Tracing cultural citizenship online

ABSTRACT

From the early 2000s onward the Netherlands has witnessed unexpected and unprecedented polarization. Right-wing populist activism challenged the right of newcomers to belong in Dutch society. Coinciding with this populist swing, participatory media (web communities such as Marokko.nl, blog sites such as GeenStijl – which translates as ‘BadForm’ – and later Facebook and Twitter) have become available as sites for like-minded groups, including some with recent migration backgrounds, to convene and build communities that cross from the social into the virtual and back. They have become spaces for exchange, sharing, and discussion where emotion colours most interactions. Following discussion among cultural theorists, this paper will trace how affect intersects with discursive practice in order to understand how cultural citizenship as a discussion of the right to cultural difference is being practiced and contested. The paper examines whether and how participatory platform media have changed the role and the mission of the engaged media-audience researcher, and what she might need to do now that audiences arguably have become a new type of public.

KEYWORDS:

• Media ethnography
• qualitative audience research
• cultural citizenship
• affect and emotion
• populism

There seems to be widespread agreement that the outpouring of emotions made possible by social media are co-shaping contemporary history. A quarter-century ago, a qualitative audience researcher would have looked at the meanings and pleasures of popular media (Radway 1984; Ang 1985). This would involve speaking with audience members about everyday routines, about the series or novels they felt strongly about as much as about genres they enjoyed only incidentally or in habitual, off-hand ways (Morley 1986; Gray 1992; Gillespie 1995). Whether or not they were popular, the vast majority of media texts referenced, ranging from news programmes to drama, popular fiction, game shows, and other forms of ‘ordinary television’ (Bonner 2003) would have been made by professionals. Fan fiction is a notable exception. Before the internet, it was exchanged at conventions (Bacon-Smith 1992; Jenkins 1992).

The job at hand was to understand the meaningfulness of media-related everyday practices and to deconstruct them. The relevant parts of such a deconstruction were suggested by Stuart Hall’s 1973 encoding-decoding model, which recommended looking at the frameworks of knowledge (of both producers and audiences), and the relations of production and technical infrastructures (Hall 1980). Done well, such work informed its readers about how unequal power structures are lived, reproduced, and resisted in and via the use of popular media. It assumed that media representations are negotiated with in order to construct identities. While all such practices are suffused with emotion and affect, neither feature was specifically focused on.

Today’s media-audience research is faced with a decidedly different challenge. It is clear that the emotions, and especially the anger that social media allow their users to express, cannot be reduced to meaning-making, even if making sense of the world is part of it. Neither can a ‘media text’ be considered as a given – that is to say, as something produced by professional organizations for consumption by audiences. Today’s media landscape is a hybrid mixture of what John Fiske (1987) presciently described as secondary and tertiary texts that are intertextually related to primary texts. Unforeseen by Fiske, such primary texts today are also produced by ‘amateurs.’ Unhindered by codes of professional conduct individuals today produce all sorts of content, including mash-ups videos and memes that blatantly disregard copyright, as well as original materials (vlogs, music videos). Occasionally such content finds its way back into newspapers and tv shows made by media organizations, mostly it is used directly by followers and friends of the new makers. The result is a hybrid media sphere. Variety rather than accountability or verifiability is its strong suit as is the open invitation to rage and vent.

Rather than look at single issues, moments in history, media platforms, media(ted) art or activism (see Kraidy 2016; Papacharissi 2016; Postill 2014), however necessary and urgent, I am interested in trying to discern the logic of ‘cultural citizenship’: that is to say, the ways in which we frame sociality and negotiate a sense of belonging and of identity in today’s world in unreflected-on, everyday media use (Hermes 2005; and see; Postill & Pink 2012, 130). We know that ‘professionally produced’ popular fiction and non-fiction media have been and remain important. Social media today however enable cultural citizenship in much more public and heated ways (Hermes and Stoete 2019; Eeken &Hermes 2019). While initially YouTube could be called a platform of cultural citizenship expressed via vernacular creativity (Burgess 2006) and evaluated positively, today’s social media platforms carry increasingly worrying amounts of excited anger and hatred (Coe, Kenski, and Rains 2014; Seta 2018) as well as forms of humour that are meant to exclude rather than to encourage reflection on what might make the world a better place for most of us. Are those cultural citizenship too? Should media audience research offer a voice of reason and deconstruction, or mere understanding? Is it the goal of engaged cultural studies work today to investigate? Or to also offer allegiance and support? My aim here is to be a storyteller who helps to recalibrate and contextualize, who understand that perverse effects and tragic outcomes may sometimes simply need to be taken in stride rather than framed in terms of blame and accountability.

