Interdiscursive intersections: Social class, citizenship and migration in YouTube comments

Abstract

YouTube’s comment feature provides the affordance of persistent interdiscursivity, as commenters can build on and intensify public debates using utterances that remain visible over time. Responding to an episode of Benefits Street, a British post-reality TV documentary about welfare (or ‘benefits’) recipients, commenters draw on and reinforce well-established discourses of social class, welfare, citizenship, and migration to invoke two opposing characters: ‘the British citizen on welfare’ and ‘the migrant’. These polarised and polarising stereotypes help to shape and reinforce neoliberal, post-welfare ideologies, by painting welfare as stultifying, and precarious mobility as motivational. Though the data is explicitly about class and welfare, an intersectional approach allows for these more nuanced findings. The episode the comments engage with was broadcast years before the EU Referendum and does not mention immigration, yet many commenters assume that the unemployed protagonists are Brexit voters who blame immigrants for their plight. These ‘British citizens on welfare’ are believed to be privileged, entitled, lazy and demotivated – stereotypical work-shy ‘skivers’. Commenters typically construct immigrants, on the other hand, as model neoliberal ‘strivers’ – entrepreneurial, hardworking, and upwardly mobile – despite the poverty and hardship migrants often face. Analysing the ways these tropes and categories intersect in the comments provides insight into the process of political polarisation in digital discourse. When sketching two opposing characters, certain conflations are effected, for example, ‘welfare as privilege’ and ‘migration as rebranding’. As the perception of social cohesion is integral to support for the welfare state, these polarising stereotypes can bring material consequences. An intersectional lens helps bring these multi-faceted issues into focus.