Jornal de Comunicação de Massa e Jornalismo

Between Knowledge and Power: Political Agenda and Social Engagement of Political Elites through Micro-Blogging (Twitter) in India

Abstract

Santosh K Patra

In the age of connectivity through the double-edge sword in the context of time biased and space biased media, new social media emerged as the most powerful weapon in the hands of political elites to create a unique platform where they can interplay between the knowledge and power. This paper is an attempt to understand national political agenda and social engagement of ten top and most popular political elites in the micro-blogging site twitter in India. Though there are other popular social media sites, twitter is known as the mouth piece of some most influential political elites across all major political parties and can give a minute to minute update to their followers. As the part of data collection and data analysis, tweets from selected ten twitter accounts were collected over a period of one month, before the declaration of one of the national political party’s Prime Ministerial (PM) candidate for the upcoming national election of India and being analyzed by adopting hermeneutics as the method of data analysis to understand the lifeworld of the political elites while balancing the knowledge and power.