I will ‘trace’ cultural citizenship over the past decade and a half and my own role as media researcher by focusing on two issues that continue to generate enormous emotion in the Netherlands. Discussion of them has changed almost beyond recognition with the coming of internet-enabled discussion and social media platforms (Bucher and Helmond 2018; Papacharissi and Trevey 2018). Both have to do with diversity and multiculturalism. Neither can really be understood without considering how social media shape particular ways of expressing emotion and forms of affect and thereby change how to go about doing media audience research. In addition, the initial years of web communities in the early 2000s offered little reason to suspect that the internet would become a stronghold of discrimination, hatred, anger, and right-wing conspiracy thinking (Boeschoten and Ven 2019; Dagnes 2019). Today, this seems to be exactly what has happened.

My first issue is the social position and media representation of the Moroccan-Dutch, which is intertwined with fear of Islam; the second is the ongoing debate, or rather quarrel, about the yearly Dutch Sinterklaas festivities and especially the figure of Black Pete. Pete is supposed to be a helper of Sinterklaas, who is a Santa-like prelate. Petes are kitted out in a stereotypically racist manner. They wear blackface and black wigs. They tend to be silly if not outright stupid. The figure of Pete has occasioned protest since the mid-20th century (and possibly even before; the figure itself is a 19th-century invention; see Helsloot 2012; Boer-Dirks 1993); but heated debate, hate speech, and riots coincide with the rise and establishment of social media platforms, roughly between 2005 and 2015, and continue to this day. As a major newspaper reported in early September 2019: ‘Good idea to discuss Pete in peace time’ (NRC 2019, 5 September 2019).

The first issue is also one of identity and representation. Moroccans have come to the Netherlands as migrant workers since the late 1960 s (Haas 2007). While they lived precariously, their families were reunited and lives were built. Dutch society prided itself on being liberal and welcoming until well into the mid-1990 s. An essay in the Dutch quality newspaper NRC called ‘The multicultural drama’ by publicist and social-democrat Paul Scheffer (2000) marks the turn to increasingly open hostility towards migrant groups. Prins and Saharso (2008) reckon that the pride taken in ‘pillarization’ had long given way to heated debates over integration and immigration before ‘9/11,’ the 2001 attack on the Twin Towers in New York, and before Scheffer’s article was published. According to Prins and Saharso: ‘In September 1991, the then leader of the Conservative Liberals (VVD) initiated what was called the ‘national minorities debate’ (-). European civilization, as party leader Frits Bolkestein argued, is sustained by the values of rationality, humanism, and Christianity (Prins and Saharso 2008, 366). All of these Bolkestein depicts as antithetical to Islam. Mostly it was the position of women that was used as an argument to point to what was considered to be the backwardness of Islamic culture (idem).

Interestingly, these same young Muslim women are early social media adopters in turning to Yasmina.nl, the forerunner of the immensely successful Marokko.nl web community which today mostly operates as closed Facebook groups. My contact with the manager-producers of Marokko.nl dates back to 2004, a period in which Marokko.nl was seeking to ward off trolling and hate speech by training moderators. They also wanted to empower the community by providing its 200,000 members with a news website, a project on which they asked us -as media audience experts- for advice.

My interest in the Pete discussion came later, in reaction to both real-life and online reactions in defence of Pete in blackface. What seemed to me a reasonable request to slightly update a folkloric ritual by refashioning Pete and doing away with the ear-rings, the blackface paint, and the exaggerated lips (but maintaining the costume) was met with breathtaking hostility, and not just from groups at the far-right end of the political spectrum. A significant number of friends signed Pietitie, an online action in 2013, a ‘petition’ demanding that Pete not be changed. When asked, they explained it was not something they had given much thought, it had just ‘felt right’ that this particular tradition should continue to be honoured.

