This chapter explores innovative forms of political communication among citizens on Twitter, in the context of the 2017 French Presidential Elections. It notably questions the degree to which 'contagious' social network communication may be impacting discourse on politics in the public sphere, related to the debate around 'fake news'. From a corpus of over 50M election-related tweets, the chapter identifies those which were most widely retweeted during the second round of the French elections. Through qualitative analysis of 197 manually coded 'viral' tweets, it seeks to characterise their contents in this particular context, in order to fill a gap in the literature and better understand how the contents, tone and subject matter of tweets may be related to virality, thus helping identify the characteristics of viral political tweets as an innovative and influential form of political communication within the media-related public sphere. The study finds little evidence of 'fake news' in the corpus studied and highlights instead practices of whistleblowing, but also a dominance of nonfactual, opinion-based commentary, as well as humour, irony, satire, parody and mash-ups.

In discussing these insights into the mechanics of viral communication, the chapter underlines both specific innovations linked to the technological medium and continuities with traditional offline practices, and suggests that popular contents on Twitter tend to feed into discourse discrediting politicians rather than supporting inclusive democracy.

Introduction:

The changing media context and notably the spread of digital communication technologies have helped reshape political processes in late modern democracies. Scholars have debated the importance of mediatization as a 'meta-process' [START_REF] Krotz | The meta-process of `mediatization' as a conceptual frame[END_REF] affecting politics itself, as various actors within the system seek to time and adapt their actions in order to optimise media coverage [START_REF] Esser | Mediatization of Politics: Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies[END_REF][START_REF] Strömbäck | Four Phases of Mediatization: An Analysis of the Mediatization of Politics[END_REF]. Innovations in the use of social networking sites (SNS) and dedicated online platforms for activists by political parties, social movements and citizens have further contributed to renewing forms of collective action and spaces of political debate (Frame & Brachotte, 2015), as well as influencing the media ecology with its agenda-setting characteristics. As a widely-used medium by politicians and their supporters, Twitter has become a popular online microcosm for political discussion in many Western countries [START_REF] Davis | Twitter and Elections around the World: Campaigning in 140 Characters or Less[END_REF]Frame, Mercier, Brachotte, & Thimm, 2016), and a tool used by parties to mobilise networks of activists during election campaigns, relaying key messages to support their candidates and criticise opponents. With the new possibilities for political communication come dangers associated with a lack of technical and social limits: 'bad buzz' may create an unwelcome echo in the mainstream media and 'fake news' makes the sensationalist media agenda harder to manage. Moreover, the use of 'social bots' is now widespread among major political parties and pressure groups [START_REF] Ferrara | The rise of social bots[END_REF][START_REF] Murthy | Bots and political influence: a sociotechnical investigation of social network capital[END_REF], while new forms of political communication via SNS, opening up the structural possibility of two-way dialogue, are marked by verbal violence and a lack of respect for social hierarchy, which challenge classical top-down conceptions of political communication [START_REF] Frame | Personnel politique et médias socionumériques: nouveaux usages et mythes 2.0[END_REF]. The peer-to-peer potential of these technologies leads to the emergence of ephemeral forms which are more or less organised, such as 'mini publics' [START_REF] Thimm | The mediatization of politics and the digital public sphere: the dynamics of mini-publics[END_REF] or political memes (Mercier, 2015b), but which can have an impact on coverage of politics in mainstream media, in what is increasingly being qualified as the 'post truth' era [START_REF] Lewandowsky | Beyond Misinformation: Understanding and Coping with the 'Post-Truth' Era[END_REF][START_REF] Suiter | Post-truth Politics[END_REF].

In this context, 'viral communication' on SNS represents an innovative form of political communication in electoral periods, potentially empowering non-party communicators. Viral posts originating from grass-roots level, employing irony, parody, mash-ups, fakes, or verbal insults constitute an increasingly-used form of political contestation, and may be relayed far beyond the medium of origin (Frame et al., 2016), prompting Arnaud Mercier to qualify Twitter as a 'counterpublic sphere' in the political context (Mercier, 2015a). i This encourages researchers in political communication to shift away from the traditional focus on messages produced by party political machines or individual candidates, examining instead the innovative communication forms which are emerging and being widely shared in this 'counterpublic sphere'.

Building on an interdisciplinary collaboration between communication scientists and computer scientists, this chapter explores these emerging forms of political expression through viral posts on Twitter. ii It is part of a wider study based on a corpus of over 50 million political tweets collected during the French Presidential elections in April and May 2017, but focuses here on the fortnight between the two rounds of these elections, and on a sub-corpus of just under 200 tweets pertaining to the elections, which were retweeted over 3000 times during that period. These tweets were coded and analysed qualitatively in order to shed light onto the types of contents which gained popularity on Twitter during the final days of the election campaign. After a brief overview of the literature, the research protocol and results, the chapter moves on to analyse the nature of these forms of political communication and their potential impact on representative democracy. It notably provides insights into the mechanics of online political contestation via Twitter and a discussion of the characteristics of posts likely to become 'viral', while questioning the degree to which they can be seen as truly innovative, in the light of more traditional offline forms of political contestation.

Innovative political communication on Twitter

Although 'viral communication' or 'social contagion' are commonly-used metaphors, little consensus is to be found regarding the definition of these concepts as applied to SNS, either within or between scientific disciplines [START_REF] Alhabash | Redefining virality in less broad strokes: Predicting viral behavioral intentions from motivations and uses of Facebook and Twitter[END_REF][START_REF] Weng | Virality Prediction and Community Structure in Social Networks[END_REF]. In the social sciences, these concepts are generally seen to have their epistemological roots in early work on crowd psychology by Gustave Le [START_REF] Le Bon | Psychologie des Foules[END_REF] and Gabriel Tarde [START_REF] Tarde | L'opinion et la Foule[END_REF], later echoed by the Chicago School in studies focusing on social influence. iii However, computer scientists or social network analysts studying the question tend to look rather to the epidemiological origins of the terms 'viral' or 'contagious' [START_REF] Weng | Virality Prediction and Community Structure in Social Networks[END_REF]. They study the extent to which a message appears to act like a disease, spreading rapidly within a population by massively infecting new individuals. While this metaphor may work to some extent for computer 'viruses' which infect a 'population' of computers in a more or less indiscriminate way and contrary to the wishes of their users, behaviour termed as 'viral' on SNS results from conscious expression of adhesion to a particular idea, generally with the intention of relaying this to connected accounts. Researchers thus distinguish between 'simple contagion' (that of computer viruses) and 'complex contagion' (in the case of SNS - Weng et al., 2013, p.1). However, there is evidence to suggest that despite the multiple factors affecting 'complex contagion', the epidemic metaphor can still be appropriate to characterise the progression of messages within and across communities on SNS (ibid.).

A basic definition of 'virality' in this context is given by Guerini and colleagues, for whom 'it refers to the number of people who accessed a given content in a given time interval.' (Guerini, Strapparava, & Özbal, 2011, p. 507). From an operational point of view when working on SNS, for a message to be considered 'viral', both the extent and speed of propagation should be taken into account in the form of minimum thresholds to be exceeded: a 'viral' message should both be sufficiently massively spread, and also spread (eg. retweeted) on a sufficiently frequent basis, at least at some stage in its propagation cycle. More advanced methods might also include factors linked to the network architecture and usage in order to take into account 'visibility' of the tweet. For example, a less 'visible' tweet might be considered more 'viral' if it circulates as rapidly as a more 'visible' one (i.e. one which benefits from higher exposure given the network infrastructure, for example if it is produced and/or relayed by an account with more followers, if it uses popular hashtags, etc.).

