The safest investment? Discursive modes of justification and normalization of the mortgages in blogs, media and PR articles in the Czech Republic.

Abstract

Mortgage debt enacts contradictory emotions among debtors, whose understanding of mortgages as such is deeply ambivalent. Mortgages for debtors represent burden, insecurity and uncertainty, but paradoxically serve to deliver the dreamed security of homeownership.

In the following contribution, I trace various discursive modes of justification and appropriation of mortgage debt performed in Czech media and blogs and compare them to justifications used by debtors. I argue that certain imaginary of mortgage debt created by those labelled as experts (bloggers, opinion-leaders, journalist) functions as reservoir of tropes and topoi for the debtors.

I aim to question to what extent and in which contexts these debtors invent original arguments and how and where they apply tropes and topoi presented in public discourse (media, blogs, websites, PR texts) to legitimize their indebtedness. I present the analysis of corpus of data based on the media and blog articles from the Czech Republic (in 1996 - 2016).

The media articles were exported from database NEWTON Media, which monitors major printed and web-based newspapers and journals. Articles were selected with respect to the occurrence of the keywords "mortgage"; "mortgage loan".

Relevance of blogs was identified in relation to their web traffic and position in the web search engines. Moreover, the presentation of mortgage loan providers (i. e. banks) to the public in the form of advertisement, PR documents and quasi-advice media articles authored by financial consultants is taken into account.

I combine the elements of structural narrative analysis (the focus on form and genre of texts), critical discourse analysis (topoi, linguistic construction of emotions) and visual analysis (semantics of visual data). The aim is to identify the potentially most relevant parts regarding their ideological and imaginative impact on readers.

The particular aims of the analysis are to distinguish the emotional and technical accounts, metaphors and (quasi)arguments, references to abstract or particular principles, narratively structured or fragmented texts. Apart from qualitative methods of discourse analysis, certain quantitative features of analysis are applied to the corpus to identify most frequent and co-occurred tropes and argumentative figures.

So far the provisional results of analysis indicate that the debtors successfully overcome their primary negative attitudes to debt by defining homeownership as the best investment and by constant remembrance of low interest rates of the mortgages. The character of public discourse and its interconnectedness with family discourses results in normalization of mortgage debt as a device to reach for the homeownership in the Czech Republic.

Consequently it might played significant role in the current expansion of mortgage market and rising of the housing prices in certain places in the Czech Republic (Prague, Brno). In this regard the findings may be relevant also for another European countries with similar structure of housing market and discourse about mortgage debts.