To be accepted as Dutch and non-white, or as Dutch and Muslim, is not easy in the Netherlands, and the process is compromised by what initially were the trolling and hate-speech practices of small minorities. Pietitie, which gathered over two million signatures at a moment when the Netherlands had only five million Facebook users, revealed otherwise. Over the last decade and a half, social media platforms transformed into a safe haven for alt-right and alt-light emotions. They have become a gateway for anger as part of the public sphere. Before that, the internet felt like a safe space for marginalized communities caught between two worlds.

Of course, neither social media platforms nor professional media sites can be understood as adhering to single logics or single stories. Messiness characterizes the mediated public sphere as much as the ongoing creation and bursting of ‘filter bubbles’ (Parisher 2011). My point is that qualitative media audience research, with its commitment to broad contextualization and a polylogue of the voices of members of different social groups, can help us to understand the broad and continuing unease with diversity and multiculturalism which is a shared characteristic of societies across the globe today (Steger and James 2019). The question is how to interpret and weigh emotions with a methodological approach that has traditionally relied on the deconstruction of discourse and on theorizing the patterns and logics of meaning-making.

Below I will briefly introduce what I understand by ‘qualitative audience research’ and consider how much of a difference the ‘digital’ makes in doing what has also been referred to as media ethnography. I will then introduce three social-media related moments in the early and late 2000s and in the mid-2010s that will help to identify how emotion became a key element in digital media culture. These three moments show the ongoing relevance of understanding representation and identity when looking at how media are used, whether these media are ‘legacy’ or ‘digital native’.

Understanding everyday digital media culture

There is a strange split between qualitative audience research and media ethnography. Both found their own way to taking the digitalization of media practices on board. While ‘media ethnography’ as a term is widely used in media and cultural studies, there are not that many studies in media and cultural studies that rely on the forms of fieldwork we find in anthropological work (Mankekar 1999, 2015). Marie Gillespie’s Television, Ethnicity and Social Change is a unique exception (Gillespie 1995) for which she used her vast network among the South Asian community in Southall, London, which she built as a schoolteacher. Long open interviews rather than fieldwork became the method of choice in media and cultural studies in the 1980 s and 90 s.

‘Virtual’ or ‘digital’ ethnographies appear later, from 2000 onwards (Hine 2000; Baym 2000). They use exchanges on discussion lists (message boards and discussion fora) to reconstruct underlying patterns and logics in the communications of communities that routinely use the internet to connect. Jumping another decade, Miller and Horst (2012, 3) seek to understand ‘particularity and difference’ in digital communication in order to better understand ‘the framed nature of analogue […] life as culture’ (idem 4). Field sites, says Hine, have multiplied and come in various forms (2017, 24). Miller and Horst understand digital anthropology as a holistic and culturally relativistic undertaking that accepts the ambiguity of the digital with regard to its ‘increasing openness and closure.’ The digital has become part of material culture, including, as Miller and Horst point out, its remarkable capacity to (re-)impose normativity (Miller and Horst 2012, 4). While they do not link normativity explicitly to affect and emotion, this connection marks precisely what digital communication has added to existing forms of media and mediation in the public sphere.

The advantage of continuing to use the suggestive linking of qualitative audience research in the cultural studies tradition with media ethnography and digital anthropology, is that it underlines the importance of attending to emotion and the new means needed to do so. In addition, it helps recognize that the shift from personal to mediated interaction via social media demands following what Horst calls ‘negotiations inherent in knowledge production and forms of knowing’ across different field sites, actual and virtual (Horst 2016, 154). Too strong a focus on text(s), whether interview transcripts, online discussion, or other media content, may leave precious little space to appreciate what has changed. Discourse analysis can become overly technical and lose its link with materiality, with bodies and feelings, as early discussions of affect pointed out (Gregg and Seigworth 2010). The visceral qualities of online discussion as well as its entanglement with everyday experience matter. It is important to find ways of dealing with how meaning-making, emotion, and bodily affect interlink and can be traced and theorized with the coming of the digital media age.