Beauvisage and colleagues provide an early review of the literature distinguishing three approaches to the study of viral communication on social networks (Beauvisage, Beuscart, Couronné, & Mellet, 2011, p. 153). A first set of studies, they suggest, focus on the speed at which content is propagated and define virality in the terms of simple measurements of temporal concentration of attention on particular contents, as outlined above. The other two approaches pay more attention to the network architecture in this regard, either to take it into account or to eliminate it from the analysis, depending on the definition of virality which is adopted. The second type of approach seeks to isolate the phenomenon of social contagion as distinct from algorithmic or network structural factors. It thus aims to measure the speed and extent to which messages spread independently of structural effects (including key influencers, hashtags, 'promoted' messages, etc.). From this perspective, the more visible a message is, the less it is considered to be viral, compared to a less visible message which receives an equal amount of exposure. The third set of studies identified by Beauvisage and colleagues adopts the opposite perspective, in a more holistic approach to virality which considers network architecture, and hence visibility, as one of many factors affecting the extent to which a message circulates on a SNS. They aim to examine the impact of these structural factors on the way messages spread between and across accounts with more or less influence, thus seeking to measure the role of the network topology in viral phenomena.

In the context of Twitter, these studies often underline the possible impact of social network structure (visibility algorithms, social capital, homophily) on perceived virality [START_REF] Beauvisage | Le succès sur Internet repose-t-il sur la contagion ? Une analyse des recherches sur la viralité[END_REF][START_REF] Stieglitz | Emotions and Information Diffusion in Social Media-Sentiment of Microblogs and Sharing Behavior[END_REF]. However, while recognising the importance of algorithmic and structural factors, as well as the existence of influencers, Beauvisage and colleagues underline the need for further research into what they see as 'the blind spot of existing work': the types of message contents which might also favour viral circulation. In a relatively rare example of such research, Stefan Stieglitz and Linh Dang-Xuan carried out a study performing semi-automated sentiment analysis on German political tweets, allowing them to suggest that positive or negative expressions of emotion in such tweets are 'significantly associated with retweet behavior in terms of retweet quantity.' (Stieglitz & Dang-Xuan, 2013, p. 239). Aside from this, the studies which do set out to take into account the characteristics of individual tweets often tend to focus on the presence of operators such as hashtags, mentions or URLs, features which are in fact linked to the specific network architecture of the microblogging platform. By contrast, the present chapter builds on a qualitative approach to verbal and other contents of individual messages, in order to better characterise viral tweets as an innovative form of popular political communication in the French electoral context.

One element which marked the presidential election campaign in 2017, and which supports the idea that these forms of communication are having a tangible impact on politics-related discourse in the public sphere, was the debate around 'fake news'. During the campaign, Emmanuel Macron was targeted with apparently unfounded accusations of harbouring a secret personal bank account in the Bahamas. Other smear campaigns targeted Marine Le Pen, as well as candidates for Les Républicains, François Fillon and Nicolas Sarkozy. In the last hours of the public campaign, the 'MacronLeaks' scandal saw WikiLeaks publishing a large number of pirated emails from the En Marche campaign team, including a number of 'fakes' which had been surreptitiously introduced among the authentic messages released.

Despite such 'fake' messages being commonly denounced by journalists, iv as well as the politicians themselves and their allies, in the 'post-truth' political arena, it is the very circulation of such rumours, notably on SNS, which not only plants a seed of suspicion, but gives the supporters of political rivals who wish to believe them more-or-less credible yet widely-shared theories with which to disparage the candidates targeted. However, from a scientific perspective, and even on the social level, the category of real vs. fake appears increasingly problematic, not least in the French context where it is most often translated into true vs. false, including for the planned parliamentary bill targeting 'false news' or 'fausses informations' [START_REF] Mercier | Fake News et Post-vérité: 20 textes pour comprendre et combattre la menace[END_REF]. The team of researchers led by Philip Howard at the Oxford Internet Institute avoids the notion of 'fake' news, preferring instead to talk about the wider category of 'junk' news, which goes beyond the true vs. false dichotomy, and defined as: 'various forms of propaganda and ideologically extreme, hyper-partisan, or conspiratorial political news and information. Much of this content is deliberately produced false reporting. It seeks to persuade readers about the moral virtues or failings of organizations, causes or people and presents commentary as a news product. This content is produced by organizations that do not employ professional journalists, and the content uses attention grabbing techniques, lots of pictures, moving images, excessive capitalization, ad hominem attacks, emotionally charged words and pictures, unsafe generalizations and other logical fallacies.' (Howard, Bradshaw, Kollanyi, & Bolsolver, 2017, pp. 3-4).

Research carried out by the team into the information circulating during the second round of the French presidential elections suggests that such 'junk news' constitutes around 6% of links shared over Twitter in that period [START_REF] Howard | Junk News and Bots during the French Presidential Election: What Are French Voters Sharing Over Twitter In Round Two?[END_REF]. In the light of such findings, we ask, in this chapter, to what degree such material can be considered an 'innovative' form of political communication, and how successful is it in 'going viral', to the extent that it is likely to be picked up and reproduced by other online and offline media sources. We will thus discuss what forms of 'junk news' are to be found among the viral tweets identified in these particular elections, and the degree to which similar forms may have affected democratic debate in the pre-social media era.

Viral tweets during the 2017 elections

This empirical study upon which the chapter was based was carried out as part of a research project which began in 2012, bringing together communication scientists and computer scientists at the University of Burgundy, looking into the dynamics of political communication on Twitter thanks to combined algorithmic and qualitative analyses. It draws on a specific corpus collected by the team in 2017, using its own open-source application SNFreezer (https://github.com/SNFreezer), which collects data from both the Twitter search and streaming APIs. Tweets were collected for seven weeks around the Presidential elections in France, according to the following criteria:

• the official accounts of the 11 presidential candidates (including tweets and mentions or replies);

• hashtags and strings of characters based on these or their principal variations or misspellings (#Marine2017, #MLP [for Marine Le Pen], #jamaisMacron…);

• an initial list of 204 hashtags based on anticipated topics of political discussion chosen before the beginning of the period;

• further hashtags added progressively and selectively on the basis of co-occurrences with the hashtags already chosen. v

Corpus and methods

From the global corpus thus constituted, the current paper focuses specifically on a sub-set of around 14 million tweets which were collected during the fortnight between the two rounds of elections, from 23 rd April to 7 th May 2017 inclusive, from which a set of 'viral' tweets were selected. In order to detect virality and identify the tweets which were effectively circulating the most within the French political Twittersphere at this time, the team used the criterion of the total number of retweets during the 15-day period. Tweets were thus ordered by the number or times they had been retweeted during the period, irrespective of whether the original tweet was sent before or during the period itself. This means that the total popularity of some tweets was potentially under-represented in the corpus, if they were extensively retweeted before or after the period in question. The approach does not explicitly take into account the relative frequency at which a tweet was retweeted, though the high threshold imposed (minimum 3000 times in 2 weeks) means that the frequency was relatively high. For reasons of feasibility, the approach did not factor in the relative 'visibility' (supra) of the tweets, in terms of network architecture. This is one of the limits of the conclusions of the study presented here, since factors linked to network structure are another possible explanation of the popularity of the viral tweets, aside from their contents which constitute our main focus. The 197 tweets pertaining to the elections which were each retweeted over 3000 times during the period were manually coded and analysed qualitatively in order to shed light upon the types of contents which gained popularity on Twitter during the second round of the election. A set of 28 labels were identified for coding purposes, divided into five main categories:

• political positioning (pro-or anti-Macron or Le Pen, plus other significant figures/movements);

• political nature of contents expressed (political or not, anti-establishment, linked to TV debate, denunciation of scandals, intimacy/private sphere);

• tone (irony, emotion, familiarity, insults, use of smileys);

• truthfulness (true information, fake, opinion or belief, joke, mash-up/parody);

• operators (hashtags, mentions, links).

