Power in New media platforms: A multidimensional analysis of wikileaks' news stories

Abstract

Precisely as its name suggest, the present research study is about power in new media platforms. It specifically investigates the notion of power in Wikileaks discourse. Wikileaks in this research is used as a representative of applications developed from the progress of web 2.0, and highlights the ability of these emerging networks to cause radical changes not necessarily advantageous. On the other hand, Wikileaks is also used to indicate how power relations can be manipulated and reshaped by context parameters. To address and unveil power relations in the discourse of Wikileaks and determine the sources of bias that may emerge from new form of media discourse. The present research is based on corpus analysis, precisely critical discourse analysis as the general framework. The realization is achieved through a multidimensional analysis. The latter is used to categories levels and dimensions of analysis. The term was used by Fairclough (1689) to refer to the association of different statistical operations. In the current corpus, the term multidimensional refers to macro, meso and micro dimensions of discourse analysis. Each dimension has its own components and designed to answer specific research questions and hypothesis. The findings have brought great insights into the research problem, and contribute to raise awareness related to several contemporary practices within digital technologies most of the time overlooked. The recommendations suggested are directed to different social groups and suggest different pedagogical as well as sociocultural factors involved in maximizing the potentials of scientific research in building progress and change.