User-Generated Nationalism: Interactions with Religion, Race, and Partisanship in Everyday Talk Online

Information, Communication & Society

ISSN: 1369-118X (Print) 1468-4462 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rics20

User-generated nationalism: interactions with religion, race, and partisanship in everyday talk online

Saif Shahin

To cite this article: Saif Shahin (2020): User-generated nationalism: interactions with religion, race, and partisanship in everyday talk online, Information, Communication & Society, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2020.1748088 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1748088

Published online: 22 Jun 2020.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rics20 INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1748088

User-generated nationalism: interactions with religion, race, and partisanship in everyday talk online Saif Shahin School of Communication, American University, Washington, DC, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This article examines how the nationalist imagination structures Received 4 July 2019 cyberspace from the bottom up, or what I call user-generated Accepted 20 March 2020 nationalism. It also looks at the interplay between nationalism and KEYWORDS other, non-spatial modes of social identification. My analysis of a Internet; Twitter; month of tweets indicates that religious, racialized, and partisan postnationalism; populism; identities are quite pronounced online, but they also tend to be Trump conflated with nationalism. I argue that nationalism is not simply banal itself: because of its fixity in place and political correctness, it is used to lend legitimacy to and ‘banalize’ other identities. This dynamic is key to understanding the explosion of right-wing populism around the ‘world of nations’–especially the success of populist leaders in normalizing religious, racialized, and partisan identifications – and the central role being played by digital media in this process.

Nations, as Benedict Anderson famously observed, are ‘imagined communities’–imagined with the help of the printing press (Anderson, 2006). This imagination has survived, even thrived, through colonial rule and anticolonial struggles, world wars, and globalization. For at least two centuries, the nation has served as the primary building block of social reality, enabling us to organize all that we know about the world and find our own place within it. It now appears to be flourishing in the supposedly ‘post-print’ and ‘postnational’ digital era as well – as the electoral success of populist leaders, parties and campaigns such as Brexit indicates. Michael Billig credited the resilience of nationalism to its banal character, or the often- unnoticed reproduction of nations in everyday discourse, which structures the human imagination and precludes thinking outside this socio-cognitive box (Billig, 1995). In this article, I extend Billig’s concept in two ways. First, I examine banal nationalism in cyberspace as a means of understanding how the nationalist imagination – bounded as it is by physical space – imposes itself upon the digital landscape. Second, I investigate how other, non- spatial forms of social identification and differentiation – racial, religious, partisan – are conflated with nationalism and banalized in the process. I contend that nationalism is not simply banal itself: because of its fixity in place and political correctness, it can also lend banality to other imagined socialities and ascribe to them an objective, natural quality.

CONTACT Saif Shahin [email protected] School of Communication, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., Washington, DC 20016, USA © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 S. SHAHIN

My argument draws on the computer-assisted textual analysis of tweets that flag the nation in cyberspace. Specifically, I look at a month of tweets that refer to ‘nation’ or ‘country’ to understand what the concept means to people from around the world in quotidian digital discourse. This approach enables me to avoid the methodological nationalism – research designs in which particular nations serve as case studies or comparative units – that commonly impairs empirical studies of nationalism and makes them tautological. At the same time, it helps me address two significant gaps in extant research on nationalism in general and cyber-nationalism in particular: lack of interest in American nationalism as an everyday practice and the active role of common internet users – as opposed to, say, political leaders and media institutions – in reproducing nationalism (Szulc, 2017). I, therefore, call it user-generated nationalism. By illustrating how the ostensible immateriality of cyberspace is conditioned by and simultaneously reinforces the nation as a material condition of being, this study extends our understanding of digital materialism, especially a tradition within this scholarship that emphasizes hermeneutics and considers materiality to be ‘a dialectic process between physicality and interpretation’ (Casemajor, 2015, p. 13). My research also challenges the postnationalist argument by drawing attention to some of its untenable premises. Finally, the integration of ideas from digital materialism and political sociology can provide a theoretical lens for scholars exploring the interlinks between technology and populist nationalism.

Nationalism: imagined, banal Pushing against the primordialist view of humanity as ‘divided into distinct, objectively identifiable nations’ that have existed since antiquity (Özkirimli, 2010, p. 51), modernists such as Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner, and Benedict Anderson have argued that nations are social constructs and a relatively new phenomenon in human history. For Hobsbawm, nations are ‘socially engineered’ through the ‘invention of tradition’–an elite-led process that began with the French Revolution (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983). The emergence of mass politics and mass technology were key to this social transformation: the printing press, for instance, playing a vital role in standardizing the use of a ‘national language’ across large geographies and popularizing traditions such as ‘national day’ celebrations across those geographies, turning them into culturally cohesive political units, or nations. Gellner emphasized what he called the imposition of ‘high culture’ on industrial-era populations, which led to ‘the establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable ato- mized individuals, held together above all by a shared culture’ (1983,p.57).LikeHobsbawm, Gellner stressed the role of education and communication systems in this process. While Hobsbawm and Gellner considered nations to be a ‘fabrication,’ Anderson (2006) viewed their social construction in more positive terms. He defined the nation as ‘an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sover- eign’ (p. 6). It was imagined because ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (p. 6). At the same time, it was limited because ‘even the largest of them has finite if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations’ (p. 7). This distinction is important to emphasize: for Anderson, imagination is not disconnected from but conditioned by physical reality. INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY 3

