of a national competition to access a university job (see below).
One important feature of group discussion is its structure: either formal or
informal; formal when groups correspond to acknowledged institutions like political
parties or formal associations; informal when outside the social network the group is not
acknowledged as such. In this case the network can be the expression of a
spontaneous majority or minority group joined by common interests or belonging to a real or
virtual social group. Another feature is also relevant: an either vertical or horizontal
structure. The group structure is vertical when it contains opinion leaders that
regularly animate a discussion by links or posts, and horizontal when participants
democratically and actively intervene. Lortie-Lussier [
Within Italian institutions one of the most conflictual debates concerns University. In 2013, after a reform of the University proposed in 2011 by the right-wing Italian Ministry of Instruction Gelmini, professors and universities were evaluated by an independent agency called ANVUR (Evaluation National Agency of University and Research), passing from a local evaluation with single competitions between candidates to a professor role-crossing in a national evaluation process of “professor eligibility”. The first round of evaluation started in February 2013, an after one year at least part of the evaluators’ committees – in December 2013 – finished their work and published the lists of eligible and non-eligible candidates, with their corresponding evaluations.
The Ministry of Instruction and University decided that the eligibility would follow numeric criteria obtained by reference to the so called “medians” obtained considering the number of publications with the impact factor and citations by the scientific community. (Only later, when a new Minister came, Francesco Profumo, the more qualitative criteria were exploited).
In this confusing period – due to novelty and lack of information – within the very institution of the Anvur Agency an active group of researchers created a Facebook group and a website called “roars” (Return on academic research”).
They do not know each other but their number grows up very fast and at the time of this work they count almost 5000 members (7 milions of views and 21.600 comments) who discuss together on the situation trying to find possible solutions together.
Group discussions have been examined through two methods of analysis. On one side, they have gone through automatic lexicographic analysis by using TALTAC, a software for qualitative analysis. On the other side the lexicon obtained through quantitative measures was analyzed by means of “concordance analysis” that, like “traditional” discourse analysis, takes into account the text of all answers to draw recurrent concepts, topics or semantic areas from them.
The automatic quanti-qualitative analysis was performed on the subjects’
discussions by TalTac (“Lexical and Textual Automatic Processing for Content Analysis”:
[
Here we describe topics and discussions that emerge from the Facebook group of “Roars” Italian researchers by focusing and detailing the used lexicon both in the first period (before the national evaluation results) and in the second period (after publication of first results) to identify the minority’s discourses aimed at facing two critical periods, one characterized by lack of information and another by negative evaluations from commissions.
We extracted a corpus by means of Facebook Graph API (Application Program interface, for advanced users) and we obtained a corpus which counts 31948 (V) occurrences with 307682 (N) different words and a high lexical richness index [(V/N)*100], equal to 10,38%.
The lexical analysis includes some descriptive information, particularly interesting for the understanding of minority group discussions, like adjective analysis and time analysis.
We used the dictionary of positive and negative adjectives present in TalTac2 by
analysing the negative index1 to identify the polarization through a positive or
negative lexicon. The index reveals that the corpus shows characteristics of negativity as
high as 71%, that is higher than the reference value for Italia (which is 40% according
to Bolasco [
Looking in depth we see that negative adjectives are very often used in the first period concerning the Evaluation Process. We can recognize an adjectival use focalized on the first period on a sematic area of doubt and highly oriented toward a personalized criterion (questionable discretion, objectionable, poor, questionable, unproductive, smoky, doubtful, bad);
on the other hand the second period that corresponds to the first publication of concrete results focuses on the emotional use of adjectives revealing a sense of unfulfilled expectations, like scandalous, disconcerting but also shameful, indecent, disgusting, detrimental, pernicious, laughable, mediocre.
Moreover, the second period shows a very high frequency of the adjective “pertinent”, that is used by the committees as the most typical “cause” of negative evaluations. (Actually, one of the most used motivations mentioned by evaluators to deny eligibility is that a candidate’s publications, notwithstanding their high number and quality, show a lack of pertinence to the core of the discipline).
