The online anti-public sphere

2020 ◽  
pp. 136754942090279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Davis
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Political Interaction ◽  
Democratic Discourse ◽  
Rational Consideration ◽  
Facebook Pages ◽  
Discursive Field

In this article, I outline the online ‘anti-public sphere’ as an object for analysis, defined as that space of online socio-political interaction where discourse routinely and radically flouts the ethical and rational norms of democratic discourse. This is a formerly offline space made newly visible by digital networked media. It includes discursive spaces and forms such as White supremacist websites, anti-climate science forums, militant ‘men’s rights’ sites, anti-immigration Facebook pages, gay hate memes, misogynist trolling, anti-Semitic websites, alt-right websites and ‘truth’ (conspiracy) websites, to name a few, where discussion flouts norms of public debate, rules of argument and requirements for the rational consideration of evidence for its own ends. Building on earlier work on anti-publics by McKenzie Wark and Bart Cammaerts, and working from examples from several different domains of online anti-public discourse, I argue that despite its size and complexity, it is possible and necessary to theorise this heterogeneous discursive field, not least because while such discourse is often dismissed, the meanings developed in such domains increasingly intermingle with and inform everyday democratic discourse. While we tend to think of extreme and irrational online discourse as aberrant and alien to everyday democratic discourse, analysis suggests that such discourse in fact is a precise reflection of an everyday ‘post-normative’ democratic discourse that has itself become deeply inflected with reactionary and populist themes.

scholarly journals 'FASCISM IS THE NEW HIP': ONLINE ANTI-PUBLICS AND POST-NORMATIVE DEMOCRACY

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Raymound Davis
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Race Politics ◽  
Emergent Phenomena ◽  
Trust In Institutions ◽  
Marginalised Groups ◽  
The Media ◽  
Democratic Norms ◽  
Democratic Debate

In this paper I draw connections between two emergent phenomena of the recent past: the growing influence of online ‘anti-publics’ on democratic debate and the emergence of ‘post-normative democracy’. The paper draws on work by McKenzie Wark (1997) and Bart Cammaerts (2007) to further theorise the rise of online anti-publics. It demonstrates how groups such as white supremacist groups, ‘men’s rights’ groups, anti-climate science groups, and ‘neoreactionary’ or ‘Dark Enlightenment’ groups, among others, can be understood as belonging to a loose-knit, diverse online ‘anti-public sphere’. This is a heterogenous space of often fractious social interaction where discourse routinely flouts traditional democratic norms, such as normative ‘public sphere’ conventions of rational-critical deliberation, rules of evidence and argumentation, and requirements for truthfulness, reciprocity, mutuality, and so on, over and above the ways in which democratic debate is properly passionate (Papacharissi, 2016). The paper uses a case studies approach based in discourse analysis of five different groups to theorise their activities in light of their influence on the emergence of a post-normative democratic politics. This includes the normalisation of race politics across the west, attacks on human rights conventions, attempts to undermine legal processes, attacks on the media and journalists, attempts to shore up subvert gains made by marginalised groups, and systematic attempts to undermine trust in institutions. The paper will show how, to advance their cause, right groups have sought to flip established political logic and to reposition fascism as ‘the new hip’.

scholarly journals Exclusion and Articulation: Transgender Counter-Public in the Indian Public Sphere

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 32-44
Author(s):  
Parul Priya ◽  
Anurag Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Transgender People ◽  
Exclusionary Practices ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
Newspaper Articles

The study attempts to locate transgender counter-public as an alternate public sphere in India. It argues that transgender counter-public is necessitated owing to the exclusionary practices of the Indian public sphere as well as the successive counter-public spheres. The study, further claims that transgender counter-public is constructed by critiquing the marginalisation of transgender people through exclusionary practices, and articulation of concerns linked to transgender people. Public discourse analysis of both discursive arenas—print: newspaper articles, journal articles, autobiographies, biographies, memoir, and others, and non-discursive arenas—activism, pride parade, protests and alike have been adopted as methodology. The study concludes that transgender counter-public achieves the dissemination of their concerns to the wider public that exclusion and discrimination of transgender people are a denial of social justice in the democratic social structure.