Three interlinked moments

Early internet-facilitated communication and community-building were different from social media use today. Interaction and identity construction in the Marokko.nl web community in the early 2000s was predicated on a ‘hard’ rather than a fluid sense of identity, on shared history, everyday life challenges, and ways of being in the world. The Dutch blogsite GeenStijl (BadForm, founded in 2003) shared an anti-ideological outlook with other liberal sites and offered dead-pan and funny comments that to me seem far removed from the sexist and racist hate speech it often spouts today. Although a less serious news medium and far less successful than the North American site Breitbart, by the early 2010 s GeenStijl was firmly on its way to establishing itself as a Dutch alt-light domain in its turn espousing hard identity politics. The open Facebook page Pietitie which came online in 2013 showed the alarming degree of polarization in the formerly pillarized and consensus-oriented Netherlands.

Summer 2005

In 2005, my co-researcher Robert and I were in the offices of the ethno-marketing bureau Marokko Media in Amsterdam-West. Also present were Gijs, Khalid, and Annebregt. Khalid, Said, Redouan, and Otman had worked for a competing website (Maroc.nl) which they left to start Yasmina.nl (in 2002) and later to build Marokko.nl. Gijs is their fund-raiser and a social activist. Annebregt became editor-in-chief of the news website that Marokko Media wanted to create, and on which we were asked to consult (cf Hermes 2009). The massive success of Marokko Media as a community website depended partly on its early use of ‘hard’ rather than soft identity definitions. Moroccan-Dutch youngsters, unlike other groups with recent migration histories, had the handicap of not reading Arabic. They had no access to the media in their parents’ countries of origin. Also, they preferred keeping a bit of distance between the traditions of their parents (which they respect) and the new lives they were hoping to build for themselves in the Netherlands. Rather than a space defined by long-distance nationalism or religion, it celebrated the flair associated with Moroccan youth culture: epitomized by great fashion sense, especially in shoes (Dibbits 2007).

In retrospect, ‘soft identity’ definitions describe the Marokko Media team in 2005 much better than the harder, essentialist ones that carry the identity of the web community. Though Muslims, they talk about enjoying an occasional glass of alcohol, referring to the likewise looser form of religious observance in Turkey at that time as a bit of a self-deprecating joke. (The Dutch have a problem distinguishing between ethnic Moroccans and Turks, and tend to lump the two groups together). The general sense in 2005 was that right-wing populism would surely fade away again even if Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliamentarian who made islamophobia his main issue, was felt to be a threat. Of course, at that time, 9/11, the murder of the early populist Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002, the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in 2004, and the terrorist attack on commuter trains in Madrid, had left everyone weary of the hatred faced by those suspected of being Muslim. (The London public transport attacks of 2005 were yet to happen.)

The dual problem we discussed was that of trolling and training moderators, and of how to get Marokko.nl users to be interested in the news. With trained moderators, discussion threads would not need to be closed in their entirety when trolls tried to take over. The news site is meant to further empower and connect urban youth, to free them from a sense of being caught between two worlds in neither of which they fully belong. With the benefit of hindsight, it is interesting to see that emotion needed to be controlled: discussions should not become rants or fights; being well informed (the goal of the news project) will counter fear and anger.

To interest Marokko.nl users in the news, we worked with community members who were active as writers in the much-loved ‘story corner’ of the web community to make a ‘telenovela’ about a young Moroccan-Dutch journalist-to-be. Even though, eventually, the telenovela stranded in the offices of the coordinator of one of the three national public television broadcasting channels, it was special to spend time with a group that generally found it difficult to trust white middle-class researchers. Our link to a polytechnic defined us as teachers, which helped us to come across as reliable and as beneficial authorities (even if that is the last thing we wanted to be).

We learned how identity construction is negotiated and with whom. Respect for one’s parents was important as well as the careful marking of personal space against outsiders (such as us). Eventually, barriers were thrown up by male moderators and technicians (groups with influence and standing who also hung around the Marokko Media offices where we met with our mostly female group of writers). By the time we started planning the making of pilot episodes, over two years later, Christa, the third researcher on our team, and I encountered overt hostility that we had not had to face before. ‘That is not how we do things around here,’ I was told in a meeting. Christa was admonished for being ignorant about Ramadan (which she was not).