The categories and labels were discussed between the two coders and tested on a small sample of tweets. Both coders then independently coded the entire sub-corpus of 197 tweets, and compared their results. Differences in coding were resolved by discussion until consensus was reached. Each tweet was contextualised (links were followed, described, and taken into account in the coding, except where these had since disappeared or the account been deleted or suspended: 13 tweets/197). Individual tweets could be coded with multiple labels and in multiple categories (e.g. political + ironic + use of insults + hashtags).

Results

Interestingly, the two most commonly retweeted tweets in the corpus are both tweets from the official account of Emmanuel Macron, both containing media. They are pictured in figure 10.1. The first features a video containing a public endorsement of him from Barack Obama, while the second includes a video of the candidate shooting at goal in an 'improvised' game of football during a campaign visit.

Figure 10.1: The two most commonly retweeted tweets in the corpus of 197 tweets

The fact that both tweets come from Macron's account would tend to underline the importance of visibility and network architecture: Macron's account was widely followed and retweeted by many other influential political and media sources. A closer look at the accounts from which originated the 197 most retweeted tweets (cf. figure 10.2) reveals that the future President's account produces the highest number of viral tweets (13), followed by the official account of the televised news show Quotidien vi (10 tweets), followed in turn by other leading politicians such as left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon (6 tweets), right-wing Henri Guaino (5 tweets), Marine Le Pen (4 tweets) and her last-minute ally Nicolas Dupont-Aignan

(3 tweets). The reporter Hugo Clément, who worked at the time on Quotidien, sent five of the most popular tweets from his account, and a further four originated from the account of the satirical political website Le Gorafi. vii

Figure 10.2: Twitter accounts producing >2 tweets in the corpus of 197 tweets

The remaining accounts featured in the figure belong to Twitter users who are not public figures, nor are they particularly widely followed. The account @Ibn_Sayyid3 was deleted by

Twitter shortly after the end of the period observed.

The viral tweets contained various operators (#, @, http://) and media extensions (videos, photos, embedded tweets), as resumed in figure 10.3. A tweet may contain more than one type of operator and more than one of each. For example, 39.1% of tweets contained at least one hashtag, and maybe other operators too. The number of hashtags appears to be around average for political tweets, whereas mentions are relatively scarce, and there are only 4 instances of links leading to outside sources (online articles or party websites). This is drastically lower than in the general corpus. The use of media is very common among the viral tweets, however, and this category is further divided, to the right of the figure, between videos and photos (including a few gif animations; it should also be borne in mind that some tweets contained more than one type of media). Some 12 tweets contained other embedded tweets upon which they commented, and it should be noted that a further 13 tweets or the links or media they targeted had been deleted by the time of the study, making it impossible to check via the platform whether they were linked to media or to other online content (URLs).

In terms of their contents, the 197 'viral' tweets were dominantly classified as anti-Le Pen (48%), while only 3% were coded as pro-Le Pen tweets. The candidate Macron fared somewhat better, but still attracted 14% of negative tweets, partially counterbalanced by 11% of positive ones. This contrasts with the wider corpus for this period, which contains many more occurrences of anti-Macron hashtags than anti-Le Pen ones. It would appear that the National Front's strategy of hashtag use was better orchestrated throughout the campaign, but that Macron's supporters were more effective in massively spreading their tweets, notably during the televised debate, which accounts for a third of the popular retweets during the period.

Finally, twelve of the coding labels chosen for the discussion and relating notably to contents and tone are shown in figure 10.4, along with the numbers of tweets coded with each label.

Figure 10.4: Classification of 'viral' tweets through manual coding (n=197, multiple labels possible for each tweet)

Discussion and analysis

An overview of these results clearly reveals how little importance 'fake' tweets (4% of the total) had in this particular corpus of widely-retweeted tweets. The 8 fakes detected are mainly satirical tweets, including four posted by the satirical website (@le_gorafi). Only one of the tweets might credibly be seen as aiming to intentionally mislead. It was sent from the account of Florian Philippot, then Vice-President of the National Front, and features what appears to be a screenshot of another Twitter account attributed to a regional section of En Marche, in which a message calls on activists to go and violently disrupt Marine Le Pen's visit to Reims. Philippot's tweet addresses Macron directly, demanding an explanation. Although the tweet was quickly exposed as a fake, and later deleted by its author who claimed to have been acting in good faith, it had already been retweeted over 3000 times, in part by people criticising Philippot. It may appear surprising to find only one example of an intentionally misleading 'fake' tweet in the corpus, but it should be noted that this may in part be due to the specificity of the corpus itself, which contained only the most popular retweets. An extended corpus might reveal further 'fakes' which were less widely spread, since they remained within smaller networks of users.

However, from the figures above, it is clear that 'fake news' was only a minor component of this particular corpus, especially when satirical tweets are excluded. By contrast, 30% of tweets were coded in the 'true' category. These include tweets using real footage to make their point, which might cover, for example, rival ex-candidates from the first round who rally and express support for one candidate or another, or extracts of past speeches which are reproduced to suggest a lack of consistency in the positions defended. Linked to this, 33% of tweets (often the same ones) were coded as denouncing alleged malpractices.

Several tweets comment on Marine Le Pen plagiarising an earlier campaign speech by

François Fillon, while another, denouncing media collusion, exposes an 'in the wings' video in which Emmanuel Macron shows intimacy with the political journalist who is about to interview him. In the light of this, it would appear that viral tweets, at least in this particular campaign, seem to have focused to a much greater extent on whistleblowing and establishing the 'truth' than on spreading fake news. However, these two categories are not necessarily strictly opposed to one another, as is suggested by the notion of 'junk' news (supra): some instances of whistleblowing can constitute a form of manipulation, when real footage is used to discredit the opposition, as in the two examples just cited. In this particular corpus, the register of 'true vs. fake' can thus be found to some extent, but seems almost to become a mere pretext for expressions of rejection of or adhesion to a candidate or their cause, rather than a stimulus for rational deliberation aiming to establish objective political fact in the Habermassian tradition. This dominance of affective partisan discourse is thus possibly the most innovative dimension of the discursive forms found here, and comforts the hypothesis of the post-truth shift from fact to affect in political communication [START_REF] Lewandowsky | Beyond Misinformation: Understanding and Coping with the 'Post-Truth' Era[END_REF][START_REF] Suiter | Post-truth Politics[END_REF].

A related element of 'junk' news is its reliance on one-sided commentary and opinion. 40%

of the viral tweets studied came under the label of 'opinion', expressing support or opposition rather than disputing fact, even though one does not necessarily exclude the other. Yet the high percentages of tweets characterised by irony, humour, mash-ups and parodies, go to show that opinion and support or opposition were expressed in ways which far exceeded factual debate. Most tweets in the corpus were ironic, either using irony in conjunction with humour, or as a tool of criticism, through an ironic comment accompanying a quoted media source, suggesting a candidate is hypocritical, for example.

A fairly striking element of the corpus was the number of parodies or mash-ups: these were tweets featuring photos or videos which had been altered or recontextualised to give them new meaning, often for humorous effect. Such practices can also give rise to internet memes: one example from the corpus was a video of Marine Le Pen mocking Macron during the televised debate, moving her arms with a strange expression on her face. This was immediately taken up in the Twittersphere and circulated in different forms: the video along with several alternative captions were widely retweeted, during and after the debate. The high number of tweets (33%) mentioning directly or indirectly the televised debate between the candidates, posted before, during or after it, clearly marked the corpus. It underlines the popularity of Twitter as a 'second screen' and moreover the fact that television viewers were not only expressing their opinions on the network, but also engaging massively with others' posts during and after the event.