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, linguistically bound imagined communities began to replace religious communities, which declined as Europeans came into contact with non-European cultures and Latin, the sacred language, gave way to vernaculars like French and English. The emergence of what Anderson called ‘print-capitalism,’ the profit-driven production and mass distribution of novels and newspapers in the vernaculars, was central to this transformation. Novels included characters who did not always know each other but whose changing lives were still connected by a central plot that pro- gressed sequentially through time. Similarly, newspapers ascribed a fictitious connection to disparate persons and events by putting them together on the same page on account of their ‘calendrical coincidence.’ Novels and newspapers thus engendered among millions of readers an imagined sensibility of horizontal comradeship, bound by their awareness of each other, not as individuals but as fellow consumers of the same cultural products, a sensibility reinforced every day through the ‘mass ceremony’ of reading the morning news. Although the first nations emerged from such ‘largely unselfconscious processes,’ Ander- son added that nations later became ‘formal models to be imitated and, where expedient, consciously exploited’ (2006, p. 45). While these scholars theorized the historical origins of nations as a socio-technological process driven by politics, their work wasn’tsufficient to elucidate why nationalism retained its legitimacy and – despite repeated prognostications of its impending demise – extended its appeal through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the universal framework of social organization. To explain this resilience, Billig drew attention to the banal quality of nationalism – the ordinary and routine ways in which the idea of the nation makes its presence felt in our daily lives and reinforces its ubiquity and indispensability. Banal nationalism is primarily a discursive phenomenon, ‘operat(ing) with prosaic, routine words, which take nations for granted, and which, in so doing, enhabit them’ (Billig, 1995, p. 93). It is found in the speeches of political leaders but, more importantly, in the daily bulletins of mass media. Crucially, banal nationalism is not limited to reifying one’s own nation alone but to constructing the world as ‘a world of nations.’ Drawing on Gid- dens (1987), Billig emphasized that ‘nation-states do not exist in isolation, but “in a complex of other nation-states”’ (Billig, 1995, p. 20). Since Billig’s original articulation, banal nationalism has been studied in numerous contexts, from the analysis of coins, banknotes, and stamps to street names and building styles (for an overview, see Antonsich & Skey, 2017). While Billig emphasized unconscious processes, recent scholarship has also taken note of how ‘people crea- tively and self-consciously mobilize nationhood in their social interactions’ (Anton- sich, 2016, p. 33). Such studies complement banal nationalism with what Fox and Miller-Idriss (2008) called everyday nationhood to account more expansively for the range of social behaviors – conscious and unconscious – that reproduce nations as a quotidian reality. Banal nationalism is not without its detractors, though. Madianou (2005) and Skey (2009) suggested that banal nationalism assumes essentialized or at least uniform national audiences, an increasingly untenable supposition (but see Billig, 2009). In addition, ethnosymbolists have argued that nationalism ‘emerges out of the complex social and ethnic formations of earlier epochs, and the different kinds of ethnie, which modern forces transform, but never obliterate’ (Smith, 1995, p. 59). Unlike modernists, they trace the origins of nationalism to ancient civilizations and pre-modern ethnic communities – but 4 S. SHAHIN unlike primordialists, they view the constitution of ethnic communities as the institutio- nalization of symbols, myths, and traditions in everyday practices.

