Abstract
It has become a commonplace that the internet has created a global village. Yet in recent years, democracies have seen increased nationalism, populism, division, and a desire to protect and close borders to the outside world. How do we reconcile these trends with understandings of the internet as a cosmopolitan space? This dissertation takes an empirical approach to online communication, using a combination of Big Data gathered from Twitter and qualitative interviews with users in the Scandinavian region. This article-based dissertation is composed of four articles that use a combination of network analysis, quantitative content analysis, and qualitative thematic analysis, to understand the dynamics of cosmopolitan communication on digital, networked platforms. The findings demonstrate that cosmopolitan communication cannot be separated from national citizenship, and in fact is widely practiced by those with anti-cosmopolitan tendencies. Engagement with the Other have become a normal part of modern political engagement. The dissertation proposes an ideologically neutral “networked cosmopolitanism” as a model for political engagement in global, digital spaces.
List of papers
Article 1. Robinson, J. Y. (2022). Fungible citizenship: On the internet no-one knows you’re a swede. Media/Culture Journal, 25(2). The article is included in the thesis in DUO, and also available at: https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2883 |
Article 2. Robinson, J. Y. (2022, May 28). Monitorial–cosmopolitans, networked–locals: The case of Scandinavian Twitter engagement with the 2020 US election. Presented at the 72nd Annual ICA Conference, Paris, France. [Manuscript in process of submitting for publication.] To be published. The article is removed from the thesis in DUO awaiting publishing. |
Article 3. Robinson, J. Y., & Enli, G. (2022). #MakeSwedenGreatAgain: Media events as politics in the deterritorialised nationalism debate. Nordic Journal of Media Studies, 4(1), 56- 80. The article is included in the thesis in DUO, and also available at: https://doi.org/doi:10.2478/njms-2022-0004 |
Article 4. Robinson, J. Y. (2022). George Floyd and cosmopolitan memory formation in online networks: A report from northern Europe. Mediterranean Journal of Communication, 13(2), 185-199. The article is included in the thesis in DUO, and also available at: https://doi.org/10.14198/medcom.21834 |