A Phenomenological Exploration of Social Media Users’ Lived Experiences in Interpreting Digital Political Discourse within Their Cultural Contexts

Abstract

The rapid growth of digital media has transformed the landscape of political communication, with social media platforms now playing a central role in shaping public discourse. However, while much research has focused on the structural and content-based aspects of digital political discourse, little has been done to explore the subjective experiences of individuals engaging with political messages online. This gap in understanding raises important questions about how personal and cultural factors influence the interpretation of political messages in digital spaces. In this study, we employ a phenomenological approach to examine how individuals interpret political content on social media and the role of their cultural backgrounds in shaping these interpretations. Specifically, this research adopts an interpretive phenomenological design aimed at capturing participants’ lived experiences (Erlebnis) in encountering and making sense of digital political messages. Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 12 participants from diverse cultural backgrounds. The analysis followed a phenomenological procedure involving iterative reading, meaning-unit identification, thematic clustering, and interpretive synthesis to uncover the essence of participants’ shared and divergent experiences. Rather than measuring attitudes quantitatively, this approach foregrounds how meaning is constructed, negotiated, and embedded within everyday digital practices. Through this process, we identify two key findings: digital platforms' personalized content reinforces pre-existing beliefs, and cultural context significantly shapes how political messages are understood. The analysis reveals that participants' interactions with political content are influenced by both the algorithmic curation of content and their personal cultural frames of reference. By centering participants’ lived narratives and interpretive reflections, the study uncovers how algorithmic structures intersect with culturally embedded meaning-making processes. These results provide a deeper, more holistic understanding of how political messages are experienced in the digital age, addressing the limitations of previous studies that have focused primarily on content and structural aspects. Our findings contribute to the growing body of literature on digital political discourse by demonstrating the value of phenomenology as a methodological lens for examining the experiential dimension of digital political engagement, highlighting the importance of considering cultural context in media studies. Future research could expand on these findings by exploring how diverse audiences engage with political content across different digital platforms.