Alongside doing fieldwork memos, we recorded a series of interviews with the writers. Conventional methods of discourse analysis (interpretative repertoire analysis inspired by Wetherell and Potter 1988) deliver three central themes: confusion, safety, and ‘fight or flight.’ All three pertain to identity politics and are a mix of emotion, affect, and cognitive reasoning (Hermes & de Graaf 2015). ‘Confusion’ referred to not fully belonging. Typically, our writers told us that especially in the summer, when visiting family in Morocco with their parents, they would feel very Dutch; while in the Netherlands their being Moroccan was always a defining trait. Religion provided a much-needed sense of safety, as did their parents’ homes – no matter that those same parents would force them to come on boring family-visiting holidays. ‘Fight or flight’ describes the frustration that was an undercurrent in all the interviews. Mostly we found flight, for instance, in fantasies of travelling and going to far-away places. Not a likely prospect for most of the young women we worked with. Their parents would object, they said; the necessary funds would not be easy to find. ‘Fight’ was never voiced directly. References were always indirect, if hard to miss, and alluded to the growing numbers of adherents of Jihad and Islamic terrorism.

In terms of cultural citizenship, the three repertoires need to be contextualized against the high emotions of the much beloved story corner on the site, or the best Moroccan weddings, another well visited page, that bespeak a pleasure in togetherness and being a community through thick and thin. The more emotional the storytelling, the stronger the sense of connection and bonding. Where politics and Islam are discussed on the website, the exact opposite became important. Moderators made sure that emotions did not get out of hand, especially when outsiders started trolling but also when exchanges became fights among members. Their go-to solution was to cut threads. As a result, Marokko.nl was kept safe against early outbursts of right-wing populism. A sense of community and belonging was safeguarded by favouring rational argument over emotion when politics and religion are discussed while allowing emotion in matters of the heart: a 20th century solution of separating the personal and the political on a 21st century digital platform.

In the interviews our writers were very critical of the negative representation of Dutch Moroccans in the national media, reminiscent of another 20th century trope: the sensationalism and commercialism of the mass media, always out to attract viewers over the heads of vulnerable groups. The telenovela was to redress this situation. However, when the possibility of seeing the series on national broadcast television gained a life of its own, our writers became fascinated with the machinery and the magic of the mass media. Their initial disdain and criticism of national broadcast media became much milder, the main character of the series their hero. He had been devised as a journalist-to-be, an ambitious truth-seeker whose blog, called Faysal’s News, was the way in which the series would address social and political topics that were in the news. ‘The thing with Faysal is that he has aspirations. And that is what I see in myself. I would not mind becoming a journalist’ (Marukh, one of the writers, winter 2008/9).

Tracing cultural citizenship in this project points to a strongly felt need to have a taken-for-granted presence and for representation, for literally being visible in the public sphere without fear of being vilified. In our fieldwork notes and interviews, there are numerous references to the villainous mass media and to celebrities who despite everything manage to survive there. One favourite example is of the comedian and actor Najib Amhali, whose jokes poke fun at Dutch Islamophobia. ‘There isn’t a Moroccan home in the Netherlands where Najib Amhali would not be welcome,’ said Achraf, another of our writers. However critical of legacy media, our writers also wanted to be part of them. Repertoire analysis allowed us to chart contradictory emotions. How feeling vulnerable made the Marokko.nl writers and personnel angry and in need of recognition at the same time, caught between the worlds of their parents and their own, between ambitions and imagined solutions on the one hand and first- and second-hand everyday experience of discrimination on the other, between trust and distrust.

The really amazing feat, in retrospect, is how well Marokko.nl managed to contain hate speech, trolling, and discrimination and redirected emotion among users. Its managers mobilized the community to deliver moderators (hand-picked community members who spent much time online and were felt to be dependable); and these moderators kept cool heads. Even though populism in politics was gaining strength, Marokko.nl literally remained a safe space from which we too would disappear. As older, white, middle-class professionals, we were less and less welcome. We witnessed how religious rules were observed more and more strictly, while anger and distrust gained ground. After 2010 we lost contact.

Intermezzo: Autumn 2009

Our writers’ fictional Faysal’s News was inspired by what was happening in the actual online world. Blogging, vlogging, and Twitter had become new forms of public exchange. Instead of the older, inward-looking web communities, these sites/platforms operated completely differently. In due course there would be blog sites like Faysal’s News that credit recent migrant histories (such as Wij blijven hier – We Are Staying Here – or Republiek Allochtonië). The real eye-catchers however are the sites that initially simply intend to provoke. They become forerunners of the misogynistic hatred, painful joking, and aggression that are a central part of Gamergate (Mortensen 2018) and sites such as Reddit, 4Chan, and 8Chan, where for instance the 2019 Christchurch killer left his ultra right-wing and racist manifesto (Massanari 2017). Asserting themselves against the political correctness and ‘ideologism’ of a site announced by the Dutch socialist broadcasting organization called the Joop (the Joe), a band of unlikely co-conspirators established the Jaap (the Jake). Coming from very different parts of the political spectrum, the Jaap intends to promote open discussion beyond fixed political or identity positions.