Although the researchers had been expecting to find instances of insults (n=40), it should be underlined that the label given here is doubtless far too strong for the examples labelled, which cover different levels of incivility, from the use of vulgar language and an insult directly addressed to the individual concerned at one extreme (n=5), to mildly offensive or derogatory statements at the other, which seem to be part and parcel of standard political commentary about members of opposing parties, though likely to cause some prejudice to the candidate's image if taken literally (n=29). With only 2.5% of tweets considered particularly insulting, this dimension did not play a particularly important role in the corpus.

If political insults are present in the counterpublic sphere (Mercier, 2015b), they are not strongly represented among the most retweeted tweets.

Finally, almost a quarter of tweets were coded as 'non-political'. They made no direct reference to political opinions, focusing, for example, on a candidate's physical appearance, making jokes about the journalists' relative silence during the debate, etc. Familiar language was also common (30% of tweets), which included both non-standard French abbreviations common to Twitter but also, and especially in this sample, use of slang and swear words.

Swearing was often correlated with emotional forms of expression (18% of tweets), typically from non-public figures expressing their support for or opposition towards one of the candidates. However, the initial expectation that the corpus would contain a high number of emotive tweets, based on the study by [START_REF] Stieglitz | Emotions and Information Diffusion in Social Media-Sentiment of Microblogs and Sharing Behavior[END_REF], was not supported by the data, and interestingly only 4.6% of the tweets retweeted (n=9) initially contained one or more smileys.

Although it is important to underline the variety observed, this rapid overview of the contents of the most frequently retweeted tweets clearly shows that the archetypal tweet in this particular corpus is not 'fake news', nor is it a vitriolic or emotional address to a candidate or politician which mentions their account directly. Rather it an ironic, often humorous expression of political opinion, most probably anti-Le Pen in this particular context, usually featuring external media in its original form or having been altered in some way, sometimes denouncing the words or behaviour of an opponent, sometimes parodying what was said or done. Truth or falsehood seem less important than humour and opinion among the tweets which spread widely, and whose 'entertainment value', in the spirit of 'junk' news, seems hard to dissociate from their (mostly) political content.

Conclusion

In order to better understand the political innovations which seem to characterise representative democracy in Western societies today, it is important to take into account technological platforms opening up new spaces of expression (cf. supra, p. ) which have reshaped political communication in recent years. These in turn can be seen to generate associated changes in expectations, representations and algorithm-driven media consumption habits which effectively modify the environment in which politicians are communicating. In the context of talk about 'post-truth politics', this chapter lends support to the idea that non-factual information is indeed an important element in online political discussion. However, it does not find evidence of significant circulation of 'fake news' among the widely retweeted tweets during the French presidential elections, but rather it suggests that one of the keys to understanding 'viral communication' is to shift away from a paradigm concentrating on objective fact and veracity, in favour of expressions of opinions, humour, irony and parody which feed into discourse discrediting politicians (Mercier, 2015b).

In the light of wider debates about mediatization and its impact on political communication [START_REF] Esser | Mediatization of Politics: Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies[END_REF], we might seek to situate this evolution as part of a broader and well-established shift towards 'infotainment', which has affected all types of media channels [START_REF] Brants | The Infotainment of Politics[END_REF]. Indeed, the types of contents observed in the popular political tweets are at times reminiscent of traditional forms of political deliberation offline, including political satire, caricatures and cartoons, the practice of heckling at public meetings, televised soundbites and reactions to them, and more generally unbalanced commentary aiming to denigrate a particular candidate, such as might be found on a political blog. Even memes can be read as a cross between the traditions of political cartoonists and graffiti artists working on political campaign posters. In many ways, the forms identified here can thus be related back to pre-existing genres of political expression, while the emergence of polarised and opinion-dominated confrontational discourse supporting or criticising candidates is hardly new in political communication surrounding elections.

So are recently-developed technological platforms truly a vector of innovation in representative democracy? Can we say that new forms of political communication are emerging? While it is important to point to the continuity with and ongoing reinvention of older forms of political expression, either as implicit or explicit genres and references, the use of new technological platforms and tools does indeed appear to make possible innovative forms of expression through the way they function, encouraging, for example, certain types of viral expression through their very architecture and 'network media logic' [START_REF] Altheide | Media Logic[END_REF]Klinger & Svensson, 2014). Setting aside questions of visibility linked to public status and network architecture, it would appear that 'successful' messages often exploit both the codes and the technical possibilities of the medium. Real-time propagation plus embedded media or links to external sites make Twitter a good tool for whistleblowing, in a social and media context where denunciation or even denigration of political figures, and their alleged corruption and hypocrisy are commonplace and considered legitimate practices. Likewise, a message which contains a humorous mash-up or 'photoshopped' media source, especially if part of a meme, can end up widely retweeted. Indeed, this capacity to technologically rework, reinterpret or appropriate existing media, in order to redistribute it, seems to be one of the keys to viral dissemination, as contents are adapted or transformed as part of the circulation process itself (Beauvisage et al., 2011, pp. 161-162).

Thus, the specifics of SNS and their contribution, notably through viral communication, to shaping the media agenda and the discursive context in which politics happens should not be neglected.

Whether this then has a strong impact on the ways in which democracy functions, to link back to the central question of this collective volume, is debatable. The lack of technical barriers means that (almost) everyone and anyone is able to interact and voice their opinions publicly, and yet, to take the example of Twitter, the demographics of this particular social network in many countries including France would suggest that its direct reach and impact are limited in terms of the total number of users directly exposed to posts, since it is only actively used by a small minority of the population, and most of the time not to talk about politics. However, the platform's popularity among politicians and the media, as well as with other social 'influencers', contribute to it having a wider indirect impact, notably when tweets are linked to from other platforms or receive further coverage in mainstream media reporting about electoral communication. At the risk of simplification, those involved in political communication on Twitter often appear close to party-based structures: activists supporting and relaying messages from or about 'their' candidate, while criticising opponents. This appears notably in the most viral tweets: Macron's supporters were particularly active in retweeting messages from his account, and the digital communication teams of both second-round candidates actively sought to encourage such networked activism, as did other parties.

The current study thus does not find strong evidence of an oppositional, anti-establishment 'counterpublic sphere' (Mercier, 2015a) in the most widely retweeted tweets, yet this may well be linked to the choice of corpus itself, since it seems plausible that extreme discourse could be more of a peripheral phenomenon. We can thus only speculate as to the degree to which alternative political formations can gain traction through such technological platforms, potentially giving voice to the disenfranchised and thus leading to more inclusive forms of democracy, though also ones based on de-legitimisation of mainstream political figures.

