Comparative Media Analysis of Three Public Spheres
After entering our issue through digital tools like Navicrawler and Issuecrawler and after a qualitative analysis of the main actors and experts in our network we now want you to get a deeper insight into what the content on the websites tells us about different spheres on the Internet and their commitment to the issue around the paleo diet. Therefore we have made a comparative media analysis/content analysis of three public (media) spheres:
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Before being able to analyse the content of the three spheres we had to have a list of keywords representing different commitments. To read how we created this keyword list go to Exploring Content. We have used the digital tool Lippmanian Device to scrape the top 31(!) of each sphere and then creating the wordclouds you see below.
When we first take a look at the wordclouds it strikes us that "health" is big in all three spheres. This means that concerning one of our main interests, namely if the issue around the paleo diet is mainly about health or weight loss, we here see that in general health is the biggest issue (in the web sphere weight loss is just as big as health). In the following we will make a content analysis of the three public spheres with help from the wordclouds created through Lippmanian Device. It is important to note that the newssphere is pages and that blog and web are sites. This means that the newssphere is more precise in the sense of being exactly what google points to. But also a much smaller corpus, which has implications to the variance and validity of our averaged tagclouds. |
Web sphereIf you take a close look at the word cloud of top 31 of the default google search engine – the web sphere – what meets your eye at first are “health”, “healthy” and “weight loss” as the biggest keywords. This tells us that the issue of the paleo diet in the web sphere mainly is concerned with both health and weight loss.
The keywords “caveman”, “Paleolithic”, “natural” and “primal” are relatively big as well, which tells us that the web sphere is talking a lot about the ancient Paleolithic era where the caveman ate a paleo diet. From reading websites we know that these words are used in the pro paleo argumentation that the paleo diet is healthy and better for the body than many of the foods like grain which is available today. In many sites the caveman is used as an argument that the paleo diet is good for you, since the caveman apparently represents a strong, lean and healthy person. The science keywords are not as evident as the ones concerning health, weight loss and Paleolithic. Science is then not the most important concern if you consult google’s search engine on “paleo diet”. It appears that the publics consulting the web sphere are more interested in health and weight loss than what science says about the paleo diet. |
News sphereThe top 31 of news.google.com - what we call the news sphere - “health” and “healthy” are clearly the most evident keywords in the news sphere. So in the news when talking about the paleo diet health is the main matter of concern.
The Paleolithic and science keywords are considerably smaller than the health keywords. “Paleolithic”, “caveman”, “science”, “modern” and “research” have approximately the same size which indicates that the news sphere talks just as much about the paleolithic era as science. These two categories seem to be equally important. “Weightloss” on the other hand is not too big which indicates that the news sphere does no’t treat the paleo diet in connection to losing weight like the web sphere does. A funny detail is that the keyword “unhealthy” is very small in the tagcloud. This gives us an idea that the paleo diet rarely is connected with something unhealthy in contrast to “healthy” which is often mentioned when talking about the paleo diet. |
BlogosphereAs seen in the news sphere health is the biggest concern in the blogosphere, the top 31 pages of google.com/blogsearch. The keywords “natural”, “primal”, “caveman" and “paleolithic” are quite conspicuous as well which tells us that the public at the blogosphere is concerned about the paleolithic era in talking about the paleo diet. A possible explanation is that the ancient caveman in several examples has been referred to as the ideal human being because of his strong health and paleolithic diet without foods like grains and carbohydrates.
“Weightloss” has approximately the same size as the paleolithic keywords which show that the blogosphere is concerned with the possibilities of weight loss in connection with the paleo diet as well. The paleo diet referring to the paleolitchic people’s diet has therefore been made an issue concerned with weight loss in its modern usage. “Diabetes” is worth mentioning as well as a keyword that indicates some actors in the blogosphere being concerned with illness in relation to the paleo diet. We have seen that some of our top actors in our navicrawl have mentioned the paleo diet as the diet to eat if you have diabetes. Probably this is what is being discussed in the blogosphere as well. |