Looking back, its deputy editor-in-chief Linda Duits, a feminist and influencer, emphasized in a recent interview that making the Jaap was fun (Ven 2019). It undercut an overly serious approach to the world. ‘The idea was to be a platform where everybody was welcome to discuss whatever issue. That was the then democratic notion of the internet: as a place where people meet to exchange ideas, not to confirm one another’ (Ven, idem). As a result, the Jaap had headers such as ‘Let’s discuss negroes,’ or ‘Black Pete needs to be abolished’ (Ven, idem). After three years, the site was renamed the Post Online, still headed by Bert Brusse, its initial editor-in-chief. Gone, though, is the sentiment that ‘public debate needs to be rescued’ (Duits in Ven 2019); all optimism has disappeared. The platform has hardened and embraced right-wing populism. Duits can count on being called ‘the driver of the totalitarian gender nag-train’ or a ‘spreader of propaganda.’ Ven (2019) concludes that despite the initial good intentions, instead of online debate we now have echo chambers. Algorithms reward harsh language and strong statements. Debaters are forced back onto their own patch. Brusse (in Ven’s reconstruction) says: ‘It isn’t as if we used to agree, but we laughed about it. Now it is war online. The gap is a very deep one.’ Duits would find it difficult today to work with her then colleagues. From libertarians, they turned into right-wing ideologues whose sites feed on anger and outrage, resentment and conspiracy theory.

While it is tempting to understand the development of social media platforms as intrinsically linked to populism, it is doubtful whether this is actually true. Making the Jaap bespeaks the privilege of education and journalistic savvy that will spread to Twitter, a platform that small elite groups of public intellectuals initially shared with teenagers making a sport of tweeting about the most mundane of everyday activities. The algorithms driving social media platforms, however, reward intensity. Rather than zooming out or contextualizing, suggestions for further browsing (Bahara, Kranenberg, and Tokmetzis 2019) point users ‘down the rabbit hole,’ as insiders call it. The alt-right and alt-light have profited most from this logic of amplification. Venting on Twitter, they have effectively changed public debate (Boeschoten and Ven 2019).

2013

In the mid 2000 s Khalid, one of the Marokko Media directors, was joking when he said in the period just before Sinterklaas (December 5): ‘I can’t believe how the Surinamese allow the Dutch to persist with their Black Petes. We would not stand for it.’ Other ‘outsiders’ too, such as the writer David Sedaris (2002), have commented on the oddity, to put it mildly, of having a Santa-type figure with black ‘helpers.’ In 2009, the Jaap felt that the suggestion to abolish Black Pete was a perfect challenge to get a heated discussion going. By 2013 the figure of Pete divides Dutch society.

Anti-Black Pete activism in 2011 is met with harsh police counter-measures including the arrest of two protesters wearing a t-shirt that says ‘Black Pete is racism.’ It was the first of many ‘incidents’ at the yearly Sinterklaas events, culminating in 90 arrests for rioting in Gouda in 2014, with ongoing riots, incidents, and threatening situations to this day. While it can be argued that the riots involve activists, Pietitie in 2013 was ‘liked’ by almost two million ordinary Dutch people. Pietitie is a Facebook group for everybody who feels that Pete has to stay exactly the way he is: including the black hair, the blackface, the thick lips, and the general silliness.

Comparing two studies of pro-Pete protest that appeared almost simultaneously but are based on different sets of material, it appears that it is not so much emotion and uncouth language in and of itself that defines social media practices. The much more remarkable thing is that apparently on Facebook you can speak your heart. Whatever you say, will have no consequences. It is a domain of entitlement, a populist dream space and a prime example of appropriation of the public sphere for and by ‘ordinary people.’ Turner (2010) called this ‘the demotic’ turn. This is where any ordinary person can say what they like, a domain of free speech where sentiments can be voiced, where spelling does not matter but feelings and allegiances do. It is a fully new public logic in a new type of (semi)public sphere.