However, as technical innovations in this area are commonplace, and as algorithm-driven technologies appear to steadily progress into new sectors of social life, it is more than likely that emerging networked media forms will continue to impact the way in which citizens, politicians and the media engage with one another, in tomorrow's political arena.

i Based on Nancy Fraser's notion of "subaltern counter publics', Mercier's evocation of an electronic "counterpublic sphere' characterises the use of electronic media by disenfranchised and disillusioned voters to spread aggressive, polemical discourse running counter to dominant political messages being discussed in a wider (offline) public sphere (Mercier, 2015, pp. 141-4).

ii The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of all members of the team to this ongoing reflection, and more particularly the contributions of Eric Leclercq and his computer science team, as well as Heidi Gnagi who acted as research assistant for this particular part of the study.

iii Work carried out in marketing and advertising considers the importance of "word of mouth' as a form of social influence, which has become "electronic word of mouth' (eWoM) in the age of digital technologies and discussions of "viral marketing' [START_REF] Jansen | Twitter power: Tweets as electronic word of mouth[END_REF]. iv Aiming ostensibly to combat this phenomenon during the campaign, the "CrossCheck' project was run in association with professional newsrooms and supported by Google and Facebook. It gave French voters the possibility to query online sources they found suspect, and have their veracity checked by professional journalists. According to news reports, around 60 out of 500 queried sites were subsequently debunked by the journalists (http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/05/the-french-election-is-over-whats-next-for-the-google-andfacebook-backed-fact-checking-effort-there/). Page consulted on 13 th June 2018.

v After 1000 occurrences in the global corpus, hashtags judged relevant were manually added to the search and streaming queries and collected a posteriori over the previous seven days and for the rest of the period. A total of 354 hashtags were being collected at the end of the period.

vi Le Quotidien is a somewhat irreverent political ' infotainment ' television show, whose popularity can be considered to stem in part from the direct and provocative questions asked by its reporters, its mixture of political news and humour, as well as its often incisive or satirical tone. vii The name of this website, which began as a Twitter feed, is an acronym of the title of the right-wing national newspaper Le Figaro. Its Twitter account links to its web version, where it uses the codes of the written press to satirise or parody news stories.

  Frame and Dr. Gilles Brachotte (Université de Bourgogne-Franche-Comté) Abstract:

  Figure 10.3: Percentages of viral tweets containing Twitter operators

Table 10 .1: Number of tweets retweeted 'virally'

 10 Table 10.1 shows the numbers of tweets retweeted massively in the corpus:

	Number of
		Number of
	times
		tweets
	retweeted
	> 1000	1201
	> 2000	348
	> 3000	197
	> 5000	85
	> 10 000	35


Alexander Frame

What Future for the Concept of Culture in the Social Sciences?

Keywords: Culture, communication, critical intercultural theory, determinism, social discourse

This article reviews current criticism of the concept of culture among academics, identifying the misuses and the social context which have led to calls for it to be abandoned. Drawing extensively on recent critical approaches to the concept, it outlines a complex multi-level approach avoiding the traps of determinism and methodological nationalism, allowing us to better understand and deal with contemporary debates and discourses surrounding culture, in the light of which it appears ever more important that social science scholars make their voices heard.

Introduction

The concept of culture is paradoxically (a) one of the most successful concepts to have emerged in the social sciences over the course of the last century, (b) particularly useful to help us understand many contemporary topics of social debate, such as populist xenophobia, discourse surrounding migration, globalisation, national identity and so on, and (c) strongly criticised within the social sciences themselves, where many academics reject the concept outright. Indeed, it is in part the success of the concept itself outside the academic sphere, and the way that it is used by the media, politicians, and in the public sphere more generally, which has triggered this state of affairs. For example, media coverage and (right-wing) political debate about the so-called "refugee crisis" in Western Europe tends to give a very rigid and category-based view of cultures and cultural differences, in which the (stereotyped) cultural practices of arriving "waves" of migrants threaten dominant models of the majority in "host" society, with which they appear incompatible.

Although such discourse has no apparent scientific ambitions, many fear that its (mis)use of the concept of culture is harming the concept itself, a concept which, because of its success in the academic sphere also, has proven hard to define across disciplines, and which has had trouble keeping abreast of evolving conceptions of social interactions. Consequently, there is an increasing number of critical voices [START_REF] Dervin | Impostures interculturelles[END_REF][START_REF] Dervin | Le concept de culture -Comprendre et maîtriser ses détournements et manipulations[END_REF]Dervin & Machart, 2015a;[START_REF] Holliday | Afterword[END_REF][START_REF] Wagener | L'échec culturel : Vie et mort d'un concept en sciences sociales[END_REF] which are today warning scholars away from a concept presented as insufficiently precise, and accused of emphasising differences and masking the true complexity of the social processes it is supposed to explain. They denounce a tendency, even in research, to reduce individuals to a fixed cultural category, which may have very little bearing on their behaviour in microsocial interactions. By rejecting the concept, they claim, not only will we be better able to come to terms with the complexity of individuals and their social activity, but we will stop giving scientific legitimacy to a term which is commonly exploited to socially construct difference and maintain tensions within societies.

This article outlines the contemporary scientific debate around the concept of culture, reviewing the main objections to the concept, and seeking to explain why and how it can and must be still used to combat the reductive and simplistic discourse which is at the root of much of the criticism. Indeed, the position defended in this article is that only by focusing on the complex multi-level relationship between cultures and communication, can we promote a better understanding of the social world around us, fighting against ignorance in order to overcome simplistic discourses of cultural determinism.

Criticism of the Culture Concept

The concept of culture has indeed been one of the most productive concepts in the Human and Social Sciences over the course of the twentieth century [START_REF] Cuche | La notion de culture dans les sciences sociales[END_REF], at least in terms of the number of fields in which it has been used. From Social and Cultural Anthropology in the early twentieth century, the concept spread to other social sciences, notably from the Sixties onwards (Bauman, 1999, p. viii), and rapidly moving from the domain of scientific jargon into popular discourse, to the point where, as Dervin and Machart (2015b, p. 1) note, it was declared "Word of the Year" by the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2014. However, at the same time, critical voices were being raised in academic circles, calling for the concept to be abandoned. Indeed, from being what was already a notoriously polysemic term, according to Dervin and Machart its popularity has made it into a dangerous "floating signifier" today (2015b, p. 2), a pseudo-scientific term without a clear or fixed meaning, which leaves it open to all kinds of misuses. Already in 1999, Ulf Hannerz had denounced what he saw as increasingly pervasive "culturespeak", by which he broadly meant inappropriate and reductive or deterministic use of the concept. Even if we set aside definitions of culture "with a capital C", linked to the Arts, heritage and intellectual excellence, and situate ourselves in the descriptive anthropological tradition, uses such as "service culture", "digital culture" or "mobile phone culture" seem to reduce it to the idea of shared knowledge, norms, practices and representations, even attitudes and values, but the all-important link with the particular social group sharing this culture is lost. Indeed, although the concept was central in anthropology for many years, it has now become strongly contested even within this discipline (Anderson-Levitt, 2012;[START_REF] Kuper | L'illusion des cultures[END_REF]. The idea that the members of a society or social group all share the same cultural references has revealed its limits in studies of (post-)modern societies characterised by the diversity of their populations and a certain liquidity [START_REF] Bauman | Culture in a Liquid Modern World[END_REF] in the identity choices people make. For many anthropologists, the concept with its homogenising overtones is not sufficiently dynamic to capture the complex social processes and contexts within which people evolve today. For this reason, Arjun Appadurai prefers to employ the adjective "cultural" rather than the more static noun (Appadurai, 2001, pp. 40-47), referring to "cultural traits" which he defines as "a difference which refers to something local, concrete and meaningful" (ibid. p42). Jean-Loup Amselle points out that even terms such as "creolisation", "hybridisation" or "métissage" still implicitly refer to the myth of "pure" cultures: It is not enough to suggest that all cultures are creolised or have undergone métissage to escape from this dead end, since supposing that each culture has multiple origins brings us straight back to the distinction between different cultures, the idea that we're trying to set aside. Only total cultural agnosticism, i.e. the desire to detach all forms of thought from any particular origin, allows us to escape from this circular reasoning. (Amselle, 2001, pp. 205-6).2

Culture as Structure and Praxis

In order to better understand the debates and criticisms surrounding the concept of culture, it is important to take into account its fundamental duality, in that it both structures our social interactions and is performed through them. Paraphrasing Edward Hall, cultures shape our communication, and our communication in turn shapes our cultures.3 Zygmunt Bauman expresses this idea, and the tensions between conformism and non-conformism underlying our everyday social interactions when he observes that culture as praxis:4 is as much about inventing as it is about preserving; about discontinuity as much as about continuation; about novelty as much as about tradition; about routine as much as about pattern breaking; about norm-following as much as about the transcendence of norm; about the unique as much as about the regular; about change as much as about monotony of reproduction; about the unexpected as much as about the predictable. (Bauman, 1999, p. xiv).