Time analysis reveals a strong orientation to the present, because out of all verb frequencies our subjects express time information most frequently in present tense (82%, as opposed to 11% past and 7% future) mostly in the first period, while in the second, future time slightly increases (+2%): which in a certain sense can be seen as determination in planning. The most frequent mode is - as predictable - the indicative; but also a large use of conjunctive and conditional can be found (79% indicative vs 11% conditional and 10% conjunctive), which is quite high compared to general Italian use, with conditional and conjunctive around 4% and 7% respectively. This might 1 The index is obtained by extracting all the positive and negative adjectives by means of Taltac dictionary of adjective and then by calculating the ratio between the total of the negative occurrences and the total of the positive ones (tot. Occ. Pos/tot. Occ. Pos*100). be accounted for by participants’ high level of education that allows the use of complex forms (i.e. hypothetical constructions), but it can be also an index of uncertainty; researchers in this context argue in search of strategies and possible solutions in a confused context.
Another characteristic is the conjugation extremely oriented toward the third person (69%) compared to first (26%) and second (5%); what we expected was – given the dialogical form of discussions – an overuse of the first and the second person; on the contrary the high frequency of third person might be due to a sort of contraposition between “me-us” and “they” (researchers vs evaluators), this tendency is present in the whole Roars’s discussions but increases significantly in the second period.
Beside the absolute value of words, the key words or peculiar lexicon [
If we group the overrepresented vocabulary we find three main recurrent topics that we can phrase as follows: 1. 2. 3.
This first topic spreads across all participant and all technical aspects of the evaluation: (reported in a decreasing order, all up to 3,95; p<0.05) qualified, certification, commissioners, universities, enabled, researchers, competitions, university, teaching, PhD, commissions, full professor, publications, evaluations, median, privacy, associate, professor, monographs, band, enabled, recruitment, candidate, monograph, bibliometrics , article, assessment, commission, Commission, rewarding, to enable, casual, relevant, candidate, round, quote, magazines, policy, judgment, publish, publishing, co-optation, meritocracy, curricula, quotes, results, areas, suitable rejected, suitable, economists, humanistic, accreditation, rankings, merit, discipline, parameters, indicators, 2 In this case we used the stardard Italian, resource in Taltac. 3 standard quadratic deviation: considers significant words overused compared to the lexicon of reference, we then consider the forms with greater deviation of 3.84 which is the reference value of a chi square with one degree of freedom (p <0.05).
argue, excellence, merit, selection, progressions, bureaucracy, ministry,
errors, extractions, judge, questionable criteria
Within this topic a very negative evaluation of evaluators emerges: in terms of
types of discrediting criteria [
The second topic covers the value dimension, with researchers widening their discourses to the political and economic field.
The term politics for example is a key term to understand the level of trust [
Selected Concordance of “Politica” (period 1: freq. 110) always for opportunistic reasons , the political class began to ride . We must inste- ad get through this This is not a virus, but a precise political will, a specific project shared cultural and stubbornly pursued by a club. but the measure in question is another example of bad policy and bad politics , we know , only combines disasters. . .
The blame for this economic crisis , ethics and morality is an ignorant and corrupt politicians who shamelessly plundered the hopes of young people I expect, however, that will be conquered by force (see actions ) rather than with politics But I do not seem to remember any political force that has never explicitly raised the question of which model of nation we want I would like this question, which is not technical but political , came out from the corridors of becoming part of the political debate The problem is that when a question is considered "technical" policy stop to dis- cuss only if there is a significant policy shift . When we become a decent country politi- cally , I said decent , not perfect. Selected Concordance of " Carrozza " (period 2: freq . 39) The answer is not there, Carrozza is showing as a great political with a small p . Carrozza is there by virtue of the Holy Spirit and knows neither the school nor the university 's problems From Carrozza never came a word. . . Poor things . . . And what figures are you talking about? Let’s organize together Can you see the Minister Carrozza who " abolished " a procedure in the race ? : ) I'm sorry, but I think the response of minister Carrozza is in many ways exemplary and necessary
Carrozza must stop talking nonsenses The description of this more systemic and general discussion comes from the peculiar lexicon with the overrepresented words (reported below). (reported in a decreasing order, all up to 3,95; p<0.05) : Research, Euro, European funds, salary, incentives, budget, salary, economists, cuts, gross loans, Europeans, money, shots wage, virtuous, financing, Italy, culture, quality, university, history, respect, scientific merit, science, person, future development, the U.S., background, announcements, scientists, international, internationalization, standards, republic, government, accountability, justice, innovation, proposals, development, expertise, regulatory, rector, opportunities, needs, nobel, initiatives resources
The third topic is the “researchers’ participation and collective-cooperative activism”.