On Waxen Wings: Challenges to the Public Sphere in the Network Age

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Francoeur
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Internet ◽  
The Public ◽  
Digital Space ◽  
Multiple Viewpoints ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Economic Production ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Communicative Space

There is a tendency, particularly among Western pundits and technologists, to examine the Internet in almost universally positive terms; this is most evident in any discussion of the medium’s capacity for democratization. While the Internet has produced many great things for society in terms of cultural and economic production, some consideration must be given to the implications that such a revolutionary medium holds for the public sphere. By creating a communicative space that essentially grants everyone his or her own microphone, the Internet is fragmenting public discourse due to the proliferation of opinions and messages and the removal of traditional gatekeepers of information. More significantly, because of the structural qualities of the Internet, users no longer have to expose themselves to opinions and viewpoints that fall outside their own preconceived notions. This limits the robustness of the public sphere by limiting the healthy debate that can only occur when exposed to multiple viewpoints. Ultimately, the Internet is not going anywhere, so it is important to equip the public with the tools and knowledge to be able to navigate the digital space. 

scholarly journals Conocimiento cultural como base para la construcción de identidad nacional. Un análisis del discurso de la prensa sobre el default de 2014 en Argentina

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-103
Author(s):  
Simone Mwangi
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Identidad Nacional ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Major Threat ◽  
Crisis Events

AbstractEconomic and political crisis situations are interpreted differently in different societies and cultures. What is perceived as a major threat in one society can be experienced as an everyday occurrence in other societies. This shows that crises are not issues that exist independently of people, but that they are to a large extent the result of social interpretations. An example of how a community interprets events as a surmountable challenge, rather than a crisis, is Argentina’s public discourse on the 2014 default. Instead of a discourse that concentrates on economic, political and social problems, the event provoked a political discourse on national identity. The present paper uses the methods of descriptive discourse analysis to study this solution-driven way of handling crisis events. The investigation focuses on the cultural knowledge and discourse traditions used in Argentina to interpret the country’s situation in the summer of 2014. The study analyzes how these cultural and linguistic resources contribute to coping with the situation of default while strengthening national identity.

scholarly journals UNDERSTANDING LAW AND RELIGION AS CULTURE: MAKING ROOM FOR MEANING IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (1, 2 & 3) ◽  
pp. 2006
Author(s):  
Benjamin L. Berger
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Important Relationship ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between law and religion in contemporary civil society has been a topic of increasing social interest and importance in Canada in the past many years. We have seen the practices and commitments of religious groups and individuals become highly salient on many issues of public policy, including the nature of the institution of marriage, the content of public education, and the uses of public space, to name just a few. As the vehicle for this discussion, I want to ask a straightforward question: When we listen to our public discourse, what is the story that we hear about the relationship between law and religion? How does this topic tend to be spoken about in law and politics – what is our idiom around this issue – and does this story serve us well? Though straightforward, this question has gone all but unanswered in our political and academic discussions. We take for granted our approach to speaking about – and, therefore, our way of thinking about – the relationship between law and religion. In my view, this is most unfortunate because this taken-for-grantedness is the source of our failure to properly understand the critically important relationship between law and religion.

scholarly journals Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s Notion of Political Adab

2022 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 339-364
Author(s):  
William Ryle-Hodges
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Journalism ◽  
Good Taste ◽  
Modern Context ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Discursive Field

This paper extends the emphasis on contingency and context in Islamic ethical traditions into the distinctly modern context of late 19th century Khedival Egypt. I draw attention to the way Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s engagement with Islamic ethical traditions was shaped by his practice in addressing the broad social and political questions of his context to do with nation-building and political journalism. As a bureaucrat and state publicist, he took pre-modern Islamic ethical concepts into the emerging discursive field of the modern state and the public sphere in Egypt. Looking at a series of newspaper articles for the state newspaper, al-Waqāʾiʿ al-miṣriyya, I show how he articulated an ethics of citizenship by defining a modern civic notion of adab that he called “political adab.” He conceived of this adab as the answer to the problem of how a unified nation emerges from the condition of “freedom” by which journalists and the reading public at the time were conceptualizing the politics of the ʿUrābī revolution in late 1881. This was a “freedom” of the public sphere that allowed for free speech and the power of public opinion to shape governance. ‘Political adab’ would be the virtue or situational skill, internalized in each participant in the public sphere, that would regulate this freedom, ensuring that it produces unity rather than anarchy. I argue that adab here enshrined ʿAbduh’s holistic approach to nation-building; Egypt with political rights would be a nation in which the very idea of the nation is comprehensively embedded—through adab—in people’s lives, animating their “souls”. This was a politics conceived not as a self-standing domain, but as growing out of society, becoming thereby an authentic unity and self-regulating “life”. In developing this vision, ʿAbduh was amplifying pre-modern meanings of adab implying wide breadth of knowledge, good taste, and the virtues, labelled in the paper as ‘comprehensivness,’ ‘consensus’ and ‘habitus.’ Keywords: Muḥammad ʿAbduh, Adab, Freedom, Nation, Politics, Egypt

scholarly journals The Digital Transformation of the Public Sphere, Its Features in the Context of Various Political Regimes, and Its Possible Influence on Political Processes

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 149-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexey Salikov
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Digital Transformation ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
Internet Communication ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Relationship

