Global citizenship, the Internet and the Olympics: The Free Tibet cause

Abstract

The nature of citizenship has evolved considerably since ancient times. No longer content to leave participation to the few, new modes of political discourse are taking place through the use of Internet forums. Using a combination of critical discourse analysis and content analysis to examine the postings to the "Issues and Causes" forum on the Phayul.com Tibetan news site during the two-week period leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this thesis investigates how global citizen identity manifests itself online when the cause is state-building. Three key findings emerge from the study. First, the themes and values of global citizenship are present only to a very limited degree. Second, the users employed pronouns to discursively connect themselves to the Tibetan community, and disconnect themselves from outsiders. Third, the forum displayed a significant amount of "flaming" or disruptive discourse. Taken together these results suggest that in this case much of global citizenship theory does not appear to stand up to empirical scrutiny.