Recurring terms are linked to petition, rights (ricorso, diritti) and shared information to face a common problem or strategy and possible future solution taken together (we-ness).
Actually recurrent verbs are ones of doing, changing, working, (fattivi, volizione, potere) especially in the form of second plural person (we can, we stay, we want, we must, we do).
Within this topic we can include words close to the idea of things to do together in order to react and to be protected from injustice (up to 3,95 square deviation) like possibly, hope, example, can, could, may, plan, possibility, participate, can, I can, discussion, work, best, you, join, proposal, community, work, joint strength, our, us, network, compare, decide, change, change, future.
This area stands for the idea of resorting to a social resource to face a negative evaluation in a hierarchical and competitive context. In this connection, arguing on the web seems to be a way to give support and share information and at the same time it creates a secure place to discuss and find an exit strategy. Key words to understand this central topic are in this case rights, justice (as “superpartes” institution) and juridical words, seen as tools to defend themselves. (law, human rights, justice, judiciary, self-defense, rules, extension, rules, terms, rules, just, recourse)
we want and we can support our desire for an efficient country Then they win grants because they are good, we can do with their network. . . however, the theme of 'article linked towards resolving the dispute Then we dissent from his work as a minister (and I strongly disagree), Selected Concordance of "possiamo" (period 2: freq. 54) We can no longer sit idly by and just complain amongst ourselves otherwise we will be accomplices in this disaster Yes, we need to move, we can not suffer a judgment that will have much influ- ence on our lives. The important thing is to participate. We can, however, recourse of and make use of our rights only we can find arguments to convince the 'public opinion' s investment in re- search is useful and far-sighted simply share what I figured out why I think so we can clarify each other's ideas.
The characteristic analysis of verb lemmas (with square deviation starting from 60,00; while the reference point is 3,95), i.e. all verbs converted in their infinitive forms, highlights four types of verbs. The first one, that we can name verbs of “participation and social activism”, goes from concrete actions to acts of group coordination and action planning. This type increases in the second period, after publication of the first results (s.d. > 3,95; agentic verbs: power, succeed, find, finance, change, grow, participate, decide, earn, win, think, criticize, share, fix, work, show, get, take, raise, reward, predict, test, enable, risk, protest, overcome, invoke, invest, organize, enhance, reject, groped, challenge, boycott, create, propose, betting, solve, encourage, defend, prepare, rebalance, reform, excel, advertise, charge, rethink, take, fight, convince, fix, hold, secure, contribute, equate, try again, cooperate, prevent, respond to, influence, compel, start over, create, expand, promote, renew, resist, aspire, grow, to dream, to associate, to dare, enhance, fruit, flip, recover, trigger, coordinate, pursue, rebuild, program, address).
Another interesting topic concerns verbs of on line group interaction, indicating that one of the main goals of the “ROARS” group is “reasoning” and arguing together:
Sometimes, for this minority, arguing is an instrument for the interpretation of acts or laws and for reasoning together on the future, on the basis, usually, of posted articles, links or news.
(s.d. > 3,95) Understand, evaluate, discuss, click, refer, extrapolate, feel, add, to argue, to consider, recommend, center, disagree, implement, clarify, argue, protest, agree, infer, to reiterate, comment, confirm, restate, reason, verify, doubt, imply, specify, reflect, stress, indicate, infer, say, correspond, establish focus, to infer, to emerge, to intervene, to allow, to mention, simplify, differentiate, declare, issue, focus, excuse, introduce, monitor, communicate, examine, to assert, to aim.
