Sabina Mihelj

Performing citizenship on YouTube: activism, satire and online debate around the anti-Islam video Fitna

In this article we examine the hundreds of videos that were posted to YouTube in response to the fierce anti-Islam video Fitna. We use this case to analyse whether and how the participatory opportunities of the digital technologies invite performances of citizenship, especially with respect to the articulation of religious and/or political identity. The sheer numbers of YouTube activities (videos, views and comments) demonstrated that this was not at all a marginal phenomenon within the wider Fitna and Wilders controversy, making the question as to what these videos mean, or – to be more precise – for which contexts the posters make them meaningful, all the more pressing. We used the concepts of ‘voice’, ‘performance’ and ‘citizenship’ to approach this issue and found that the video genres unique to visual digital culture (tagging/jamming, cut-and-mix and vlogs) each invited their own kinds of political and religious performances, and assumed particular traits and interests of their audience. The most common YouTube reaction for Muslims was to upload copies of videos that expressed their own understanding of Islam as a peaceful religion in contrast to the picture drawn by Wilders. The jamming videos saying sorry were unique digital means of activism, enabling a particular participation in the controversy around Fitna that assumed a global audience open to apology. The cut-and-mix videos appeared to be especially welcome means for satire and parody, and appealing to audience emotions, but also for the deconstruction of Fitna, which addressed audience cognitive competence. Vlogging about Fitna was often part of a more regular practice of video production that was individually or institutionally maintained. We conclude that the particular articulations of religious and political identities, with different modes of audience address assume a connectedness between dispersed people in which new forms of (unlocated) citizenship emerge.

YouTube interactions between agonism, antagonism and dialogue: Video responses to the anti-Islam film Fitna

Fitna is a 2008 short film made by a Dutch member of parliament to support his fight against Islam. It shows shocking footage of terrorism, violence and women’s oppression and claims that these are inherent to Islam. The film caused immense controversy and mobilized people across the world to produce and upload their own views to YouTube. In this article we analyze these videos using different theoretical models of democratic interaction, and distinguishing between antagonism, ‘agonism’ and dialogue. On the basis of a cybermetric network analysis we find that the videos are mostly isolated reactions to the film. Only 13 percent or fewer of the posters interacted with each other through comments, subscriptions or ‘friendship’. These interactions could be qualified as antagonistic or agonistic, but very rarely involved dialogue. We therefore conclude that YouTube enabled a multiplication of views rather than an exchange or dialogue between them.

Women responding to the anti-Islam film Fitna: voices and acts of citizenship on YouTube

In 2008, Dutch anti-Islam Member of Parliament Geert Wilders produced a short video called Fitna to visualize his argument that Islam is a dangerous religion. Thousands of men and women across the globe uploaded their own videos to YouTube to criticize or support the film. In this article, we look at these alternative videos from a feminist perspective, contrasting the gender portrayal and narratives in Fitna with those in the alternative videos. We contend that Fitna expressed an extremist Orientalist discourse, in which women are presented as the current and future victims of the oppression of Muslim men and Islam. In contrast, the YouTube videos give voice to women themselves who come from across the globe, are relatively young and often active Muslims. Second, they express different view points in generically new ways, criticizing and ridiculing Wilders or producing serious and committed explanations of their own understanding of Islam. Third, although relatively few women appeared in the videos, those that did speak for themselves, not only take on Wilders, but also claim their right to speak within Islam. We propose to understand these videos as acts of citizenships through which women constitute themselves as global citizens, in some cases by engaging in ‘deliberation’ as it is understood in feminist political theory, in other cases by taking a ‘voice’ that can be responded to.

National media events From displays of unity to enactments of division

Despite the conspicuous presence of nationhood and nationalism in existing studies of media events and rituals, explicit conceptualizations of the link between these media phenomena and nationhood remain scarce. Drawing on existing literature and research on the topic, this article proposes to shift attention away from ceremonial occasions primarily aimed at celebrating national unity, towards the more distressing events and mobilization marathons enacting partition and instituting divisions among nations, ethnicities, cultures, races or religions. It provides a series of propositions regarding the involvement of media events in the transformation of audiences into nations, and discusses two categories of media rituals that are linked closely to contemporary forms of national mobilization: rituals of partition and mobilization marathons. Given the disentanglement of nations and states and the multi-ethnic nature of modern states and media spaces, such media occasions ought to receive more sustained attention in the future.

