Adorno created foundations of a theory of the authoritarian personality and fascism. After the new world economic crisis 2008, new forms of nationalism and authoritarianism proliferated. Their proponents have also made use of digital authoritarianism, that is the use of the Internet and social media for spreading authoritarian ideology. Thinking about the relevance of Adorno today must therefore encompass thinking about digital authoritarianism.
4.4 Digital Authoritarianism
The digital humanities and computational social science are the dominant approaches in the empirical analysis of social media. They focus on big data analytics, that is the quantitative analysis of vast amounts of data collected online. The danger of big data analytics is that the “convergence of social-scientific methods toward those of the natural sciences is itself the child of a society that reifies people” (Pollock and Adorno 2011, 20). In neoliberal capitalism, first the business school’s logic colonised the university. Today, computer science in combination with the logic of the business school has started to colonise the social sciences and humanities.
Critical digital and social media research is the alternative to big data analytics (Fuchs 2019, 2017). It combines critical theory, qualitative empirical research, and political praxis. Critical social media discourse analysis is a form of critical digital and social media research that is focused on the analysis of online ideology (Fuchs 2020a, 2018). It allows us to conduct analyses that focus on the question: how is nationalism and authoritarianism communicated online and on social media? Such analyses can be grounded in the theory of the authoritarian personality.
Fromm (1936) argues that authoritarian societies, including capitalism, foster sadomasochistic personalities (117–118) who feel pleasure in both submission to authority
Chapter Four | Adorno and the Media in Digital Capitalism
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Digital Authoritarianism