Here, Bauman is echoing Anthony Giddens' vision of the duality of structure, which Giddens expressed in the form of Structuration Theory (1987), reminding us that when individuals produce symbolic acts (speech, actions), they are unconsciously referring to various rules and norms, but the fact of doing so means that the rules and norms themselves are being maintained and possibly updated. The system which structures behaviour is itself reproduced through the behaviour it structures.

If we consider it as structure, then, it is important to note that culture is not stable, but a dynamic process. As Dominique Desjeux points out: "Culture is both structure and something dynamic, which is what makes it so hard to observe and analyse. As structure, it includes stable elements which can give the impression that it has an essence, whereas in fact this stability results first and foremost from the fact that historically things change over long periods. As a dynamic process, it is indeed subject to historical change" (Desjeux, 2002, p. 2). 5 Failure to seize this complexity has led to many misunderstandings and the idea that culture is something which determines behaviour. Unhelpful but commercially successful metaphors, such as Hofstede's "software of the mind" metaphor of culture6 have tended to reinforce such misconceptions.

However, despite the critical voices, most recent scientific research using the culture concept claims to have taken its "structuralist turn" in order to take into account the process-based nature of the concept. Unfortunately, this is not always followed up in the studies themselves, where careless "culturespeak" can sometimes lead to confusion about what belongs where: considerations of supposed pan-cultural characteristics (macro-level) are projected onto individuals in a social interaction (micro-level) without taking into account the fact that individuals adapt their behaviours to situations and to one another, that in their interactions people do not act towards foreigners in the way they would towards people from their own country, and so on. Whereas some of his colleagues call for the concept to be abandoned completely in modern anthropology, Dominique Desjeux suggests that it is enough to pay careful attention to the different "scales of observation" one is employing, which correspond to the "structural" and "dynamic" dimensions of culture:

The question of scales helps us to resolve at least some of the difficulties linked to observing culture: what we can observe on the macro-social scale, and which allows us to identify the regularities of a culture, disappears on the micro-social scale where behavioural and cultural differences are dominant. Both hold true at once, and that is what is most troubling and even hard to accept, but it does allow us to better understand the validity and the limits of each approach to culture. Observation Scales Theory is an anthropological approach which allows us to grasp these different perspectives". (Desjeux, 2002, p. 3). 7

Ideological Uses of the Notion of Culture

In his book Liquid Culture, Zygmunt Bauman (2011, pp. 1-17) identifies different uses of the notion of culture in different historical periods and distinguishes four of these: culture as Enlightenment (intellectual progress), culture as global domination (Elias's civilization process), culture as homeostasis and maintenance of group boundaries (linked to Bourdieu's distinction), and culture as personal invention (liquid modernity, multicultural societies). In each period, claims Bauman, the conception is given a particular ideological nuance: linked to rationalism, imperialism, elitism and then relativism respectively, and, except in its liquid version, used to ethically justify various policies and attitudes towards other groups, judged as inferior. Colonialism and imperialism are two of these. Elsewhere, Bauman describes culture as "simultaneously a man-made and a man-making entity" (Bauman, 1999, p. 28), in that it replaces, at least to some degree, supernatural rationalisations of the differences in behaviour, development, wealth, and so on between ethnic groups. Indeed, despite their historical roots, all four ideologies of culture can be found today in discourse among politicians, the media and the public in many Western countries.

Public discourse linked to the question of migration, for example, may often pretext cultural differences to stigmatise, exclude or devalue members of migrant communities. Such discourse may oscillate between a denial of the legitimacy of differences (we're all the same underneath: everyone should be treated equally and be held to respect the same rules and norms) and the idea that the differences which are attributed to these groups somehow constitute unassailable symbolic boundaries to their "integration" in a so-called "host" society. In a circular logic which has been analysed by Fredrik Barth (1969), very often the values, beliefs and practices held up as models for a particular host society are chosen in the light of the cultural differences being denounced and used to draw up and maintain symbolic boundaries between the majority and the minority groups who are being targeted. To quote Dominique Desjeux once again, "culture, which can be the key to adapting to someone, can just as easily be used as a means to deny them their existence" (2002, p. 6). 8 By taking on a false air of scientific discourse, such arguments based on "culture" and "diversity" often contribute to maintaining boundaries and creating ghettos within society. Even though it is often associated with the political right, such deterministic discourse can also be employed by the defenders 7 "La question des échelles permet de résoudre une partie des difficultés liées à l'observation de la culture : ce qui est observé à l'échelle macro-sociale et qui permet de repérer les régularités d'une culture, disparaît à l'échelle micro-sociale où les diversités culturelles et comportementales dominent. Les deux sont vrais en même temps et c'est cela qui est troublant, voire difficile à accepter, mais qui pourtant permet de mieux comprendre la portée et les limites de chaque approche culturelle. La théorie des échelles d'observation est une approche anthropologique qui permet de comprendre la diversité des approches ". My English translation. 8 "La culture peut autant être une clé pour mieux fonctionner avec l'autre qu'un moyen de le nier." My English translation.

of multiculturalism and even by self-appointed spokespeople of the minority groups themselves, seeking to give themselves political legitimacy and have their voices heard. Although it was long opposed to hegemonic universalism, cultural relativism paradoxically shares the same faults when it is used to promote or justify hegemonic practices in the name of the right to difference, as Albin Wagener explains (2015, pp. 147-57). In "multiculturalism" we find the term "culturalism": claiming and defending a particular "cultural identity" very often leads to reducing this to a set of fixed and recognisable symbols, which are more or less "traditional", "authentic", or invented in a dynamic process of boundary maintenance (Barth, 1969).

This can be illustrated by the cultural appropriation debate, when often self-designated representatives of a minority or underprivileged social group accuse non-members of trying to illegitimately appropriate its cultural codes, often in order to make a profit. The British music group Coldplay and American pop stars such as Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry have come under such criticism in recent years, 9 but the debate even extends to which children can legitimately wear which costumes at Halloween or for Carnival celebrations in the US and elsewhere. Such tensions show just how far things can go when cultural identity claims are taken for absolute truths. North-American multiculturalism is certainly an extreme example of this, but one which is symptomatic of a more general ideological tendency towards more "solid", essentialist (Dervin & Machart, 2015a), deterministic and reductive approaches to the question of cultural identity.

Even in the academic field of intercultural education, Martine Abdallah-Pretceille remarked, over ten years ago, that "the relatively recent recognition of cultures has led to a totalitarian stance towards the cultural dimension, by reducing individuals to their cultural groups and by overestimating the importance of the cultural dimension". (Abdallah-Pretceille, 2006, p. 2). 10 The same comments also apply to scholarly work in other fields, where methodological nationalism [START_REF] Dervin | Au-delà du nationalisme méthodologique : l'interculturel sans essentialisme[END_REF][START_REF] Wimmer | Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and the social sciences[END_REF] 11 is a limit to be avoided at all costs. As Fred Dervin and Régis Machart regret, too often the concept of culture has become "the easy-and-ready-to-be-used explanation for almost everything, the click-and-use application which apparently makes life easy without wondering if we really need it or if it is scientifically or ethically justified" (Dervin & Machart, 2015b, p. 5).