Postnationalism and its discontents Another challenge to Billig’s thesis comes from those who argue that globalization, evi- denced in the transnational flow of capital and culture, people and ideas, and the growing appeal of alternative identities – ethnic, racial, religious, sexual – is bringing the age of nations to an end (Breen & O’Neill, 2010). Scholars such as Jürgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck have, for the better part of three decades, pulled their intellectual weight behind the idea. In The Postnational Constellation, Habermas argued that ‘(u)nder the pressure of de- nationalization, societies constituted as nation-states are “opening” themselves to an econ- omically driven world society’ (2001, p. 61). Beck dismissed banal nationalism and instead proposed banal cosmopolitanism, ‘in which everyday nationalism is circumvented and undermined and we experience ourselves integrated into global processes and phenomena’ (2002, p. 28). Interestingly, these scholars theorize postnationalism as a protraction of the processes that produced nationalism. Communication technology, in particular, is once again viewed as a key determinant of this social transformation. If the printing press presaged the rise of nations, the digital revolution – manifested in the internet and the world wide web – is believed to herald the postnational public. Habermas counted ‘electronic information transfer and information processing’ among his constellation of factors that were razing down national boundaries (2001, p. 66). Beck opined that as children grew up ‘in the non-place of television and the internet,’ there was no reason to expect ‘that political loyalties and identities will continue to be tied exclusively to a nation’ (2002, p. 31). Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ no longer needed to be tethered to physical place: they could now extend globally through cyberspace (Gradinaru, 2016; Lin, 2017). But three decades since the postnational turn, nationalism doesn’t seem to be going away. If anything, nations have lately renewed their allure as the primary building blocks of social reality, evident in the electoral success of campaigns such as ‘Brexit’ in Britain; leaders like Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Narendra Modi in India; and parties including the AfD in Germany, Law and Justice Party in Poland, ANO Party in the Czech Republic, and Freedom Party in Austria – all of whom premise their politics on an appeal to ‘old-style’ nationalist sen- timents. Even scholars like Beck (2009) have modified their postnationalist position and acknowledged the need for nation-states to work collectively to deal with problems that ‘multi’national corporations either create or do not care for – like climate change. What explains this paradox? A multitude of factors has prevented cultural and economic globalization from undermining the legitimacy and desirability of nations – from the nexus between global capital and national elites to the continued significance of national identity, including and especially among transnational diasporas (Breen & O’Neill, 2010). Even the technological shift, the rise of the internet and the world wide web, that was believed to deterritorialize imagined communities may have, in fact, reinforced their touch with terra firma. INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY 5

Recent scholarship has discerned a number of ways in which nations ‘thrive in cyberspace’ (Eriksen, 2007, p. 1; see also Szulc, 2017). First, the architecture of the internet, specifically its domain name structure, relies heavily on country codes such as .uk (United Kingdom), .tr (Turkey) and so on, reproducing nationalist divisions in the process. Although new types of domains have been incorporated in recent years, nation-specific domains remain very common (Szulc, 2015). Second, internet governance is becoming increasingly nationalized, with large and small nations imposing their own laws to control the experience of cyberspace for their citizens. This is partly in response to cybercrime and global terrorism, and partly to limit US control over the operations of the internet (Hong, 2017). Third, while early internet was dominated by English, it has since turned increasingly multilingual and, in the process, ‘rapidly become the vehicle of a reinvigorated nationalism’ (Hafez, 2007, p. 105). Fourth, national diasporas – Indian, Chinese, etc. – and stateless nations, such as Tibet, Kurdistan, and Tamilian Sri Lanka, use the internet to reinforce their national identities and espouse their nationalist causes (Eriksen, 2007; Mills, 2002; Sheyholislami, 2010). Surprisingly few studies have looked at expressions of nationalism in online content – with some notable exceptions. Szulc studied LGBTQ websites in Poland and Turkey, finding that ‘they reaffirm the world as a world of nations … but also subvert those national discourses which exclude queer sexualities from the nation, particularly through the more explicit coupling of queer symbolism with national symbolism’ (2016, p. 318). Sheyholislami’s analysis of Kurdish satellite TV, websites, blogs, and chatrooms suggested that ‘new media have enabled Kurds from different regions (Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran) … to construct and reconstruct their identities discursively with relative freedom and ease’ but they also ‘diversify the language across alphabet and regional lines’ (2010, p. 289).

