This article explores the contextual nature of fragmentation and polarisation – subjects that have attracted significant concern in the age of social media. I investigate the media sharing practices ...of Scandinavian Twitter users discussing the 2020 American presidential election, an event that attracted international attention. Using links in tweets, I map the media networks of users in Sweden and Norway in their national languages and in English. This intranational approach provides a view into whether fragmentation and polarisation are characteristic of the audience or the media milieu. The findings show Scandinavian users exhibit low audience polarisation within their national languages, but they display polarisation similar to American users when engaging with English-language media. At the same time, media fragmentation is higher in the Norwegian language than in any other sphere. This article sheds light on the relationship between the sometimes-conflated concepts of fragmentation and polarisation and provides a discussion of the implications of political information sharing on transnational digital platforms.
Scholars have observed the need to better understand the role of emotion in the issue of climate change, as well as to better convey the relationship between climate and other global crises. This ...article takes up these two positions, investigating the way social media facilitates affective connections between climate and other global risks. Using Twitter data from three global events - Covid, the 2020 U.S. presidential race, and the Russia-Ukraine war - the study examines how users connect climate change to each event. Placing these discussions in the context of online issue publics and ecocriticism, the paper examines the way users employ affect to connect these events to climate change. The paper uses a quantitatively driven qualitative approach, combining computational methods with a thematic analysis of affective expressions. Interestingly, sentiment was not universally negative, and the qualitative findings further suggest that users combine emotions in contradictory ways, expressed through the themes Weary Zealotry, The Hope-Disgust Dialectic, Climate as Proto-Disaster, Idiots and Enemies, and Global Solidarity. It is argued that a modified version of Beck's 'imagined communities of global risk' provides a framework for the role of affect in people's relationship to climate change.
This work analyses the presence and management As personalized digital networks have increased in cultural and political relevance, there is a more urgent need to understand their role in democratic ...memory-formation. Moreover, scholars have suggested that, in a globalized digitalized age, collective memory could extend to transnational publics. This study aims to advance the understanding of memory on global social networks by investigating the way the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 was treated and understood by Twitter-users outside the United States. Using a combination of big data and contemporaneous qualitative interviews with users in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, the paper brings the concept of cosmopolitan memory into the social media era. The study finds that users fused the event and its aftermath with observations of injustice in their own countries. However, this process operated differently among users of different ideological outlooks. Another key finding is that users on the radical right resented the uptake of the event as a cosmopolitan memory, and employed techniques termed as “combative counter-memory”.
Online networks have blurred the lines between national and global news, and have given users a more active role in how information flows. This opens up the opportunity for individuals to engage with ...foreign events in new ways, curating information and offering their own interpretations. In this article, we investigate how national elections are taken up in the global Twittersphere, using a set of 198,635 English-language tweets about the 2018 Swedish parliamentary election. Based on a network analysis and a content analysis of themes in the tweets, we demonstrate that national media events can become “deterritorialised” by globally networked publics. A second key finding is that the Swedish election is leveraged to discuss anti-globalist themes such as immigration and nationalism in, paradoxically, a global and deterritorialised context.
Across Europe, negative public opinion has and may continue to limit the deployment of renewable energy infrastructure required for the transition to net‐zero energy systems. Understanding public ...sentiment and its spatio‐temporal variations is as such important for decision‐making and for developing socially accepted energy systems. In this study, we apply a sentiment classification model based on a machine learning framework for natural language processing, NorBERT, on data collected from Twitter between 2006 and 2022 to analyse the case of wind power opposition in Norway. From the 68,828 tweets with geospatial information, we show how discussions about wind power intensified in 2018/2019 together with a trend of more negative tweets up until 2020, both on a regional level and for Norway as a whole. Furthermore, we find weak geographical clustering in our data, indicating that discussions are country wide and not dominated by specific regional events or developments. Twitter data allow for detailed insight into the temporal nature of public sentiments and extending this research to additional case studies of technologies, countries and sources of data (e.g. newspapers, other social media) may prove important to complement traditional survey research and the understanding of public sentiment.
The spread of misinformation in the digital age has become a significant concern, especially during times of crisis and conflict. In the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine, a web of actors – ...including government officials, journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens – participate in shaping public discourse on platforms such as Twitter. Although much attention has been devoted to the role of bots and other highly active users in spreading misinformation, the majority of Twitter users remain "casual" observers with limited active engagement in crises. This paper investigates the communication strategies of these casual observers concerning the war in Ukraine, focusing on their propensity to share misinformation. Drawing on an analysis of 117 million tweets, the findings indicate casual users are less likely to disseminate links to misinformation sources. This observation underscores the potential of low-activity users to act as a stabilizing force in public discourse, mitigating the spread of false narratives and promoting more accurate information during times of crisis. By shedding light on the role of casual observers in shaping public discourse, this research contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of crisis communication and highlights the need for a nuanced examination of information sharing dynamics on social media platforms.
