Below the line: social class discourse in YouTube comments

Abstract

Using a critical discourse studies approach, here I explore YouTube comment discussions about the notion of social class as a ‘private choice’. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 1,385 YouTube comments following a British documentary about welfare recipients called Benefits Street, I argue that commenters often recontextualise common neoliberal political and media discourses to infer that an individual’s social class results from the efficacy of their private choices (Bennett, 2013). Adopting Savage et al.’s (2013) Bourdieusian understanding of class as constructed through economic, social and cultural capital, the comments are analysed for references to social class as private choice through each of those three prisms. The idea that the video protagonists are economically, socially and culturally poor because they make poor economic, social and cultural choices is consistently reinforced in the comments section, though there are detractors and consequently, debates. However, perhaps due to the resilience of the digital divide (Rainie, 2016), and the stigma attached to being ‘on benefits’ in today’s Britain, even the detractors do not self-identify as belonging to the class depicted in the video, resulting in a discussion about the poor conducted almost entirely in the third person. While analysing discourses of class and choice, the paper more broadly demonstrates that social class is a subject able to provoke extensive and varied debate in online media. Against the backdrop of a relative lack of research on social class online, it thus suggests the need for more attention from scholars, particularly given the increasing mediatisation of culture and society (Hjarvard, 2013) and the steady deepening of economic inequality.