European Twitter Networks: Where they are? A Transnational European Public Sphere

One of the reasons underpinning the proverbial distance between European Union institutions and European citizens has been attributed by scholars to a communication gap: the lack of a common and public space, where the European demos is able to talk and deliberate common concerns over European affairs. However, the research conducted on the European Public Sphere has been arbitrarily limited by media content analysis on the national media systems, by comparing news content across countries (offline and/or online). The need for an in-depth analysis of other methodological alternatives and for less institutionalised actors, leads us to understand that research on the so called European Twitter Sphere might illuminate new practices. A social network such as Twitter is considered the ultimate expression of online interaction, comprised of user-generated content. The article explores in-depth, from a bottom-up approach, the interactions formed around Twitter issue publics of European relevance (Schengen and TTIP), with their geographic location. To respond the research questions I apply the methodology of network analysis. A network of 28 nodes -one for each member of the European Union- is created. In each node, Twitter data collected from each hashtag is embedded, forming six different weighted networks –each one for each hashtag- with the same number of nodes –the 28 members of the European Union. The networks contain replies, retweets or quotes of other tweets in the dataset (for which location data were available). The use of network analysis and data from a social network (Twitter) is an innovative approach on the research of the European Public Sphere. The results show that there is certain degree of transnational European Public Sphere in these topics. However they are still small compared to discussion about the topics made nationally.