Another useful function of online interaction in this group, even if less represented compared to the other two, is the “expression of emotions”, especially negative emotions that are primarily acknowledgeable by the negative effects both on the economic and on the self-image side, and more in general on the researcher’s life.
Quite representative of a first type of expressive verbs are those mentioning negative actions and their effects on life and emotions.
(with square deviation starting from 15,00; while the reference point is 3,95): Displease, fear, err, block, complain, waste, scream, regret, shame, suicide, insult, scuttle, beat, abuse, spitting, damage, freeze, hit, brandish, point, demolish, slay, crazy, break, fumble, pick up, prejudice, cringe, break, subdue, aging, affect, scrounge up, derail, deter, insult, graze, vomiting, mock, live
Positive emotions are less frequent; in the first period we find verbs like “hope”, auspicare, in relation to positive expectations, but in the second period the coexistence of verbs like “promote, enforce, continue to, thank, help, share, suggest, support, be grateful, agree, resolve" highlights that positive emotion are only felt in presence of the potential support of the group composed by other active researchers in the same critical period.
This function of the Roars Group is evident when we extract “entities”4 or complex expressions (marked in bold) in the corpus that are clear requests for help, usually followed by a very large variety of answers:
"Guys, I have a problem and I would like to share it here hoping that someone would suggest a way to solve it. (...) Has anyone had similar experiences and can help me? "
4 Fragments Obtained through semantic concordance by means of so called Entity research (Taltac allows to extract phrases or fragments which present sequences or semisequences with two or more words that represent complex queries; Bolasco, 2013):
One aim of this study is highlighting how social media can be a tool for active
minority groups to overcome some critical situations. Social networking is a place
where people can share information, discuss on common problems and/or on political
and economic situations, find shared strategies to adopt and finally develop group
discourses and personal narratives. In minority groups arguing on line seems to
correspond to a way to develop a group thinking by knowing the other member’s point of
view, by analysing together either macro-themes (political and economic situation) or
micro-experience (personal experiences like rejection from the national evaluation,
legal action). In this sense discourses can be seen as an active participation but also –
beyond the institutional contexts where they live – they can facilitate the so called
“process of conscientization” and critical consciousness [
The work presented is based on the Italian group of researchers “Roars” before and after a national evaluation process aimed at their possible enrolment as professor within Italian University.
Roars, as a minority group lacking any consulting or decisional power, before the
evaluation results discuss all possible scenarios in absence of institutional
information, especially analysing the political and economic present and past situation. After
the extraction of peculiar and characteristic lexicon [
This lack of trust toward the political class and institutions [
This exploratory analysis is a way to understand psychosocial processes within
minority group, with a particular attention to social trust. It helps us to better understand
trust dynamics by means of social media discussions: we have seen that in critical
phases if there is a lack of trust toward “political” institutions, minorities discuss for a
common solution or for a guarantee which helps them as super-partes institution (i.e.
the case of justice). This can be a resilient strategy for a minority, but further studies
can go more in depth and analyse further acts of “social commitment” [
From the use of social media some methodological issues also emerge concerning the analysis of argumentation on line. The retrieval of on line discussions give the researcher a very large material to analyse and to understand, sometimes in a realtime situation. So before analysing in depth this big data and material obtained from social media a possible route to better understand and to identify argumentations in discussions is to identify main topics by means of a lexicographic approach [9; 10] through imprinting analysis of lexicon (time, mode and person analysis by extraction and frequencies aggregation), peculiar and characteristic analysis supported by concordances and entity research in the text.
From this methodological point of view, this study is a way to connect a lexicographic approach to the specific need of studying argumentation on line. Future works could explore the minority groups’ argumentations used by their members to “embrace” each other from an instrumental and emotional side in a critical situation and in a position of lack of power.