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The Blogosphere in the “Land of Smiles”: Citizen Media and Political Conflict in Thailand
Abstract
Since the turn of the century, Thailand, dubbed as the “Land of Smiles,” has been racked by internal political instability, turmoil, and violence. This study assesses how an ongoing political crisis in Thailand is deconstructed via blogs. A qualitative content analysis of 45 blogs (838 posts) about Thailand indicates that during a peak period of massive anti-government protests in the spring of 2010, blog posts about the crisis tended to fall under three categories: (a) creating a partisan view of the political conflict, which largely mirrored the dominant discourses already present in mainstream media; (b) presenting a dispassionate account that often provided a synthesis of different viewpoints; or (c) offering improvised accounts of what expatriate-tourist bloggers perceived to be important yet having little context to explain. It is argued that although blogging potentially offers new spaces for representing political perspectives in and about Thailand, these perspectives do not always enhance the public’s understanding of the political processes and in some cases fan the flames of inflammatory rhetoric.
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