The question of how the digital transformation of the public sphere affects political processes has been of interest to researchers since the spread of the Internet in the early 1990s. However, today there is no clear or unambiguous answer to this question; expert estimates differ radically, from extremely positive to extremely negative. This article attempts to take a comprehensive approach to this issue, conceptualizing the transformations taking place in the public sphere under the influence of Internet communication technologies, taking their political context into account, and identifying the relationship between these changes and possible transformations of political regimes. In order to achieve these goals, several tasks are tackled during this research. The first section examines the issue as to whether the concept of the public sphere can be used in a non-democratic context. It also delineates two main types of the public sphere, the “democratic public sphere” and the “authoritarian public sphere,” in order to take into account the features of public discourse in the context of various political regimes. The second section discusses the special aspects of the digital transformation of the public sphere in a democratic context. The third section considers the special aspects of the digital transformation of the public sphere in a non-democratic context. The concluding section summarizes the results of the study, states the existing gaps and difficulties, outlines the ways for their possible extension, and raises questions requiring attention from other researchers.

scholarly journals A National Public Sphere? Analyzing the Language, Location, and Form of Newspapers in Finland, 1771–1917

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
Jani Marjanen ◽  
Ville Vaara ◽  
Antti Kanner ◽  
Hege Roivainen ◽  
Eetu Mäkelä ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Mass Medium ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
The Public ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Newspaper History

This article uses metadata from serial publications as a means of modelling the historical development of the public sphere. Given that a great deal of historical knowledge is generated through narratives relying on anecdotal evidence, any attempt to rely on newspapers for modeling the past challenges customary approaches in political and cultural history. The focus in this article is on Finland, but our approach is also scalable to other regions. During the period 1771–1917 newspapers developed as a mass medium in the Grand Duchy of Finland within two imperial configurations (Sweden until 1809 and Russia in 1809–1917), and in the two main languages – Swedish and Finnish. Finland is an ideal starting point for conducting comparative studies in that its bilingual profile already includes two linguistically separated public spheres that nonetheless were heavily connected. Our particular interest here is in newspaper metadata, which we use to trace the expansion of public discourse in Finland by statistical means. We coordinate information on publication places, language, number of issues, number of words, newspaper size, and publishers, which we compare with existing scholarship on newspaper history and censorship, and thereby offer a more robust statistical analysis of newspaper publishing in Finland than has previously been possible. We specifically examine the interplay between the Swedish- and Finnish-language newspapers and show that, whereas the public discussions were inherently bilingual, the technological and journalistic developments advanced at different pace in the two language forums. This analysis challenges the perception of a uniform public sphere in the country. In addition, we assess the development of the press in comparison with the production of books and periodicals, which points toward the specialization of newspapers as a medium in the period after 1860. This confirms some earlier findings about Finnish print production. We then show how this specialization came about through the establishment of forums for local debates that other less localized print media such as magazines and books could not provide.

scholarly journals Rhetorical Discourse Analysis of State of the Nation Address of Select Philippine Presidents

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lilibeth A. Calonge ◽  
Ismael N. Talili
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Standard Deviation ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Public Speaking ◽  
Frequency Standard ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Weighted Mean ◽  
Rhetorical Device ◽  
Rhetorical Devices ◽  
Rhetorical Discourse

The art of public speaking has been one of the commonly feared tasks for some people because they are not prepared and equipped with knowledge in rhetoric. The study was conducted to analyze the State of the Nation Address (SONA) delivered by the three presidents of the Philippines. Speech videos and speech manuscripts were analyzed using validated rubrics. A survey was also conducted to gather information on students’ perception on the study of rhetoric. Frequency, standard deviation, and weighted mean were used to analyze the rhetorical devices and canons of rhetoric employed in the speeches. It was found out that metaphor is a common rhetorical device used by the Presidents. The results show that the canons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery were utilized in the speeches. Majority of the students of Rhetoric and Public Discourse, self-reported (or agreed) that the rhetorical discourse analysis of the SONA is beneficial to them as Rhetoric and Public Discourse students. The study concludes that the Presidents used the rhetorical elements and techniques to convince and influence the audience. It is recommended that the presidents (or their speech writers) should consider optimum use of the rhetorical elements and techniques to evoke the desired response from the audience.

scholarly journals Come Fly With Me: Analyzing The F-35 Aircraft Acquisition Discourse to Study Incivility in Question Period

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arun Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Accountability ◽  
The People ◽  
Canadian Politics ◽  
The Government

The main objective behind the parliamentary practice of Question Period is to ensure that the government is held accountable to the people. Rather than being a political accountability tool and a showcase of public discourse, these deliberations are most often displays of vitriolic political rhetoric. I will be focusing my research on the ways in which incivil political discourse permeates the political mediascape with respect to one instance in Canadian politics - the acquisition of the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter. I believe that incivility in the political discourse of Question Period must be understood within the mechanics of the contemporary public sphere. By interrogating the complexities of how political discourse is being mediatized, produced and consumed within the prevailing ideological paradigms, I identify some of the contemporary social, cultural and political practices that produce incivility in parliamentary discourse.

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