Conflict management in massive polylogues: A case study from YouTube

The aim of this paper is to examine how conflict begins, unfolds and ends in a massive, new media polylogue, specifically, a YouTube polylogue. Extant research has looked into how conflict begins, unfolds and/or ends. However, to our knowledge, the models and taxonomies developed so far have not been applied to the analysis of the mediated conflict of massive polylogues. Drawing on the difference between methods of analysis that are natively digital versus those that have been digitized, i.e., they were developed for off-line research and then migrated on-line, one of the goals of this paper is to test whether non-natively digital, extant models and taxonomies, if digitized, would be well equipped to handle massive mediated polylogues. A multilayered methodology was devised and applied to the analysis of a sizeable corpus of comments triggered by a public service announcement on teen homosexuality posted by a Spanish LGBT association. Findings reveal that extant, models and taxonomies of conflict – developed to account mostly for local, synchronic, dyadic conflict –, if solely digitized, would not be well equipped to explain societal, diachronic, massively polylogal conflict such as the one under analysis and that hybrid models that can tackle the affordances of digital technologies need to be developed.