Dialectics of digital materialism Expressions of territorially derived national identities in cyberspace bring to light a relatively understudied form of digital materialism. The materialist paradigm ‘assumes that all things in the world, including things of the mind and digital stuff, are tied to (and in some cases, determined by) physical processes and matter’ (Casemajor, 2015, p. 5). Digital materialism, in particular, pushes against the rhetoric of virtuality that celebrates the ‘freedom’ – from social structures, politico-economic realities, even physicality itself – that digital technology purportedly affords and, in the process, renders invisible the relations of power immanent in the digitization of human affairs. Emerging in the 1980s as a critical counterpart to conventional digital media studies, the discipline has become quite diverse over the years. Casemajor (2015) identified six distinct trajectories within it, which focus on different objects – or materials – of research and also adopt different epistemological and methodological positions. The Berlin School of Media treats communication ‘as a question of engineering rather than of semantics’ and pays attention to the hardware as well as the logico-mathematical structure of technology (Casemajor, 2015, p. 7). Software and platform studies scholars are interested in hardware and software operations that create cultural media, especially visual media ran- ging from films to graphic designs, including their production and dissemination online. The tradition of electronic textuality takes text itself to be a material object and ‘inves- tigates its hypertextual and multimedia properties, including sound, image, and other 6 S. SHAHIN software functionalities’ (Casemajor, 2015, p. 8). Scholars of forensic traces draw on forensic science to examine objects like ‘storage and the inscription of digital information on hard drives’ (p. 9). ‘New Materialist’ research adopts a media ecology perspective to study the ‘vibrancy’ of digital materials, rejecting the binary distinction between animate and inanimate objects and instead viewing the world as a continuum of living matter. Finally, Neomarxist authors turn their attention to the physical labor that underlies the production and dissemination of digital media as well as the environmental degradation caused by them. Largely ignored by these perspectives is the materiality of media ‘users’: specifically, how the material conditions of active audiences inform their digital experiences. These conditions include the ‘matter’ of identity. I use matter in a dual sense here. One is visceral, or how body color, sexual orientation, and even religious habits impinge upon users’ online actions and interactions. To be sure, identities are socially constructed – but once constructed, they also become embodied and shape people’s lives in all sorts of ways, including the lives they lead online. Black Twitter (Sharma, 2013) and LGBTQ virtual communities (Acosta et al., 2017) are some of the most obvious examples of this phenomenon. The other sense is geographical. Research from a variety of contexts attests to the significance of physical location – or place – in cyberspace, including the scholarship on cybernationalism discussed earlier (Eriksen, 2007; Szulc, 2017) but also the literature on digital cities (Mossberger et al., 2013) and hyperlocal websites (Chadha, 2016). In taking seriously the materiality of user identities, I draw on but also extend analytic traditions available within the discipline of digital materialism. N. Katherine Hayles, a pio- neer of electronic textuality, noted that ‘[i]n its broadest sense, materiality emerges from the dynamic interplay between the richness of a physically robust world and human intelligence as it crafts this physicality to create meaning’ (Hayles, 2002, p. 33). Hayles’s dia- lectical approach, however, treats only text as belonging to the ‘physically robust world’ while human intelligence, which gives meaning to text, is seen as extrinsic and asocial. But the human capacity for interpretation is necessarily influenced by the materiality of human existence – the visceral and geographical matters that constitute the human sub- ject. In other words, different human beings create different meanings of the same text – and these differences are shaped, among other things, by material conditions such as their skin color, religious habits, partisan membership, and national belonging (Hall, 1996).

Research design The broad objective of this study, therefore, is to examine how the materiality of human existence structures the digital experience. In particular, I am interested in investigating how nations transmute from physical to virtual matter – from geographical location to digital landscape. As extant research has typically looked at nationalism in internet architecture and governance (Hong, 2017; Szulc, 2015), I turn my attention to what I call user- generated nationalism, or the ordinary ways in which nations are produced and repro- duced by common users online – and are interpreted and reinterpreted in the process. The concept not only extends Billig’s(1995) thesis of banal nationalism into cyberspace but also encapsulates the interaction between nationalism and other forms of social identiﬁcation. INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY 7

My empirical focus is on Twitter, one of the most popular social networking platforms with more than 300 million monthly users worldwide (Twitter, 2018). I collected tweets from a month-long period, 1–31 May 2019, that included the word ‘nation’ or ‘country’ using the Crimson-Hexagon social data mining platform. No geographical parameters for data collection were specified. This approach enabled me to avoid methodological nationalism – or treating nation-states as units of analysis. Critics such as Beck (2007) have pointed this as a concern for scholarship on nationalism in general and banal nationalism in particular, as looking for nationalism in nationally delimited contexts can be a tautological exercise. A total of 32.8 million tweets were found, or an average of just over 1 million tweets per day. The day-wise frequency of tweets was fairly even, with 27 May registering the highest number of tweets (1.4 million) and 11 May the lowest (0.8 million). Only about half the tweets – 18.6 million – had identifiable locations. The majority of these were posted from the United States (52.5%), followed by Britain and India (10.5% each); Canada, Nigeria, and Australia (2–3% each); and Pakistan, South Africa, Philippines, and Indonesia (1– 2% each). But tweets came from all 195 nations of the world: the fewest were 88 tweets from Chad. A random sample of 10,000 tweets was extracted from the original corpus for further analysis using topic modeling – specifically Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), an unsupervised machine learning technique (Blei, 2012). This computational method assumes that any collection of documents comprises a certain number of latent themes or ‘topics’ and that these topics determine patterns of word usage in the documents: words belonging to a particular topic will frequently be used close to each other. The analysis reveals clusters of terms that have a high probability of occurring in proxi- mity across the documents and thus constituting a latent ‘topic’–although it is up to the researcher to then interpret the meaning of each topic by identifying the semantic link among those terms. The method leads to better interpretation of large-volume Twitter data compared with other computational techniques (Guo et al., 2016) and has also been validated by traditional qualitative textual analysis (Shahin, 2016). Its unsupervised approach – which inductively discovers patterns of word usage in the documents being studied instead of imposing pre-determined coding categories upon them – is especially suit- able for the analysis of conversations on social media, where users tend to take liberties with spelling and grammar. On the flip side, this can make topic modeling subjective, both in terms of the determination of number of topics and their meanings. Jacobi and colleagues (2016) have therefore suggested that the internal consistency of each topic and the overall model’s theoretical interpretability are important checks on the model’s validity. In this study, I conducted topic modeling in RStudio using the custom-built ‘topicmo- dels’ package. Proprocessing included stemming, lowercasing, and removal of numbers, punctuations, hyperlinks, Twitter handles, and stopwords. The latter are words (the, is it, etc.) that are commonly used in the English language, irrespective of theme or context, and therefore do not contribute to the interpretation of topics. A model comprising 23 topics emerged from the analysis. After closely examining tweets containing terms from each topic in the model, I collated the topics into four general themes that constitute my analytic framework. 8 S. SHAHIN