So should we reject this concept, which has become intellectually too vague, too dangerous, as many authors suggest? Without seeking to belittle the risks or undermine the objections presented above, our answer to this question is negative, since that would also mean abandoning it to those who seek to exploit the term in essentialist ways, through ignorance or in order to further their political, social or commercial agendas. We thus adopt the same line as Ulf Hannerz did, back in 1999 (Hannerz, 1999, p. 396), despite the fact that little or nothing seems to have improved in the meantime. We defend the idea that we can still best combat these misuses of the term by promoting a more rigorous and complex use of the concept, taking into account the different scales of observation (supra), but also the fact that essentialist representations of cultures exist out there in society and play a role in the way we relate to one another on a daily basis. 9 Cf. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/apr/17/hunger-games-amandla-stenberg-criticises-mileycyrus-taylor-swift-cultural-appropriation. Page consulted on 31/03/2017. 10 "La reconnaissance, relativement récente, des cultures tend à une « dictature » du culturel par réduction de l'individu à son appartenance culturelle, par une survalorisation de la dimension culturelle". My English translation. 11 Methodological nationalism consists in treating nationality, in experimental design, as the sole independent variable which may explain variations in observed behaviour: the fact of comparing different national populations may make the researcher blind to intra-national variations, or cause him/her to attribute differences between corpora to national culture, whereas other factors may (also) be involved.

Culture as a Social Construction and a Communication Toolkit

The trap of methodological nationalism prevents us from defining an individual by his/her claimed or supposed membership of one single social group -migrants are not simply migrants, any more than they are simply Turks, Russians or Chinese, and it would be extremely hazardous to predict behaviour based on such identifications (cultural reductionism or determinism). However, such reliance on cultural identifications is an everyday occurrence in the social world, where we tend to unthinkingly use various categories to define ourselves and others in order to predict behaviour and anticipate reactions. In this sense, the concept of culture is a social reality, used to make sense of the social world around us and corresponds to a basic human need to think in terms of categories. As Adrian Holliday puts it, "While culture may not be real in the solid, essentialist sense, it is real in the way in which it is used and as an excuse, and very often real in the minds of those who use it". (Holliday, 2015, p. 199). It follows that this concept should be apprehended not as an ontological category, but as a social construct, as the source of heuristic and discursive categorisations. In an article devoted to the question of regional identities, Pierre Bourdieu (1980, p. 65) reminds us that our "representations of reality" (la réprésentation du réel) are just as important as reality itself, since symbolically the representations are what we use to make sense of things.

Social psychology has extensively documented and commented upon the process of social categorisation and the associated intergroup identity processes [START_REF] Moscovici | Psychologie sociale des relations à autrui[END_REF][START_REF] Tajfel | Human Groups and Social Categories: Studies in Social Psychology[END_REF]. Social categorisation works as a sort of "cognitive shortcut", an easy way for the brain to divide up the unthinkable complexity of the world into groups, classes and categories which make it easier to apprehend. This way of thinking encourages us to consider individuals that we've identified as members of a particular group, based on their membership of this group and of the traits which we expect them to share, on the basis of their membership, with other members of the same group. The more different a group appears to be to our "own" group -perceived differences which we often explain away through culture -the more members of that group may tend to appear alike. The use of stereotypes to represent the members of groups with which we are not very familiar is a salutary cognitive reaction when faced with the potential anxiety which is associated with high levels of behavioural and predictive uncertainty in interactions with strangers [START_REF] Gudykunst | Anxiety / Uncertainty Management (AUM) Theory[END_REF]. Simplifying the complexity through the use of stereotypes is a way of making it more familiar and less frightening. In order to help us think about Otherness or communicate with individuals whom we identify as members of a (little-known) out-group, social categorisation comforts us in the idea that the members of such and such a group share a fairly homogenous culture. In other words, this natural cognitive process tends to comfort us in a falsely essentialist and reductive vision of cultures.

The position defended here, however, is that not only is the notion of culture meaningful in peoples' everyday interactions, as a heuristic category based on attributions of social membership, but also that we should not reduce culture to only this: it is not simply a sort of subjective projection without any objective foundation. We believe that the concept is also necessary and useful in order to understand the structural regularity which can be socially expected within a group, on the level of values, beliefs, practices, etc., as long as we distinguish the two scales of observation (supra). Culture as a "representation of reality" is of course idiosyncratic and so does not correspond perfectly to the patterns of socialisation that can be observed by the analyst on the macrosocial level. However, although these patterns can be found and seen to exercise some degree of influence over people's behaviour (from which they are deduced), they are neither uniformly distributed among members of a particular group, nor is the relationship one of deterministic causality: each individual acts differently, depending on the situation, in relation to various cultures and identities, and with a greater or lesser degree of critical distance.

A useful analogy can be made with language: so that speakers may understand one another, the code needs to be sufficiently regular, regulated and widely-shared among members of the speech community. When speakers use it, they are free to respect or diverge from the various norms concerning register, grammatical correctness, etc., to produce utterances which are more or less "correct" or "nonsensical", to develop their own jargon or sub-code, but the important thing is that all of their utterances will refer implicitly to the shared code, to which they conform to a greater or lesser extent, or against which they are constructed. "Nonsense" would not be "nonsense" (or at least would not make sense as such) if we did not have a standard norm of language against which to measure it. Sometimes it is because we know that a certain type of language or discourse is expected, that we obtain the effect we want by not producing it. And it is not because people share a language that they all say the same thing, or even say things in the same way. However, if there was no (incompletely) shared code, there could not be mutual understanding.

All interpersonal communication relies on culturally pre-figured codes (such as language) and representations, which are to some extent shared by the participants in an interaction, and, which they are expected to understand, to some extent, depending on how closely they are associated with their various identities. All of these elements can be taken as references by the participants to interpret the "meaning" of what is going on and being said, in the light of their understanding of the situation and what is at stake, of their past experiences and relationships with one another, and of a whole set of internal and external factors affecting their perception [START_REF] Frame | Reframing Intercultural Communication Research: Theories and Approaches to Communicating in a Culturally Diverse World[END_REF][START_REF] Frame | De la sémiotique pour penser la complexité de la communication interpersonnelle : l'approche sémiopragmatique des interactions sociales[END_REF][START_REF] Frame | On Cultures and Interactions: Theorizing the Complexity of Intercultural Encounters[END_REF]. The "culturally pre-figured" elements can result not only from national culture, but from many other vectors of socialisation. According to [START_REF] Berger | The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge[END_REF], primary socialisation marks the individual's mind, his/her ways of expressing him/herself and of understanding the world, in a way that secondary socialisation does not. It plays a role in structuring cognition during the formative years, and as such has a more profound impact than secondary socialisation, which in turn helps the socially-aware individual to adapt to interactions within previously-unknown groups. Through secondary socialisation, the individual adapts his/her expectations, practices and discourse, learning new codes and new behaviours based on his/her representations of the social groups12 and their norms.

It should be clear that the term "culture" is being used here in relation to social groups of various types and sizes, from the couple [START_REF] Imahori | Identity Management Theory. Facework in Intercultural Relationships[END_REF] or the family [START_REF] Kiecolt | Roots of Identity. Family Resemblances[END_REF], groups of friends, colleagues from a department or service, to a whole organisation (Frost, Moore, Louis, Lundberg, & Martin, 1991), a locality, a region, a profession, etc. "In practice, an individual takes part in several cultures" (Chevrier, 2003, p. 27). 13 The notion of "taking part in a culture" casts the individual in an active role, whereby (s)he draws upon a cultural toolkit [START_REF] Swidler | Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies[END_REF] of knowledge and references in order to express him/herself and to make sense of what is going on. Mary Zellmer-Bruhn and Cristina Gibson defend a constructivist vision of the cultural dynamics of interactions, commenting that "whereas the values-based approach tends to view individuals from a single cultural background as having one perspective on each value, the constructivist view indicates that individuals have a toolkit or repertoire of cultural knowledge at their disposal." (Zellmer-Bruhn & Gibson, 2014, p. 175). The individual selects the cultural "tools" which appear most appropriate, given the situation and the figurative context (Frame, 2013a), rather than being constrained into acting in a particular way, based on his/her primary socialisation background. For this reason, [START_REF] Brewer | Culture and Group Processes. Defining the interface[END_REF] plead for the necessity of adopting "a situated view of culture":

A situated view of culture is particularly important for understanding the relationship between culture and group process because social interactions in the group context constitute specific social situations. Across the life span, individuals engage in many types of groups -family groups, friendship groups, recreational groups, work groups, large organizations, national groups, and so on -that differ significantly in size, structure, purpose and temporal extension. These group features constitute situational cues that activate cultural knowledge structures appropriate to that particular social context […]. Thus, we cannot simply assume that the individuals from a particular cultural background bring a single, fixed set of beliefs and values to all group encounters. Rather, to understand the interface between culture and group process, we need to know what cultural meanings are brought to bear in groups that vary in form and function. (Brewer & Yuki, 2014, p. 4).

