Inspired by debates about citizen engagement, studies of political conversation on the internet have often explored whether the exchanges can be described as, or designed specifically for, deliberation.Yet much public talk occurring online is not structured, institutionally-sanctioned, or organized for the sake of decision-making. Instead, these conversations tend to be informal exchanges in which everyday topics of public, or neighborhood life are raised and discussed. Such bottom-up, physically dispersed, conversations challenge current models of public discourse. This problem is significant for at least two reasons: (1) a large part of people's contemporary lives take place in, around, and through internet technologies, and (2) the development of informal online forums forces us to re-examine our definitions of public engagement, asking whether functions such as issue emergence and the recognition of shared interests occur outside the confines of traditional models of public decision-making.

Rather than applying ideals of deliberation to online discourse, my dissertation employs qualitative methods to analyze informal, internet-based political discussions--what I term "networked public talk." Specifically, networked public talk accounts for three components often missed by deliberative models. First, informal political talk in online forums has a problem-emerging function, suggesting public problems are not pre-determined but make themselves known through active discussion. Second, informal political talk online has a playful character which mixes rhetorical forms other than reasoning (including humor and wordplay) in revealing shared public issues. Third, online informal political talk is based in and actively contributes to the experience of shared place and is not divorced from the material conditions in which people live.

The University of Michigan Institutional Review Board Behavioral Sciences has determined that this study is exempt from IRB oversight ( HUM00026169).