Die Etablierung von Politischen Online-Influencer:innen (POI) in Konstellationen der öffentlichen Kommunikation

Social media influencers are no longer just active in advertising and promoting products, but also express themselves politically and become actors in the public sphere. These political online influencers (POI) are boundary crossers who switch between older and newer media contexts as well as between information- and entertainment-oriented content and skillfully operate at the transitions between political, journalistic, and commercial contexts. The result of this boundary-crossing are complex relationship constellations in which political influencers are embedded. These POI are not only closely connected to their audience, but also have numerous relationships with traditional intermediaries from politics and various areas of the media industry.

But how can this be explained? How is it that these political-media outsiders establish a position in the public sphere and are included in constellations of public communication? What contribution do they make and is this contribution positive or negative for public communication? Although there are several empirical studies on political influencers, there is as yet no systematic theoretical framework on which these questions can be answered. This is where this article comes in. Its first aim is to develop a theoretical concept that helps to explain the establishment of POIs in the public sphere and their inclusion in the relationship networks of traditional intermediaries. To this end, different branches of research in communication and media studies (political communication and journalism research, celebrity research and media capital theory) are combined to form a relational theoretical concept that understands the public sphere as an assemblage. The concept of the public sphere as an assemblage is borrowed from Chadwick’s concept of the hybrid media system, because the assemblage concept allows the public sphere to be conceived as a fluid constellation of actors in which media logics—defined as technologies, genres, norms, modes of behavior and organization—of older and newer media are coupled with each other.

It is argued that political online influencers (POIs) establish themselves in relationship constellations because they share the communication space with traditional intermediaries in the hybrid media system, because their social relationships and their status as micro-celebrities on social media platforms act as social capital and the establishment process intensifies as soon as they are legitimized through initial relationships with traditional intermediaries. Establishment is understood as a process that takes place in the triadic relationship constellation between influencers, their audience on social media platforms and traditional intermediaries from politics and the media.

The second aim of the paper is to structure the normative discussion around POI. This will be done by using the theoretical concept to discuss what services POI provide (or at least could provide) in the public sphere and to address the dangers of journalistic communication by people who do not always have a journalistic background. Up to now, communication and media studies have mainly focused on the mediation services of professional journalism and discussed its value for democratic societies. However, the digital transformation shows that professional journalism is losing its position of primacy. Therefore, the mediation services of other actors and media must also be examined, and POIs are examples of other new actors in the hybrid media system. The services identified as mediation services for the audience are:

1. digital political peer, 2. the service of navigating through already published content, and 3. the service of contextualizing content.

The mediation services that POI provide for traditional intermediaries from politics and the media are discussed as: 4. the re-mediation of groups remote from politics and information, and 5. the innovation potential for journalism through self-reflection and boundary work.

In summary, it can be said that the field perspective adopted in this article, with its focus on relationships, has the advantage that it opens up a view of larger contexts. It allows processes of establishment and institutionalization to be made visible, which result from the network of mutual observation and relationship constellations. An important finding with regard to mediation services is that the hybridity of communication and the convergence of media contexts also make social mediation services more hybrid. While traditional journalistic communication of political content, for example, is primarily associated with information management, the services of POI are also enormously important for young people in the area of identity and relationship management.