Communicative Figurations of Financial Blogging: Deliberative and Moralizing Modes of Crisis Communication during the Eurocrisis

Abstract

Financial blogging can be understood as a practice of the eurocrisis’ “communicative construction” (Knoblauch, 2013). But it is not only financial blogging, also other media and their coverage – newspapers, television, online journals etc. – are relevant for the communicative construction of the eurocrisis as a specific political conflict. In a certain sense we can understand the eurocrisis therefore as a mediatized conflict: “a conflict in which the media have a performative involvement and constitutive role” (Cottle, 2006, p. 9). Through mediatized crisis communication, not least in financial blogging, the eurocrisis became an important part of public discourse. Therefore, its construction is linked to a certain framing and representation in the media (Schranz & Eisenegger, 2011) as well as the modes of its communicative construction, as we will demonstrate within this chapter in relation to financial blogging. In this sense, our starting point is the actors’ constellation comprising a certain group of bloggers and their specific talk about the crisis in its moral dimensions.

Our perspective is the crisis as it is communicatively constructed in public communication − not the crisis communication of financial organizations to their stakeholders. With this approach, we are able to show that this debate has been constructed by two modes of communication, moralizing and deliberation, which predominantly refer to value orientations concerning a) the field of economics itself and b) how to communicate values properly during this crisis, in particular to improve the consequences of the crisis. In this sense the public communication in media “has the function to face something held to be threatening” and reveals a wide set of negative feelings concerning the crisis (Peter and Knoop et al., 2012, p. 50).