User:Pleun/grad/ProposalProject

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Online Culture Wars

"The most powerful influence was exerted neither by individual speeches nor by articles or flyers, posters or flags; it was not achieved by things which one had to absorb by conscious thought or conscious emotions. Instead Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously."
– Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady (London: Bloomsbury, 2013 (1957)), 11, 15.


Contemporary fascism, misogyny, and extreme right ideologies are cultivated in online forums collaboratively. Alt-Right and Leftists ideology is framed with terminology found in nihilist meta-memes and jargon which are rapidly evolving and duplicating. The online enthusiasts are creating an impassable forest where normies will easily get lost. Right conservatism and left-wing socialism are reformed with new styles of media-usage, propaganda, and focus of ideology. The alt-right is reappropriating everything from entire subcultures to usage of transgression formerly done so by the socialist left, is bullying their way to domination en is coining term after term to shape their moral bible.

I believe the jargon is not only the basis of their ideology but also deliberately used to form an inclusive group that mystifies outsiders.

"The neoliberal project to destroy the public sphere meets the hate networks of the internet, and it is these “identity groups” who will, unless things change radically, take to the streets: these spaces now also made to be places of ambiguity—privatized, unevenly securitized and surveilled—where IRL is increasingly constructed by virtual belongings."–http://www.e-flux.com/journal/83/141286/the-language-of-the-new-brutality/

"The emergence of the Alt-right should warn us of a now imminent nightmare vision of what the coming years might hold—a public arena emptied of any civility, universalist ideas or openly competing political visions beyond a zero-sum tribal antagonism of identity groups, in which the boundaries of acceptable thought will shrink further while the purged will amass in the fetid forums of the Alt-right."
–Angela Nagle, “What the Alt-Right is all about,” Irish Times, Jan 6, 2017




Main interests

  • Framing of reality in online echo chambers
  • Collective creation of an ideology online
  • from online echo chambers to actual political power
  • possible physicality of online spaces



Focus Questions

  • How is offline politics influenced by the online culture war?
  • Can I break an online echo chamber by taking its ideology offline, leaving a physical trace?
  • How can I stimulate discussion (poke a few holes in the online echo chamber) between sides?
  • How are language and image used in online culture to shape ideology?



Research Method

“Observe, study and memorize what is going on—by tomorrow everything will already look different, by tomorrow everything will already feel different; keep hold of how things reveal themselves at this very moment and what the effects are.”
– Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady (London: Bloomsbury, 2013 (1957)), 10.



I want to create a dynamic dictionary of the language of the right side of the online culture wars, namely of the Alt Right and the Manosphere. For now focussing on two key forums, one Right-wing forum on 8chan and one key manosphere forum on Reddit: 8chan /pol/ and reddit/theredpill. When I achieve this dynamic dictionary I want to look for ways to open up discussion, maybe by leaving physical/public traces, that would function to create some friction or different sounds in the online echo chambers.


STEP 1

I first want to map out the broad scope of the culture wars, which will be the basis of my knowledge and thesis.
I will do this by:

  • text (short descriptions of ideology, bio's of actors, links between actors, online habitats)
  • gathering media
  • creating a map


Restrictions gathering data:

  • ONLINE culture wars
  • Focus on 2015>2016>2017
  • Focus on main events, actors, media,

STEP 2

The implementation and part-creation of a tool that will gather jargon on (a) main right-wing forum(s), through Pattern (a Natural Language Processing library in Python), because of my believe this jargon captures the core of their ideology. I will focus on Reddits subforum The Red Pill first, and then on 4chans subforum /pol/ second. I believe those are two of the most highly influential subforums in the Manosphere and the Alt-Right media-bubble.

I plan to use text scraping to scrape the forum and then start to filter out content so I would be left with non-dictionary words. I could use a text minus text method, where you, for instance, extract all the words used in a New York Times article, from the words used in a forum thread. Then I also want to look at which words, nouns/adjectives are used most, maybe if they are used in a positive or negative way. Next, I can also look at sentiment. Is a text negative or positive and to which standards? The difficulty of a text could be tested with the Flesch/Kincaid Readability Test, where word-length, syllables and sentence length are taken into account.

Urban Dictionary could provide meaning to the jargon that's found.


  • Natural Language Processing

– https://pypi.python.org/pypi/redditnlp/0.1.3
– Python Pattern Library: Sentiment

  • Bag-of-words model
  • Urban Dictionary

http://api.urbandictionary.com/v0/define?term=word
https://market.mashape.com/community/urban-dictionary

  • Flesch/Kincaid Readability Test

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_tests

STEP 3

Publishing the research in a manner that aids general understanding and triggers discussion.


Plan B

  • (How) does the alt-right influence Dutch politics?



Notes

  • While attempting to describe these groups, I notice the left-wing/feminist side has less specific groups/names. Plus a lot of names, like SJW, are coined by the "enemy".
  • If I create a dictionary and follow word origin and scrape its history online, could that give clues on how the ideology is shaped?
  • Is it possible to scrape a few forums and check when unknown words are created? Therefore following directly when, where and how the ideology is shaped?
  • 06/11/2016: CNN has released a video on The Red Pill: http://edition.cnn.com/videos/cnnmoney/2017/10/30/divided-we-code-red-pill-cnntech.cnn
  • Even when addressing non-TRP they still use jargon heavily
  • internet > ideology or ideology > internet?
  • WOKE vs The Red Pill (frames of reality) Two sides, same coin?
  • normie takeover




Timetable

Step 1: Creating the mapping of the online culture wars: 06 NOV – 26 NOV

Step 2: The Tool: 13 NOV – 3 DEC

Step 3: Publishing: DEC & JANUARY

Relation to practice

  • I was researching the online subculture of Vaporwave for a while when the culture got reappropriated and was involved in an online culture war, by the alt-right.


Dictionary

Dictionary of this page:

  • Alt-Right
  • The Red Pill
  • PUA: Pick Up Artist
  • Incel: Involuntary Celibate
  • “riding the cock carousel”
  • Alpha-male and Beta male
  • "nice guy"




Bibliography

Mapping out the online culture wars, with the help of:

HAVE READ/WATCHED:




NEED TO READ/WATCH:

  • Klaus Theweleit – Male Fantasies Volume 2, Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror
  • Victor Klemperer – Language of the Third Reich – LTI – lingua-tertii-imperii
  • The authoritarian personality (1950) – Theodor W Adorno


Contemporary fascism, misogyny, and extreme right ideology is created online in forums collaboratively. Their ideology is framed within terms and memes.



- How the right mobalises

Hard to escape dominance of frames, even if your critical your flooded

- How are claims contextualized - Prevents critical thought, rational thought: do memes do something similar than the fascist images,

- Most powerful influence: single words, ideoms, and sentence structures

- Words shape reality - Use of memes to frame reality


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