From rage to “the facts”: reflective racism and the limits of “digital extremism”
Gavan Titley
The aim of this paper is to specify key dimensions of a research agenda concerning the transnational translation and amplification of racist politics, in and through online networks. In keeping with the thematic focus of the panel, it will do so by questioning some key ‘myths’ concerning the status of race and the nature of racism online, and through this critical engagement and the subsequent discussion of a case study, identify key questions for emerging research. If the ‘euphoric era’ of belief in the liberating potential of the internet featured a celebration of the disembodied and anonymous nature of online identities and engagement, it is understandable that this sense of freedom was temporarily amplified with regard to questions of race. Since at least the late 1990s, empirical studies have contested this discourse, and examined how online spaces are sites both for the shaping and contestation of shifting processes of racialization. Moreover, and particularly in the US context, internet studies have focused on how online strategies have served to both further and enhance the recruiting and dissemination strategies of extremist organisations. While this work is valuable, it could be argued that research has been slow to expand its focus from dedicated hate sites and extremist forums to examine both the more open and diverse sites through which racist discourses are circulated, and the shifting modes through which racialization occurs online. In parallel to the post-racial assumption that locates racism at the social and political margins, as the property of extremists or the ignorant, the dominant research paradigm locates online racism predominantly within elective networks, strangely afloat within what Jodi Dean has termed the blogipelago. What this misses is that much as racist political discourse searches for forms of legitimation, the most influential forms of online racist activism are motivated by the search for integration and acceptance, for becoming part of, not an alternative to, ‘mainstream discourse’. On this basis, research needs to pay more attention to how social media platforms, online news discussion threads and other such open sites are spaces for the rehearsal and laundering of emerging forms and strategies of racism. Concomitantly the over-determining identification of online racism with overt extremists has prompted a dominant focus on the threat of hate speech. Whilehate speech – notwithstanding the definitional problems and normative questions the concept raises – clearly poses a threat online, the current concentration on this phenomenon misses the importance of facticity to racist discourse – that is, the ways in which online architectures have facilitated the circulation of ‘facts’ and ‘information’ concerning the ‘truth’ about problematic minorities. The turn to facticity is reflexive – dependent on an ostensible repudiation of extremist language, and also on a claim to the internet as a space beyond the regulatory control of ‘political correctness’. Building on a case study of online forums after July 22nd 2011 in Norway, this paper argues that both prevailing myths about racism, and lingering assumptions about racism online, need to be examined both theoretically and empirically.