World of nations Wednesday is a perfect day to celebrate! Celebrate with ePrintedBooks! Our self-publishing cart can now process orders from any country in the world. Please RT this for us. Thank you. This tweet by @ePrintedBooks perhaps best illustrates the banal reproduction of nations in cyberspace – and of the world as Billig’s ‘world of nations.’ It was posted by a company that produces books for the digital age and had recently developed a ‘self-publishing cart.’ Yet, while publicizing said cart’s global reach on Twitter, a global digital platform, @ePrintedBooks resorted to a nationalist frame of reference – saying not ‘anywhere in the world’ but ‘any country in the world.’ In different ways, Topics 1–9 flagged the nation as the basic building block of social reality (see Table 1). The first four topics had a spatial configuration. Topic 1, with terms such as world, health, care, system, immigr-, and so on, related to national belonging

Table 1. Topic model of tweets referring to ‘nation’ or ‘country,’ 1–31 May 2019. World of nations Topic 1 world, take, care, plan, major, part, health, creat, away, system, around, immigr, stay, like, half, protest, inter Topic 2 get, go, let, everi, back, us, time, whole, money, pay, life, group, break, thought, ive, fuck, water, recycl, bottl, jail Topic 3 power, protect, govern, democraci, secur, think, foreign, must, crimin, also, war, interest, constitut, act, corrupt, offici, matter, justic, betray, polit Topic 4 make, us, best, better, china, also, countri, free, now, that, deal, usa, lead, trade, far, help, nigeria, idea, leav, billion Topic 5 time, ever, new, histori, run, polit, citi, human, today, great, economi, becom, busi, set, say, much, took, feel, road, long Topic 6 end, give, face, lot, futur, person, line, rais, friend, biggest, teacher, ill, tell, debat, challeng, john, high Topic 7 vote, parti, elect, brexit, may, put, eu, remain, candid, wait, lost, uk, labor, voter, tori, member, conserv, long, result, fact Topic 8 see, like, alway, need, follow, show, name, watch, video, bts, current, guy, tweet, armi, music, comment Topic 9 live, first, news, media, day, may, two, travel, legal, other, heart, taiwan, celebr, allow, list, marriag, top, worst, point, last Religious nationalism Topic 10 india, nation, pm, modi, muslim, indian, pakistan, gandhi, die, islam, liber, becom, congress, bjp, religion, govt, name, huge, strong Topic 11 across, work, mani, win, leader, minist, speak, great, everyon, next, prime, team, new, campaign, wish, communiti, back, look, togeth, develop Topic 12 one, god, good, state, stand, hope, place, america, give, children, famili, home, hand, israel, land, pray, day, bring, thank Topic 13 day, love, today, thank, serv, honor, great, rememb, freedom, servic, men, proud, made, live, sacrific, militari, patriot, memori, gave, women Racialized nationalism Topic 14 peopl, like, say, mean, rich, control, black, good, look, actual, allow, war, kind, student, hate, need, differ, politician, imagin Topic 15 come, stop, peopl, now, countri, state, illeg, make, unit, start, leav, pleas, chang, forc, build, problem, remov, border, open, mexico Topic 16 year, anoth, im, school, american, last, kill, us, tri, kid, now, yet, racist, old, white, like, girl, isnt, boy, still Partisan nationalism Topic 17 trump, presid, attack, call, hes, destroy, democrat, republican, obama, hour, congress, done, donald, enemi, biden, disgrac, everi, administr, murder, terrorist Topic 18 right, women, abort, now, happen, ban, life, even, bill, save, fight, can, state, hate, pass, charg, sign Topic 19 keep, well, use, just, play, ask, educ, million, one, club, paid, debt, shit, home, seat, question, game, plus, month, yes Topic 20 never, man, presid, one, go, america, said, still, lie, must, entir, thing, someth, law, second, danger, tell, investig, found, unit Topic 21 countri, support, hous, mueller, report, noth, american, million, democrat, white, bad, way, done, work, person, read, maga, call, citizen, venezuela Topic 22 need, law, american, public, offic, polici, senat, support, hold, truth, import, near, real, hear, run, general, repres, rule, crime, enough Topic 23 want, dont, say, know, believ, elect, talk, re, thing, realli, get, cant, impeach, divid, word, dem, your, mind, issu, right INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY 9 being the basis of access to fundamental human rights, such as healthcare. As one tweet noted, ‘In this country, you earn what you get … .period!!! All ‘legal’ citizens are eligible for Healthcare. Illegals earn deportation.’ Topic 2’s terms, such as fuck, get, life, go, jail, and so on, related to problems that afflicted ‘the nation.’ One tweet author, for example, wrote:

I need to get the fuck out this country I don’t know how much more I can take. The shit is too corrupt and people r too ignorant. I don’t know wtf to do right now. And no, I’m not going just go live my best life when the people getting fucked over!!!!! Topic 3 related to dealing with ‘national’ problems, who had the power to do so, and whether or not they used their power appropriately. Topic 4 was very specific, about the US–China trade war and how tariffs levied by Trump were making the country better. But nations don’t only exist synchronically in space: they also extend diachronically through time. Two other topics were related to the temporality of nations. With terms such as time, ever, new, histori-, becom-, and so on, Topic 5 was about how a nation’s past is remembered and how its future is foreseen – and how these narratives shape national belonging in the present. One retweet exclaimed, ‘Deleting the history of a nation is another form of genocide!! This!! Is!! Planned!! Genocide!!’ Topic 6, meanwhile, was about securing the nation’s future, and the role that teachers and soldiers played in it. As a retweet of an original post from former US Vice President Joe Biden noted, ‘Teachers like Ronniece are not only educating our children – they’re building the future of our country.’ For a nation to exist in a world of nations, it’s important for it to maintain a good image of itself among fellow nations. Three topics reflected Twitter users’ concern with their nation’s status and the image it projected internationally – albeit in very different contexts. Topic 7 included tweets that betrayed anxiousness over how protracted uncertainty over Brexit was harming Britain’s image. As one user said, ‘@AlanDuncanMP Sick of the arguing. Makes the country look stupid internationally. Decide your best deal to leave. Have 3 options. Hard Brexit, No Brexit or May’s Brexit. Ask the boss which one they pre- fer. End of the embarrassment. #PeoplesVote.’ Topic 8, primarily about the boy band BTS, had several tweets thanking the group for raising the profile of Korean music. And Topic 9 included tweets celebrating Taiwan becoming ‘the first Asian country’ to legalize same-sex marriage.

Religious nationalism Like so many Islamists, Tipu never thought of India as a country. Quite willing to bring in foreigners like the French, Ottomans, Afghans. Same story with Islamists today. Concept of nation-state eludes them and the whole world has to be converted. The Tipu being chastised in this tweet was Tipu Sultan, who ruled parts of southern India toward the end of eighteenth century, a time when the idea of the modern nation-state was at best a murmur even in Europe – and the idea of India as a nation more than 100 years away. But this tweet doesn’t simply reflect how a primordialist conception of the nation remains common – even in a country as culturally diverse as India. It also indicates that the nationalism espoused by @RRP_1984, the tweet’s author, is of a particular kind, viz. Hindu nationalism. Four topics represented a deep association between nation 10 S. SHAHIN and religion in the imagination of Twitter users. This association operated at two levels. One was the veneration of the nation as sacred. The other was the construction of the nation as rightfully belonging to a particular religion – a practice that often relied on the construction of ‘other’ nations as belonging to ‘other’ religions. Topic 10, for instance, included terms such as india, pakistan, religion, islam, muslim, pm, modi, and bjp.Itprimar- ily emerged from tweets constructing India as a Hindu nation led by Prime Minister Modi of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – and Pakistan as a Muslim nation and an existential threat to Hindu India. As one such tweet noted in reference to a terrorist attack in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday in April, ‘Indians and hindus have seen countless such attacks and mostly inspired from a neighboring country and that too mostly from Muslims.’ At the same time, the topic included tweets celebrating Pakistan’s Islamic nationalism, such as this retweet: ‘RT @Sharjeelvfp On 28 May 1998 the Pakistani scientists fired up the trigger of nukes and make Pakistan as first Islamic and world’s 7th Country having the nuclear technology #PakistanTakbeerDay.’ Topic 11 was closely related to 10, with many of its terms (prime, minist-, campaign, win, great, leader, new, team, etc.) found in tweets congratulating Modi for his victory in India’s general election. Topic 12, with terms such as america, one, god, pray, thank, home, land, and so on, sacralized America as a Christian nation. As one such tweet observed,