Aware of Pietitie and reactions against ‘Black Pete is racism’ activism, Wekker (2016) goes back to the (mostly anonymous) hate mail sent to two museum curators in 2008 who were preparing an exhibition for the Dutch Van Abbe museum. When a Dutch populist newspaper wrote about their plans for a protest march against Black Pete, the curators were bombarded with messages. Going through these, Wekker found ten themes that share a remarkable overlap with themes Van Dijk found in 1998 in similar protests against criticism of Zwarte Piet, well before ‘Black Pete is racism’-activism and well before social media platforms were set up and became a new public sphere (Dijk quoted in Wekker 2016, 158). Even more remarkable is that a second 2016 study found the same themes again in the messages posted on the Facebook Pietitie page in 2013, five years later. Wekker identifies aggression and deep feelings of hurt. Innocence is a recurring term, as well as fear for tradition (2016, 148). Hilhorst and Hermes (2016, 218) point to the suffering to which the mostly White Dutch Pietitie commenters bear witness in the roughly 1,000 posts they look at. A key phrase in the Pietitie material is ‘children’s festivity’ (kinderfeest), invoked to defend a sense of the loss that children would experience if they were denied the wonder of the Sinterklaas tradition (as if this fully depended on Pete’s being in blackface). Other responses focused on the alleged racism of Zwarte Piet as a total misconception (Black Pete is fun!) and the ingratitude of the accusers (with the implication that they all come from migrant backgrounds).

Wekker’s analysis is built around her central concept of ‘white innocence,’ which refers to the way Dutch society refuses to take responsibility for its colonial history or racist practices and references. Literally, innocence is an important theme for those who support Pietititie and link it to ‘the innocence of children’ (2016, 223/4) with whom they identify. Humour too is in evidence in both sets of material as a means to vent strong feelings while always also being able to claim you were ‘only joking.’ Online humour in pro-Pete protests, as in the right-wing blogs, is the property of what is known as ‘geek culture’ and the alt-right (as also evidenced in trolling and meme culture). The most outrageous statements, attacks, and visuals are defended as ‘just for the lulz’ (for a laugh; Milner 2013; Phillips 2012). To take offence means not getting the joke and not having a sense of humour – exactly what Wekker is accused of by academic colleagues when she suggests that Black Pete is an expression of racism (2016, 147). Not only does humour make possible a ‘having your cake and eating it logic’ in the Pietitie material and in the hate-mail sent to the curators; it is also used in a Domino or avalanche logic. First Pete has to go, then the next thing, and before you know it, it is Sharia – and clearly no longer a joke.

Both 2016 studies offer analyses of textual materials from a broad contextual and historical awareness. Both follow the emotional intensity of their material. Both reference the increased right-wing populist presence that is making nationalism acceptable again, as manifested in the forceful exclusion of the feelings of non-white Dutch. The passionate defence of national heritage appears to be built on a sense of (white) suffering, which excludes the possibility of non-white suffering. Discourse analysis here has become part of an ethnographic effort. Wekker is an anthropologist. It allows for recognizing and understanding affect – and the incredible speed at which unease turns into complaint, (the appropriation of) victimhood, and self-righteous and short-sighted arguments. The located phenomenon of right-wing nationalism Ahmed studied in 2004 has become a pervasive presence today; her argument that emotion should be studied as a cultural practice that values some bodies and devalues others, still holds.

Anger and outrage define the politics of both Pietitie and the Kick Out Black Pete group. The wounded feelings of Black Pete supporters mirror the feelings of Moroccan youth ten years earlier who did not feel recognized either. Pete supporters’ use of humour suggests they speak from an underdog position. Mostly white Dutch, they belong to a majority group who feel vulnerable and talked down to and are unaware of their own social power or privilege. Black Pete provides an issue that makes for a political bond rather than a previous identity or shared agenda.