Social media platforms are believed to offer new opportunities for place branding practitioners, but also change who participates in the process. This paper investigates the role of global networks ...in shaping the image of a place, focusing on foreign users. This audience was once considered the target of place branding campaigns, but now have the ability to be active participants. Drawing on a year-long data collection of nearly 6-million tweets about Norway, the study uses quantitative and qualitative methods to understand the spatial and temporal dimensions of place branding online. The findings suggest that international users take a leading role in shaping the conversation, especially in response to local news events. While foreigners largely reinforce the official place brand, they also deploy the brand as a political symbol. These findings are discussed in relation to both the practitioner and critical literature on place branding.
A medida que las redes digitales personalizadas han crecido en relevancia cultural y política, la necesidad de comprender su papel en la formación de la memoria democrática se ha vuelto más urgente. ...Además, los académicos han sugerido que en una era de globalización y digitalización, la memoria colectiva podría extenderse a públicos transnacionales. Este estudio tiene como objetivo avanzar en la comprensión de la memoria en las redes sociales globales al investigar la forma en que los usuarios de Twitter fuera de los Estados Unidos trataron y entendieron la muerte de George Floyd en el verano de 2020. Usando una combinación de big data y entrevistas cualitativas contemporáneas con usuarios en Noruega, Suecia y Dinamarca, el artículo trae el concepto de memoria cosmopolita a la era de las redes sociales. El estudio encuentra que los usuarios fusionaron el evento y sus consecuencias con observaciones de injusticia en sus propios países. Sin embargo, este proceso funcionó de manera diferente entre los usuarios de diferentes puntos de vista ideológicos. Otro hallazgo clave es que los usuarios de la derecha radical resintieron la aceptación del evento como una memoria cosmopolita y emplearon técnicas de "contramemoria combativa".
Social media companies like to claim the world. Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook is “building a global community”. Twitter promises to show you “what’s happening in the world right now”. Even Parler ...claims to be the “global town square”.
Indeed, among the fungible aspects of digital culture is the promise of geographic fungibility—the interchangeability of location and national provenance. The taglines of social media platforms tap into the social imagination of the Internet erasing distance—Marshall McLuhan’s global village on a touch screen (see fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Platform taglines: YouTube, Twitter, Parler, and Facebook have made globality part of their pitch to users.
Yet users’ perceptions of geographic fungibility remain unclear. Scholars have proposed forms of cosmopolitan and global citizenship in which national borders play less of a role in how people engage with political ideas (Delanty; Sassen). Others suggest the potential erasure of location may be disorienting (Calhoun). “Nobody lives globally”, as Hugh Dyer writes (64).
In this article, I interrogate popular and academic assumptions about global political spaces, looking at geographic fungibility as a condition experienced by users. The article draws on interviews conducted with Twitter users in the Scandinavian region. Norway, Sweden, and Denmark offer an interesting contrast to online spaces because of their small and highly cohesive political cultures; yet these countries also have high Internet penetration rates and English proficiency levels, making them potentially highly globally connected (Syvertsen et al.).
Based on a thematic analysis of these interviews, I find fungibility emerges as a key feature of how users interact with politics at a global level in three ways: invisibility: fungibility as disconnection; efficacy: fungibility as empowerment; and antagonism: non-fungibility as strategy. Finally, in contrast to currently available models, I propose that online practices are not characterised so much by cosmopolitan norms, but by what I describe as fungible citizenship.
Geographic Fungibility and Cosmopolitan Hopes
Let’s back up and take a real-life example that highlights what it means for geography to be fungible. In March 2017, at a high-stakes meeting of the US House Intelligence Committee, a congressman suddenly noticed that President Donald Trump was not only following the hearing on television, but was live-tweeting incorrect information about it on Twitter.
“This tweet has gone out to millions of Americans”, said Congressman Jim Himes, noting Donald Trump’s follower count. “16.1 million to be exact” (C-SPAN).
Only, those followers weren’t just Americans; Trump was tweeting to 16.1 million followers worldwide (see Sevin and Uzunoğlu). Moreover, the committee was gathered that day to address an issue related to geographic fungibility: it was the first public hearing on Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 American presidential race—which occurred, among other places, on Twitter.
In a way, democratic systems are based on fungibility. One person one vote. Equality before the law. But land mass was not imagined to be commutable, and given the physical restrictions of communication, participation in the public sphere was largely assumed to be restricted by geography (Habermas).
But online platforms offer a fundamentally different structure. Nancy Fraser observes that “public spheres today are not coextensive with political membership. Often the interlocutors are neither co-nationals nor fellow citizens” (16). Netflix, YouTube, K-Pop, #BLM: the resources that people draw on to define their worlds come less from nation-specific media (Robertson 179). C-SPAN’s online feed—if one really wanted to—is as easy to click on in Seattle as in Stockholm. Indeed, research on Twitter finds geographically dispersed networks (Leetaru et al.). Many Twitter users tweet in multiple languages, with English being the lingua franca of Twitter (Mocanu et al.). This has helped make geographic location interchangeable, even undetectable without use of advanced methods (Stock).
