User-generated nationalism: interactions with religion, race, and partisanship in everyday talk online

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:

• Internet
• Twitter
• postnationalism
• populism
• Trump

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

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Saif Shahin

Saif Shahin (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is an assistant professor of communication studies at American University, Washington, D.C. His research interests include critical data studies, social computing, and global politics. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Information, Communication & Society; Social Science Computer Review; American Behavioral Scientist; and The International Journal of Press/Politics. He is also an associate editor of the Journal of Information Technology and Politics. He previously worked as a journalist in India, Middle East, Britain, and the United States.