@DebunkAtheists @DianaBialkowski God Bless all who gave US their service in any part of the Military-It is .04%of the nation we live in that is willing to risk life&limb to protect the rest of US-Remember the’oﬃce workers’-Pentagon 9/11-may the Heavens watch them. Interestingly, this topic also included the term israel, suggesting that for Twitter users there was a religiously ordained connection between the two nations. Closely related to Topic 12 was Topic 13, with terms such as militari-, patriot, memori-, serv-, servic-, and so on emphasizing the military’s sacriﬁces on behalf of the nation as religious duty. For instance, one user retweeted,

RT @Education4Libs ‘Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’. -John 15:13 God bless the fallen Patriots who made the ultimate sacrifice while pro- tecting this nation & the lives of their fellow Americans. We will NEVER forget you! #MemorialDay Conflating the nation with religion, and particular nations with particular religions, has a dual implication. It sanctifies the nation by turning it into an object of veneration and deserving even of the ultimate sacrifice. At the same time, it lends banality to religion as well – and to religious identification as an everyday mode of social organization. It transforms the metaphysical into the physical, the irrational into rational. Being Hindu or Muslim or Christian is no longer simply a matter of impalpable, transcendental faith but ‘grounded’ in naturally occurring, concrete reality.

Racialized nationalism Imagine if I went to Somali and told everyone that ‘Somali would not be the country of black people.’ They would say ‘FUCK OFF you anti-Somalian, racist slag’ and run my ass out of town. But here in America, we elect people like that to Congress. Laura Lawson, who goes by @LauraLaura1650 on Twitter and posted this retweet, declares in her proﬁle information that ‘I Thank God Everyday That Trump is Our President!’ Her INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY 11 evident dismay at her compatriots’ inability to see what she deemed to be a commonsen- sical relationship between races and nations was shared by @GOPCRwMichaelAD (a proﬁle that appears to have since been deleted), who retweeted,

Rep. Ilhan Omar asserted ‘This is not going to be the country of white people’ during a rally in DC yesterday. Imagine if a white Republican had made a speech saying the same thing about black people. Their political career would be ﬁnished. One interesting feature of both these (re)tweets was their call to ‘imagine’ similar counter- factual situations: Lawson telling Somalis their country won’t be for Black people; White Republican politician asserting America won’t be a country of Black people. The supposed incredulity of these situations was meant to emphasize the political incorrectness of White Nationalism in ‘liberal’ America. In doing so, it was also supposed to make people wonder what, after all, was so wrong about Whites claiming America to be ‘our’ nation – when ‘other’ races, in other parts of the world, could matter-of-factly lay claim to ‘their’ own nations. These retweets represent a discourse brought to light by Topic 14, which included terms such as imagin-, black, peopl-, politician, diﬀer-, hate, war, and so on. This discourse both applauds and admonishes Trump’s politics – and racializes American nationalism in both ways. For instance, an anti-Trump Twitter user noted,

Anti-Black racism, xenophobia, white nationalism, & hate have always been part of US policy & culture. Trump has given it a larger platform. But this country was built on white supremacy. We have to be honest about centuries of bigotry & state violence if we want to end it now. Tweets about Black people fighting and dying for the national cause were even more telling. One such tweet ruminated, ‘Granville Coggs, was one of the nation’s first black military pilots during World War II, has died at the age of 93.’ Another went, ‘Today let’s remember to memorialize the fallen Black service men and women who were forced into fighting wars for a country that saw them as less than human. Honor them on this day. #MemorialDay.’ Yet another claimed, ‘Facts are:White Black Brown people have been in existence since day one:They have fought for America in many wars since its founding …’ Such tweets suggest that the discourse isn’t only about racializing America – it is also about Americanizing race, both White and Black (and Brown), and legitimizing racial identification in the process. In this discourse, race isn’t just skin-deep, so to speak. Being White also means belonging to a land that is meant for me and my people, defined and demarcated, beyond which lie other lands for other peoples. Conversely, Black expressions of American nationalism betray a sensibility that being Black is not enough to belong to predominantly-White America; Blackness must be conflated with Americanness – of which there is no greater proof than a history of willingness to die for the nation – to legitimize such belonging. Two more topics represented this conflation of race and nation. Topic 15 included terms like mexico, illeg-, stop, peopl-, come, remove, open, border, and so on. Tweets containing these terms were ostensibly against immigration, but they also reflected a racialized view of the ‘world of nations.’ One retweet, for instance, said,

Attention Mexico, Middle East, and the rest of the world. Twice were weren’t happy with our country. We didn’t ﬂee to your country. We picked up guns and fought and died to make it 12 S. SHAHIN

right - Revolutionary war and the civil war. Stay home and man up! #2ADefenders #WeThe- People RT. Another noted,

… Don’t Care if Their Muslim Or A Mexican or Central American A Shit Hole Country We Won’t Put Up With! Don’t Learn English US Native Language & Want to Be Lawless & Bring Your Shit Hole Culture Into Dem Run City-NO … Similarly, Topic 16 was primarily about US school shootings being a national shame, but tweets related to this topic also evinced racialized nationalism. To cite one example: ‘RT @Lexialex Not a single Arab has ever shot up a school. This isn’t only racist, it’s stupid. Every school shooter looked like your All-American white country boy. This is how dumb racism is.’

