Class on Camfess: a Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis of socioeconomic issues as discussed by students on a Cambridge University “Confessions” page.

Several recent Discourse Analyses ((eg. Bennet (2016), Gomez-Jimenez (2018), Paterson, Coffey-Glover, & Peplow (2016), Toolan (2016)) suggest that social class is presented by the British media as an issue of little contemporary relevance. Despite the fact that socioeconomic inequality is increasing (Cribb et al. 2012), it is referenced with lower frequency than in previous decades, and when class is mentioned it is often framed as an issue of ‘morals’ or a ‘lifestyle choice’, while social issues underpinning class inequality go unexamined. This research explores how class is discussed by Cambridge students, comparing their online, anonymous discussion with class discourse as constructed by the British press.

I use a corpus from Camfess, an anonymous Facebook page used by students at the University of Cambridge. I use three months of posts from January-April 2022 (2127 posts, almost 90,000 words), searched for keywords: Class, comp[rehensive], private, grammar, bursary, wealth, posh, privilege, poor, rich and money. The analysis uses qualitative and quantitative methodology in a Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis framework (Herring 2004), including comparing frequencies of these words on Camfess with the ukWaC corpus (Baroni, et al. 2009); and assessing Camfess with respect to five recent trends in British class discourse:

1. Socioeconomic status presented as not/no longer societally important.

2. Social class being examined only through a middle-class, capitalist or neoliberal lens.

3. Working-class people portrayed as a “burden” on economic systems.

4. Working-class people portrayed as responsible for their own lack of opportunity.

5. Social change as harmful, or having “gone too far”.

Unlike recent British mass media, class is acknowledged as a contemporary social divider, and working-class people are portrayed as a community, disadvantaged systemic issues. Many class-related words are mentioned significantly more often on Camfess than the ukWaC corpus. Furthermore, the posts show an awareness of the way class is constructed by powerful people, and an awareness of the middle-class gaze that shrouds some discussions and may drown out working-class voices. This is not to say that Cambridge is a classism-free environment: even some well-intentioned Camfessions fail to examine some damaging normative beliefs on class relations, and many of the posts reference other people at Cambridge (on and off Camfess) with harmful ideas about class relations and working-class people. But the findings do suggest that class is discussed with greater nuance on Camfess than elsewhere.

I discuss some reasons why this might be the case, including: changes in sociological context between the UK in 2016/18 and 2022; the historical and social context of class awareness in Cambridge; and the differences between mass-media texts and anonymous online discourse. As well as sociological conclusions about the nature of class discourse among young people in Cambridge in 2022, the paper makes an important methodological contribution: while discourse analysis on newspapers and television are incredibly useful in revealing how social issues are constructed to shape our understanding of the world around us; using CMDA on anonymous, online sources may allow us to investigate how successful these attempts to shape people’s perspectives have been.

References

Baroni, M., Bernardini, S., Ferraresi, A., & Zanchetta, E. (2009). The WaCky wide web: a collection of very large linguistically processed web-crawled corpora. Language Resources & Evaluation, 209-226.

Bennet, J. (2016). Moralising class: A discourse analysis of the mainstream political response to Occupy and the August 2011 British riots. Discourse & Society, 27-45.

Cribb, J., Johnson, P., Joyce, R., & Oldfield, Z. (2012). Jubilees compared: Incomes, spending and work in the late 1970s and early 2010s. London: Insitute for Fiscal Studies.

Gomez-Jimenez, E. M. (2018). ‘An insufferable burden on businesses?’ On changing attitudes to maternity leave and economic-related issues in the Times and Daily Mail. Discourse, Context & Media, 100-107.

Herring, S. (2004). Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis: An Approach to Researching Online Behavior. In S. Barab, R. Kling, & J. G. (eds.), Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning (pp. 338-376). Cambridge: CUP.

Paterson, L., Coffey-Glover, L., & Peplow, D. (2016). Negotiating stance within discourse of class: reactions to Benefits Street. Discourse and Society, 27 (2), 195-214.

Toolan, M. (2016). Peter Black, Christopher Stevens, class and inequality in the Daily Mail. Discourse and Society, 642-660.