Such dynamic, process-based visions of culture, underlining the importance of intersubjective negotiation and social context in the way that cultural traits are mobilised correspond to what Zygmunt [START_REF] Bauman | Culture in a Liquid Modern World[END_REF]Fred Dervin (2011, p. 33) call "liquid" approaches to culture, as opposed to more essentialist and reductive "solid" approaches. They underline the fact that the ways in which we behave are often only very loosely connected, if at all, to the places we grew up or the education we received.

Conclusion

Communication scholars should be sensitive to the concept of culture on at least three levels in an interaction. They must distinguish between macro-level and micro-level manifestations of culture, between the widely-shared cultural references supposedly commonly held by the members of a particular nation or other social group, and the way that these references may be mobilised, adapted, or neglected in favour of other cultural references or emergent forms of negotiated behaviour, in a given interaction. In this sense, communication begins where culture ends: in the intersubjective negotiations and emergent structures of meaning to which individuals refer in order to make themselves predictable and interpret the meanings that they suppose others are trying to convey, in a given context. However, to do this, the individuals involved also reason in terms of the third level of culture which scholars need to take into account: that of cultural identity as a social construct, with its associated symbolic boundaries. Despite the "liquidity" of the approaches adopted here, "solid" culture remains often in the minds and eyes of those using it to make sense of cultural diversity in terms of "us" and "them". As Dervin and Machart point out, "« Often it is not the Other that we meet in intercultural situations, but our imagination of his/her culture as it is conveyed through different types of discourses on which mass (and nowadays social) media tend to focus. Culture then tends to prescribe how these individuals should be seen, met, understood, dealt with, and so on, rather than recognising who they are in their diverse diversities (gender, social class, religion, age, etc.), as an individual Self. » (Dervin & Machart, 2015b, p. 3).

In order to transcend the dichotomy between solid and liquid approaches to culture, Tania Ogay and Doris Edelmann (2016) propose a third term which can help us conceptualise the relationship between the first two. Ogay and Edelmann propose to compare culture to a "non-Newtonian fluid": a fluid which densifies when subjected to pressure, to the point of becoming almost solid, but which returns to a liquid state once the pressure has been removed. Thus, they write: "Culture is usually liquid, (or gaseous like air), permeating everything in the context, but remaining unnoticed. But when there is pressure (for example through identification/differentiation issues as a result of intercultural contact), culture becomes solid and perceptible, and differences are perceived and performed." (Ogay & Edelmann, 2016, pp. 9-10). This metaphor allows us to account for the ways in which moments of tension or rivalry between groups within society leads to cultural identities being foregrounded and becoming symbolically more "solid" (i.e. both more rigid and reductive, essentialist).

At a time when tensions and conflicts, between ethnic and religious groups, undermine the social cohesion of many societies around the world, when resulting migrations are presented by populist leaders as a threat to supposed cultural homogeneity and their particular brand of nostalgic parochialism, it is more important than ever for scholars not to simply dismiss such discourse out of hand as an misuse of the concept of culture, but to be able to account for it by explaining the mechanisms on which it depends. We should not wash our hands of the concept of culture through intellectual puritanism, just because the concept is being (mis)used socially, since this would also mean passing up our chance to engage with this discourse. Rather we should use our understanding of the social phenomenon at hand in order to fight against such reductionism. In the same way that terrorism which aims to create fear is fuelled by fear itself and the tensions which arise from this, xenophobic populist discourse acts like a vicious self-fulfilling prophecy, giving itself legitimacy by exacerbating social tensions. 14 Polarising discourse manipulates and solidifies perceived cultural differences behind which each group takes refuge to defend its identity. In order to combat such discourse, it is important to seek to reduce binary "Us versus Them" thinking, to highlight social complexity and question the solidity of cultural identifications. Scholars in the social sciences are in a unique position, with the conceptual knowledge and critical standpoint which allow them to act as mediators in such social conflicts. Rather than turning inwards and dissociating themselves from ongoing social debates involving culture, it is becoming more and more urgent that they stand up and make their voices heard. Barth, F. (1969). Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Nationality and Nationalism: Area and Period Studies-Modern Middle East, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, 3. Bauman, Z. (1999). Culture as Praxis. London: Sage.

  , M. (2006). L'interculturel comme paradigme pour penser le divers. Presented at the Congreso internacional de educacion internacional, Madrid, 15-17 mars 2006. Retrieved from http://www.uned.es/congreso-inter-educacion-intercultural/pretceille_frances.pdf Amselle, J.-L. (2001). Branchements : Anthropologie de l'universelle des cultures (Flammarion). Paris: Flammarion. Anderson-Levitt, K. M. (2012). Complicating the concept of culture. Comparative Education, 48(4), 441-454. Appadurai, A. (2001). Après le colonialisme : les conséquences culturelles de la globalisation. Paris: Payot.

Alex Frame is Associate Professor of Communication Science at the University of Burgundy (Dijon, France), member of the "Texte, Image, Langage" research group. Alexander.Frame@u-bourgogne.fr.

"Il ne suffit pas non plus d'affirmer la créolité ou le métissage de toutes les cultures pour sortir de cette aporie, car supposer une multi-origine de chaque culture reconduit précisément la distinction entre les différentes cultures, dispositif que l'on entend justement écarter. Seul un agnosticisme culturel absolu, c'est-à-dire la volonté de débrancher toute forme de pensée d'une origine quelconque, permet d'échapper à ce cercle". My English translation.

In the Silent Language, Hall famously states, "Culture is communication and communication is culture"(Hall, 1959, p. 186).

The title of this section is inspired by Bauman's book Culture as Praxis. The term praxis is used here to refer to culture which exists through practice: it is only through behaviour marked by culture that culture is maintained, passed on and renewed.

"La culture est à la fois une structure et une dynamique, c'est ce qui rend son analyse et son observation si difficile. Comme structure elle comprend des éléments stables qui peuvent donner l'impression d'une essence alors que cette stabilité relève surtout de la longue durée historique. Comme dynamique elle est soumise au changement et à l'histoire". My English translation.

Geert Hofstede is probably the most successful author in the field of cross-cultural communication, and his bestselling publication aimed notably at business leaders, in which he describes his "dimensional model" of culture is entitled: Cultures and Organisations: Software of the Mind[START_REF] Hofstede | Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, Third Edition[END_REF].

These social groups are themselves idealisations first encountered during primary socialisation, which help to define the individual's place in society, his/her relationships with others, his/her sense of belonging to the groups (s)he identifies with or not.

"En pratique, un individu […] participe de plusieurs cultures". My English translation.

Indeed, there is a cynical symbiosis between xenophobic populism and Islamist terrorism, which support each other's cause while claiming to fight against one another.