Television news, narrative conventions and national imagination

By and large, contemporary news stories are stories about a particular nation, told to an audience that is seen and addressed in national terms. However, the understanding of the exact ways in which national imagination becomes engrained in the narrative conventions of news reporting is still rather limited, in particular when it comes to audiovisual genres. This article aims to fill a part of this blank by examining the links between national imagination and the narrative conventions of television news. Building on existing debates about different modes of news reporting, the article distinguishes two distinct sets of narrative conventions at work in television news: one typically found in routine reporting, the other characteristic of crisis and celebratory reporting. It is argued that each of these two sets of conventions is tied to a different form of nationalism, and normally arises in a different political climate. Links between national imagination and narrative conventions vary accordingly. To demonstrate this, the article provides a comparative analysis of narrative structures in selected samples of television news bulletins broadcast in the early 1990s in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The concluding section reflects on the external validity of the chosen case study and surveys supportive evidence from four other relevant cases, drawn from the UK and Israel.

Comparing Public Spheres: Normative Models and Empirical Measurements

Most contemporary work on public spheres tends to adopt, either explicitly or implicitly, Habermas’s idea of a deliberative public sphere as a normative model. There are, however, a number of other normative models available that are rarely the subject of empirical scrutiny: republican, liberal and multicultural. This article poses the empirical question of whether actually existing public spheres more closely resemble one model rather than another. To answer this question, the authors develop ways to measure public spheres, at both national and transnational level. They ground this attempt to move comparative media analysis forward conceptually and empirically via a case study comparing media content about the EU Constitution in six countries.

The Challenge of Flow: State Socialist Television between Revolutionary Time and Everyday Time

This article contributes to the growing literature on diverse television cultures globally and historically by examining selected aspects of television cultures in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Being part of a political, economic and cultural system that self-consciously set out to develop an alternative form of modern society, state socialist television offers a particularly apposite case study of alternative forms of modern television. State socialist television was inevitably drawn into the Cold War contest between two rival visions of modernity and modern life: one premised on liberal democracy and the market economy, the other on communist rule and the planned economy. As a result, its formats, content and uses were different from those familiar from western television histories. The analysis, based on 70 life-story interviews, schedule analysis and archival sources, focuses on the temporal structures of television and on the challenges posed by television’s ability to offer an instantaneous connection to the unfolding present. We argue that the nature of television temporality had ambiguous consequences for the communist project, allowing citizens of state socialist countries to disconnect from communist ideals, while synchronising their daily life with the ongoing march towards the radiant communist future.

To be or not to be a part of Europe: Appropriations of the symbolic borders of Europe in Slovenia

Abstract The post‐Cold‐War transformation of Central and Eastern Europe involved a complex reconfiguration of existing collective identifications, territorial attachments and borders, which included both establishing new attachments and borders and dispensing with the old ones. This article traces this reconfiguration by looking at the case of Slovenia. After briefly sketching the transformation of symbolic attachments and borders during the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the article analyses the appropriations of this new symbolic mapping in the public debates and immigration and citizenship policies related to the two major instances of immigration in Slovenia after the establishment of an independent Slovenian state in 1991: the arrival of Bosnian war refugees in 1992, and the increase in undocumented immigration in 2000-2001. Particular attention is paid to the conceptualization of borders, especially the relationships between symbolic and institutionalized borders. It is argued that state borders are far from being the sole institutional vehicle of the symbolic borders separating the Self from its Others. Policy measures regulating immigration function as an additional vehicle for these borders, and thus provide a complement to the institution of state borders: if the state border marks the perceived territorial borders of the Self, the immigration‐related policy measures serve to maintain the perceived population borders distinguishing the Self from its Other(s).

Europe – a default or a dream? European identity formation among Bulgarian and English children

This article examines the formation of European identity among children in two very different countries: the traditionally Eurosceptic United Kingdom and the enthusiastic EU newcomer, Bulgaria. The paper revisits existing debates about the relationships between European identity, knowledge and the political and historical context, paying particular attention to the meanings attached to Europe. It demonstrates that children who identify as European are more likely to see Europe in geographic terms, which facilitates the perception of the European identity as ‘default’. In contrast, children who refuse to describe themselves as European see Europe as an exclusive political entity, associated with high standards and distant elites. These perceptions are significantly more common among Bulgarian children, who often depict Europe as a dream, and perceive the European identity as an ideal they aspire to reach. The article also shows how ethnicity and the images of Europe influence the relationship between national and European identities.

Nationalism, gender and the multivocality of war discourse in television news

War discourse is typically characterized by a confluence of nationalist and sexist discourses, and tends to reduce the multiple identities and affiliations of human beings to a black-and-white contrast of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Yet, as argued in this article, we should be wary of over-emphasizing the homogeneity and monovocality of war discourse. While the onset of conflict certainly narrows the range of collective identities and narratives on offer in the public domain, it does not impose a total closure on the negotiation and contestation of meanings. Rather, mediated war discourse retains a measure of ambiguity and multivocality, which can be of vital importance to its appeal. We demonstrate this by examining a sample of war-time news bulletins broadcast in Yugoslavia in 1991, focusing on representations of women.