Friday, September 25, 2020

burning Nationalism

 or Undetected echo-chambers! 

Since the latest media revolution, especially since it social media part, with the take off of Facebook, Twitter et al the echo chambers (Wp with backgrounds) is a topic, which is burning like the planet. Especially since the Trump Presidency this topic gained more attention, see as an e.g. this article in "The Conversation", which is also refering to Trump. But the topic has a longer history, even when referrerd to other key-words, like "Denialists", which is used by Naomi Klein (2014). The concept of "Denialism" (WpE) looks as it might psychological misconception of (some) individuals to face the truth:    "The facts are not getting through as Anne Applebaum is expressing this so eloquently in the "Atlantic". While I don't doubt that there a psycholigical factors contributing to this, I doubt that it should be reduced to psychological reasons alone. 

The thesis of the post (and the background research) is: These echo chambers have been there since the establishment of the public sphere (WpE, has also the link to the important book form Habermas (1962/1989). Habermas is making clear that the public sphere is an ideological construct, which is always giving a certain groups of members access to it. Whealthy white man had access to since the creation of this publich sphere, in the (respective) national-states. While the access has broadend since the 20 century, one essential restriction of access has not been eliminated and is contributing to existence of "burning nationalism", which is language. Without the sufficient knowledge of the national language a contribution to the publis sphere was not possible. One might argue, that it is the fact, that a member of the public sphere is born into the language. However, the relation is more complex, somewhat comparable to "gender" (WpE has some fact about the background of the concept)  as a social category, compared to the biological sex (McEhlinny 2012 gives backgounds to th comparision of gender and language): Language is a made a category made by certain types of societies, which are called national states. While "gender" and "race" (Kendi 2017 for more) has been researched lately, the research of  "language" a social construct is still in the initial stage. There are several reasons for the problems with this research, but they have to be adressed, because if they stay hidden, one of the most important hidden backgrounds of the dangerous "buring nationalism" keeps on smoldering.     

References:

  • Kendi, Ibram X (2017), Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Nation books     
  • Klein, Naomi (2014), This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate, Schuster & Schuster 
  • McElhinny, Bonnie (2012), Silicon Valley Sociolinguistics? Analyzing Language, Gender and Communities of Practice in the New Knowledge Economy, in: Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit (Routledge Critical Studies in Multilingualism) ed by Duchêne, Alexandre    

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