Users are not the helpless victims of anti-socialist and other ideologies, but can contest, oppose, and struggle against ideologies. Social media is a communication space where ideologies are expressed and challenged. Studying user-generated ideologies online therefore allows identifying and analysing the structure of antisocialist and anti-Corbyn ideologies and how they can best be challenged.
Left-wing social media users have developed intelligent strategies of how to react to ideological smear campaigns. Studying counter-discourses to anti-socialist ideology can inform political campaigns at a time when redbaiting is again omnipresent in politics.
9.6 Conclusion
Society shapes and is shaped by communications technologies and society. There is a dialectic of media and society. In an antagonistic society, new information and communication technologies will therefore display an antagonistic logic. A critical theory and critique of the political economy of communications and the media tries to understand the contradictions of society and communications.
This chapter has investigated causes of the crisis of capitalism. This crisis is not a crisis of regulation, but a fundamental economic crisis that has emerged from capitalism’s inherent contradictions. The economic crisis has also turned into political and cultural crises, for example a crisis of the European idea and European politics. On the level of communications, crises tend to manifest themselves in various ways. The focus of this chapter was social media in the context of capitalism’s crisis: capitalism’s crisis has favoured the expansion of targeted online advertising. In the realm of politics, social media communication and offline communication are two interacting forms of protest communication. The strengthening of right-wing extremism has resulted in various forms of far-right ideology and nationalism online (see Fuchs 2016a, 2016b, for two detailed studies of ideology 2.0).
Social media is in complex ways embedded into the contradictions of capitalist society, economy, politics, and ideology. As a consequence, social media is incompletely social and is shaped by the logic of instrumental reason that turns such communications into forms of domination and exploitation. Only social struggles can develop potentials of communications and society that communalise both society and the media so that social media and society can become truly social.
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Themes