Have a Break? A study on the networked public sphere during the Greenpeace Give the orang-utan a break campaign

Abstract: The rise of social media has brought with it new forms of civic engagement. This is a case study of the Greenpeace 2010 campaign Give the Orang-Utan a Break directed at Nestlé for its use of palm oil. The purpose of this case study is to analyse the discourse used in blogs during the Greenpeace campaign as well as to analyse the relationship be-tween different types of online content. The study applies a mixed methods approach, us-ing both qualitative document analysis and quantitative network analysis. Part of Green-peace’s strategy has been to single out Nestlé and a specific issue although this comes at the cost of not being able to discuss the greater picture. The study has shown that a major-ity of the analysed blogs were written by public relations and communication profession-als, using their blog as an online sales pitch, seemingly to maximise their own self-interests. Another finding is that traditional online media, to a large extent, were used as a main source of information in blogs, rendering the network of blogs as a source of infor-mation complementary rather than as a substitute to traditional online news sources.