ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out the task and the context of the book Nationalism on the Internet: Theorising Nationalism in the Age of Social Media and Fake News.
In recent years, we have seen a drastic rise of nationalism and authoritarian capitalism around the world. This book asks: What is nationalism? What is the role of social media in the communication of nationalist ideology?
This book advances an applied Marxist theory of nationalism that revives classical critical theories of nationalism by using them as tools for studying nationalism in contemporary digital capitalism that is shaped by social media, big data, fake news, targeted advertising, bots, algorithmic politics, and a high-speed online attention economy. It develops a critical theory of nationalism that is grounded in the works of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Eric J. Hobsbawm. For developing a critical theory of nationalism, this book furthermore takes up elements from the approaches of Étienne Balibar, Partha Chatterjee, Vivek Chibber, Erich Fromm, Klaus Holzkamp, Ute Holzkamp-Osterkamp, C.L.R. James, Wilhelm Reich, David Roediger, Marisol Sandoval, and Raymond Williams.
The theoretical foundations are applied to two case studies that analyse how nationalism was in the year 2017 communicated on social media in the context of the German and Austrian federal elections.
A critical theory of contemporary nationalism has two tasks:
It needs to analyse what nationalism is, in what political-economic contexts it stands, and why it exists.
It needs to analyse how the ideological structure of contemporary nationalism is communicated.
This book contributes to both tasks.