Such conditions might set the stage for what sociologists have envisioned as cosmopolitan or global public spheres (Linklater; Szerszynski and Urry). That is, cross-border networks based more on shared interest than shared nationality (Sassen 277). Theorists observing the growth of online communities in the late 1990s and early 2000s proposed that such activity could lead to a shift in people’s perspectives on the world: namely, by closing the communicative distance with the Other, people would also close the moral distance. Delanty suggested that “discursive spaces of world openness” could counter nationalist tendencies and help mobilise cosmopolitan citizens against the negative effects of globalisation (44).
However, much of this discourse dates to the pre-social media Internet. These platforms have proved to be more hierarchical, less interactive, and even less global than early theorists hoped (Burgess and Baym; Dahlgren, “Social Media”; Hindman). Although ordinary citizens certainly break through, entrenched power dynamics and algorithmic structures complicate the process, leading to what Bucher describes as a reverse Panopticon: “the possibility of constantly disappearing, of not being considered important enough” (1171). A 2021 report by the Pew Research Center found most Twitter users receive few if any likes and retweets of their content. In short, it may be that social media are less like Marshall McLuhan’s global village and more like a global version of Marc Augé’s “non-places”: an anonymous and disempowering whereabouts (77–78).
Cosmopolitanism itself is also plagued by problems of legitimacy (Calhoun). Fraser argues that global public opinion is meaningless without a constituent global government. “What could efficacy mean in this situation?” she asks (15). Moreover, universalist sentiment and erasure of borders are not exactly the story of the last 15 years. Media scholar Terry Flew notes that given Brexit and the rise of figures like Trump and Bolsonaro, projections of cosmopolitanism were seriously overestimated (19).
Yet social media are undeniably political places. So how do we make sense of users’ engagement in the discourse that increasingly takes place here? It is this point I turn to next.
Citizenship in the Age of Social Media
In recent years, scholars have reconsidered how they understand the way people interact with politics, as access to political discourse has become a regular, even mundane part of our lives. Increasingly they are challenging old models of “informed citizens” and traditional forms of political participation. Neta Kligler-Vilenchik writes:
the oft-heard claims that citizenship is in decline, particularly for young people, are usually based on citizenship indicators derived from these legacy models—the informed/dutiful citizen. Yet scholars are increasingly positing … citizenship is not declining, but rather changing its form. (1891)
In other words, rather than wondering if tweeting is like a citizen speaking in the town square or merely scribbling in the margins of a newspaper, this line of thinking suggests tweeting is a new form of citizen participation entirely (Bucher; Lane et al.). Who speaks in the town square these days anyway?
To be clear, “citizenship” here is not meant in the ballot box and passport sense; this isn’t about changing legal definitions. Rather, the citizenship at issue refers to how people perceive and enact their public selves. In particular, new models of citizenship emphasise how people understand their relation to strangers through discursive means (Asen)—through talking, in other words, in its various forms (Dahlgren, “Talkative Public”). This may include anything from Facebook posts to online petitions (Vaughan et al.) to digital organising (Vromen) to even activities that can seem trivial, solitary, or apolitical by traditional measures, such as “liking” a post or retweeting a news story. Although some research finds users do see strategic value in such activities (Picone et al.), Lane et al. argue that small-scale acts are important on their own because they force us to self-reflect on our relationship to politics, under a model they call “expressive citizenship”. Kligler-Vilenchik argues that such approaches to citizenship reflect not only new technology but also a society in which public discourse is less formalised through official institutions (newspapers, city council meetings, clubs): “each individual is required to ‘invent themselves’, to shape and form who they are and what they believe in—including how to enact their citizenship” she writes (1892).
However, missing from these new understandings of politics is a spatial dimension. How does the geographic reach of social media sites play into perceptions of citizenship in these spaces? This is important because, regardless of the state of cosmopolitan sentiment, political problems are global: climate change, pandemic, regulation of tech companies, the next US president: many of society’s biggest issues, as Beck notes, “do not respect nation-state or any other borders” (4). Yet it’s not clear whether users’ correlative ability to reach across borders is empowering, or overwhelming.
Thus, inspired particularly by Delanty’s “micro” cosmopolitanism and Dahlgren’s conditions for the formation of citizenship (“Talkative Public”), I am guided by the following questions: how do people negotiate geographic fungibility online? And specifically, how do they understand their relationship to a global space and their ability to be heard in it?
Methodology
Christensen and Jansson have suggested that one of the underutilised ways to understand media cultures is to talk to users directly about the “mediatized everyday” (1474). To that end, I interviewed 26 Twitter users in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. The Scandinavian region is a useful region of study because mo