Social media afford this easy bonding over (single) issues as a fleeting kind of commitment. This is very alike the sense of connection and cultural citizenship long afforded by popular culture, were it not for the intensity, the shifting of alliances within groups, and the overriding negative, angry tone. Tone, intensity, and pressure to declare your allegiance, moreover, are translated back into legacy media. As a result, public debate and the public sphere are changing. In the Netherlands, football chat shows on commercial television have hosts that profess their disgust with professional correctness and who take great pleasure in what have been termed homophobic, racist, and sexist remarks (Dongen 2017; Shownieuws 2018). Here too humour is the tool of choice for disgruntled speakers who feel disowned and sold short by both globalization and all the emancipatory movements of the 20th century. Never entirely serious, joking gives free rein to anger while it disassociates the speaker from bad intent.

Humorous non-politically aligned disgruntled letting off steam paved the way for a far more serious group of right-wing populists who have entered politics successfully. Today’s hybrid mix of social and legacy media presents a new type of public sphere. It appears a more egalitarian space, that is open to the voices of ordinary people. Its new elites however support exclusive rather than inclusive identity politics, and new types of language and codes of conduct that threaten democratic openness and solidarity and their basic requirements of a minimum level of empathy and decency.

Conclusion

What goals and methods suit engaged empirical cultural studies in search of cultural citizenship? It is not difficult to find cultural citizenship. Sara Ahmed (2004) found it when she studied British National Front speeches, John Hartley (1999) and I did when looking at television and popular culture, Jean Burgess when she studied YouTube (2006). The concept is useful in its focus on the cultural forms, heroes, and narratives that give access to the concerns, hopes, and dreams that bind groups of people. In today’s world these come with a chilling amount of anger, hatred, and suspicion that is all the more problematic for spilling over into and onto the media practices, platforms, and texts that used to be reserved for the non-fictional: for the information, discussion, background, and news that sustains democracies.

Tracing cultural citizenship allows us to understand that audiences were always publics: situated meaning makers who establish common culture by taking up issues while making use of popular media, whether commercial, state-financed or self-made. Digital media forms offer new ways and means to understand this (Marres, Guggenheim, and Wilkie 2018). From an anthropological perspective, or indeed from a media and cultural studies one, emotion is not something new. Methodologically though, ethnographic sensitivity and connecting everyday meaning making across distributed sites, online and ‘IRL’, is increasingly important. Now that popular media practices are losing much of the playfulness and openness they had three decades ago, there is an ongoing need to examine what appears ‘simple’ and is taken for granted.

As much as early cultural studies audience research ‘rescued’ popular culture and its users from blanket disdain, today’s right- and left-wing populism needs a counterweight. The search for hidden common ground in digital and non-digital encounters might well be the goal for cultural scholarship today. Scheduled and unscheduled ‘remote ethnography’ (Postill 2017), established forms of participant observation and interviewing as well as investigative journalism that aims to understand online culture, are key tools. In addition, we need ongoing commitment to what Ang calls ‘cultural intelligence’ (2011, 789) as a counterforce against the messiness and complexities of the problems societies face today; against our tendency to oversimplify when we want to gain oversight. In addition, we need sensitivity and reflexivity, key qualities in ethnographic work (Hine 2017, 26) to bring affect and emotion into the textual domain that research is.

Ultimately, as media ethnographers, media and cultural scholars engage in ‘the art of the possible’ (Ang 2016, 36) by forging sincere connections with the everyday life worlds of others, regardless of their political affiliations. Given the severity of societal polarization, advocacy and commitment to singular voices may, for now, not be the best choice. All media audience research can and should help everyday conversation and debate to move beyond their current entrenched positions. Ideally placed to map and chart feelings, positions, and identities, ethnographically-inspired work will unlock options that open up spaces for moving forward – even if it is never clear whether forward is the right direction or one that may be even more frightening than the direction in which we are moving now.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my two co-researchers Robert Adolfsson and Christa de Graaf as well as our informants. Gijs van Beek, Khalid Mahdaoui and Annebregt Dijkman read this article and are happy to see it published.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Joke Hermes

Joke Hermes is a professor of practice-based research in Media, Culture and Citizenship at Inholland University (Netherlands) and a lecturer in Television and Cross-Media at the University of Amsterdam. She studied political science in the University of Amsterdam and completed her doctorate with a dissertation on the reading of women’s magazines. Her expertise lies in the area of qualitative research, citizenship and popular culture. Joke Hermes is the founder and editor of the international journal European Journal of Cultural Studies. Her work on popular culture and gender, television audiences, internet communities and cultural citizenship, among other subject areas, has been widely published.