Download This PaperUser-Generated Nationalism: Interactions With Religion, Race, and Partisanship in Everyday Talk Online
Shahin, S. (2020). User-generated nationalism: interactions with religion, race, and partisanship in everyday talk online. Information, Communication & Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1748088
17 Pages Posted: 14 May 2020 Last revised: 26 Dec 2020
Date Written: June 1, 2020
Abstract
This article examines how the nationalist imagination structures cyberspace from the bottom up, or what I call “user-generated nationalism.” It also looks at the interplay between nationalism and other, non-spatial modes of social identification. My analysis of a month of tweets indicates that religious, racialized, and partisan identities are quite pronounced online, but they also tend to be conflated with nationalism. I argue that nationalism is not simply banal itself: because of its fixity in place and political correctness, it is used to lend legitimacy to and “banalize” other identities. This dynamic is key to understanding the explosion of right-wing populism around the “world of nations” — especially the success of populist leaders in normalizing religious, racialized, and partisan identifications — and the central role being played by digital media in this process.
Keywords: Nationalism, Post-nationalism, Digital Materialism, Digital Politics, Social Media, Twitter, Populism, Political Communication, Topic Modeling
JEL Classification: Y90
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation