Beyond pandemic populism: COVID-related cultures of rejection in digital environments, a case study of two Austrian online spaces

ABSTRACT

Opratko’s article presents the results of a discourse-centred online ethnography, tracing the articulations of COVID-related debates against the wider backdrop of ‘cultures of rejection’ among members of online communities based in Austria. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ‘corona question’ emerged as a particularly contentious topic in Austria, both in official politics and on the level of everyday discourse. It not only reinforced accusatory attitudes towards ‘traditional’ Others, such as migrants or the unemployed, but also produced new articulations that cut across traditional left-right distinctions and new sociocultural rifts related to the acceptance or rejection of anti-pandemic measures. Finally, Opratko argues that, in COVID-related cultures of rejection, we find efforts to counter a perceived crisis of authority performatively constructing specific forms of counter-authorities, and a high level of political activity both online and offline.

KEYWORDS:

• Austria
• COVID-19
• cultures of rejection
• populism
• protest movements
• social media

Notes

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6 Vieten, ‘The “new normal” and “pandemic populism”’.

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8 Quinn Slobodian and William Callison, ‘Coronapolitics from the Reichstag to the Capitol’, 5 January 2021, available on the Boston Review (online), available at https://bostonreview.net/politics/william-callison-quinn-slobodian-coronapolitics-reichstag-capitol (viewed 6 July 2023).

9 Simon Teune, ‘Querdenken und die Bewegungsforschung–neue Herausforderung oder déjà-vu?’, Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, vol. 34, no. 2, 2021, 326–34.

10 Alexander Harder and Benjamin Opratko, ‘Digitale Abgründe’, Tagebuch, no. 5, 2021, 14–19; Isabell Otto, ‘“Querdenken” in Smartphone-Gemeinschaften: Digitale Skills und Medienmisstrauen in einem Telegram- Gruppenchat’, in Reichardt (ed.), Die Misstrauensgemeinschaft der ‘Querdenker’, 159–223.

11 For research design and conceptual framework, see the Cultures of Rejection website, available at www.culturesofrejection.net (viewed 4 July 2023).

12 danah boyd, ‘Social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications’, in Zizi Papacharissi (ed.), A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (London and New York: Routledge 2011), 39–58; Christine Hine, Virtual Ethnography (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 2000 ); Robert V. Kozinets, Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online (Los Angeles and London: Sage 2009); Piia Varis, ‘Digital ethnography’, in Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Tereza Spilioti (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication (London and New York: Routledge 2016), 55­–68.

13 Jannis Androutsopoulos, ‘Potentials and limitations of discourse-centred online ethnography’, Language@Internet (online), vol. 5, 2008, article 8, available at www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2008/1610 (viewed 6 July 2023).

14 Quoted in Sally Baker, ‘Conceptualising the use of Facebook in ethnographic research: as tool, as data and as context’, Ethnography and Education, vol. 8, no. 2, 2013, 131–45 (140).

15 Danielle N. Jacques, ‘Using MAXQDA in ethnographic research: an example with coding, analyzing, and writing’, in Michael C. Gizzi and Stefan Rädiker (eds), The Practice of Qualitative Data Analysis: Research Examples Using MAXQDA (Berlin: MAXQDA 2021), 17–33; Udo Kuckartz and Stefan Rädiker, Analyzing Qualitative Data with MAXQDA: Text, Audio, and Video (Cham: Springer 2019), 171–86.

16 Cf. Alexander Harder and Benjamin Opratko, ‘Cultures of rejection at work: investigating the acceptability of authoritarian populism’, Ethnicities, vol. 22, no. 3, 2022, 425–45; Benjamin Opratko, ‘Ablehnungskulturen als Akzeptabilitätsbedingungen des autoritären Populismus’, in Seongcheol Kim and Veith Selk (eds), Wie weiter mit der Populismusforschung? (Baden-Baden: Nomos 2021), 177–94.

17 Cf. Gavan Titley, Is Free Speech Racist? (Medford, MA and Cambridge: Polity 2020); Aaron Winter, ‘Online hate: from the far-right to the “alt-right” and from the margins to the mainstream’, in Karen Lumsden and Emily Harmer (eds), Online Othering: Exploring Digital Violence and Discrimination on the Web, Palgrave Studies in Cybercrime and Cybersecurity (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2019), 39–63.

18 Reichardt (ed.), Die Misstrauensgemeinschaft Der ‘Querdenker’; Callison and Slobodian, ‘Coronapolitics from the Reichstag to the Capitol’.

19 ORF, 'Festnahmen und Anzeigenflut bei CoV-Demo', 16 January 2021, available on the ORF website at https://wien.orf.at/stories/3085165/ (viewed 13 October 2023).

20 Richard Rogers, ‘Deplatforming: following extreme internet celebrities to Telegram and alternative social media’, European Journal of Communication, vol. 35, no. 3, 2020, 203–322.

21 Harder and Opratko, ‘Digitale Abgründe’.

22 Otto, ‘“Querdenken” in Smartphone-Gemeinschaften’, 174. Translations from the German, unless other stated, are by the authors.

23 Elisabeth Schwenter, ‘Hass, Verhetzung, Wiederbetätigung: Der braune Facebook-Sumpf über der Donau’, Meinbezirk.at, 28 February 2018, available at www.meinbezirk.at/wien/c-lokales/hass-verhetzung-wiederbetaetigung-der-braune-facebook-sumpf-ueber-der-donau_a2420587?cp=Kurationsbox (viewed 20 July 2023).

24 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London and New York: Verso 2085), 127–34 (127).

25 Dag Balkmar, ‘Violent mobilities: men, masculinities and road conflicts in Sweden’, Mobilities, vol. 13, no. 5, 2018, 717–32.

26 Stuart Hall, ‘Popular-democratic vs authoritarian populism: two ways of “taking democracy seriously”’, in Alan Hunt (ed.), Marxism and Democracy (London: Lawrence and Wishart 1980), 157–85.

27 Vieten, ‘The “new normal” and “pandemic populism”’; Fabian Virchow and Alexander Häusler, ‘Pandemie-Leugnung und extreme Rechte’, Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, vol. 34, no. 2, 2021, 259–66; Sabine Volk, ‘Die rechtspopulistische PEGIDA in der COVID-19-Pandemie: Virtueller Protest “für unsere Bürgerrechte”’, Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, vol. 34, no. 2, 2021, 235–48.

28 Natascha Strobl, 'Sebastian Kurz und das Balkan-Virus', Moment.at (online), 3 December 2020, available at www.moment.at/story/sebastian-kurz-und-das-balkan-virus (viewed 13 October 2023).

29 Brubaker, ‘Paradoxes of populism during the pandemic’, 75 (emphasis in original).

30 William Davies, Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World (London: Vintage 2019), 62.

31 This part of our research was conducted as part of the additional module CuRe-COV, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, dedicated to investigating Cultures of Rejection in the COVID crisis.

32 Eberl, Huber and Greussing, ‘From populism to the “plandemic”’; Adam M. Enders, Joseph E. Uscinski, Michelle I. Seelig, Casey A. Klofstad, Stefan Wuchty, John R. Funchion, Manohar N. Murthi, Kamal Premaratne and Justin Stoler, ‘The relationship between social media use and beliefs in conspiracy theories and misinformation’, Political Behavior, vol. 45, no. 2, 2023, 781–804; Stecula and Pickup, ‘How populism and conservative media fuel conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19 and what it means for COVID-19 behaviors’; Richard A. Stein, Oana Ometa, Sarah Pachtman Shetty, Adi Katz, Mircea Ionut Popitiu and Robert Brotherton, ‘Conspiracy theories in the era of COVID-19: a tale of two pandemics’, International Journal of Clinical Practice (online), vol. 75, no. 2, 2021, doi.org/10.1111/ijcp.13778.

33 Manuela Bojadžijev and Benjamin Opratko, ‘Von der Willkommens- zur Ablehnungskultur?’, Forum Migration, vol. 12, no. 6, 2016, 1–2; Harder and Opratko, ‘Cultures of rejection at work’; Benjamin Opratko, ‘Die Kultur der Ablehnung’, Das Tagebuch, vol. 7/8, 2020, 16–21.

34 Mede and Schäfer, ‘Science-related populism’, 473.

35 Davies, Nervous States, 148.

36 Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey, ‘Die Risikogesellschaft und die Gegenwelt’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17 February 2021.

37 Johannes Pantenburg, Sven Reichardt and Benedikt Sepp, ‘Wissensparallelwelten der “Querdenker”’, in Reichardt (ed.), Die Misstrauensgemeinschaft der ‘Querdenker’, 29–66.

38 Cf. (in this issue) Alexander Harder, ‘“Everything has changed”: right-wing politics and experiences of transformation among German retail workers’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 56, no. 4/5, 2022, 219–35.

39 Koos, ‘Konturen einer heterogenen “Misstrauensgemeinschaft”’, 78.

40 Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Benjamin Opratko

Benjamin Opratko was a post-doc researcher in the Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, and is currently Assistant Professor (non-tenure track) at the Institute of Sociology and Cultural Organisation at Leuphana University Lüneburg. His research investigates empirical and theoretical aspects of contemporary authoritarian populism, racism and Islamophobia in Europe. Email: [email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6120-466X