Partisan nationalism RT @DBlack_Mountain Republicans Who Trusted & Defended Trump Will Be Held Accountable. DEMOCRATS Will REMIND Them That They BETRAYED Their COUNTRY. — @jwhallin (jeffwhallin) RT @charliekirk11 RT if you are sick of elected Republicans fighting harder against Trump than against deep state Democrats who wish to destroy our country. — @allen_hallock (Mak- ing American GREAT) Topic modeling revealed seven more topics in which the Republican-Democratic rift in U.S. politics was the primary concern. Topic 17, including terms such as republican, democrat, trump, president, administr-, attack, destroy, and enemi-, called attention to tweets that not only indicated the ferocity of partisan loyalty among Twitter users but also illus- trated how users equated it with loyalty to the nation. As the above-mentioned retweet by @jwhallin demonstrated, Democratic supporters viewed President Trump’s Republicans as not simply standing on the other side of the political aisle but as betraying the country itself. In the process, the tweet constructed Democrats, and Democratic Party supporters, as faithfully nationalistic. Meanwhile, the retweet by @allen_hallock claimed that it was the Democrats who wished to destroy the country – while Republicans loyal to the Presi- dent were resolutely American. The same discourse of partisan nationalism was evident in the remaining six topics, although each had a slightly different focus. Topic 18, with terms including abort, ban, bill, pass, state, right, women, hate, fight, and so on, was about the banning of abortion in various Republican-governed states. Twitter users supporting Democrats called on the party to fight such legislations on behalf of women across the nation and deemed as disloyal any Democratic leader who signed on to such laws. Topic 19 (million, club, debt, paid, question, seat, home, etc.) related to Trump’s controversial nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court judge, with a series of retweets highlighting one aspect of this issue that was in the news at the time: concerns over payment of his country club fees as well as credit card debt and mortgage. Three topics emphasized different features of Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election that was won by Trump. Topic 20 (investig-, found, america, presid-, lie, danger, etc.) focused on the investigation itself, Topic 21 (mueller, report, democrat, american, white, support, maga, etc.) on INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY 13 its political fallout, and Topic 22 (general, law, public, offic-, truth, repress, rule, support, crime, etc.) on Attorney-General William Barr’s defense of the President at the expense of the ‘truth.’ Finally, Topic 23 (impeach, dem-, elect, divide, issue, right, believ-, etc.) related to the possibility of impeaching Trump, which Democratically inclined Twitter users deemed to be in the national interest, while Republican supporters claimed would be ‘treason.’ As one of them posted, ‘Take note. The new focus will be on the word “Treason”… Trying to overthrow a duly elected President by the highest law enforcement agency in our nation, is nothing BUT treason.’ Partisan nationalism reflected a particular view of what the nation was or ought to be – as well as who rightfully represented it. But like religious and racialized nationalism, it also indicated a need among Twitter users to legitimize partisan identification by conflating it with identification with the nation. In this narrative, Democratic supporters didn’t support the Democratic Party per se – it was the nation as a whole that they cared about. Likewise, those closing ranks with the Republican Party stressed that they did so for the good of the nation. Identifying with a political party was thus not simply a matter of ‘petty politics’ but a commitment to the national cause.

User-generated nationalism: banal, banalizing My analysis has two major implications. First, it brings to light the banal reproduction of nations in cyberspace, not every day but every moment, by everyday people from every- where in the world. More than a million tweets were being posted daily, on average, that mentioned ‘nation’ or ‘country’ in a wide range of contexts. It is likely that my sample hardly scratched the surface of this phenomenon: many more tweets would be using these terms in other languages of the world, and perhaps still more that don’t use such terms but simply name the nation (USA, Bulgaria, Tanzania, etc.) or flag it in more subtle ways (Billig, 1995). Importantly, my analysis shows that Twitter users don’t just reproduce particular nations, but construct the world as a world of nation. Nations emerge as the primary building blocks of social reality, aware of their temporality as well as their sociality – in terms of the image they project to other nations. Nations thus impose the physical upon the virtual, constituting a digital ‘land’scape, so to speak, that structures the imagination of users online. While previous research has mostly adopted a top-down approach and looked at cybernationalism in internet architecture and governance (Szulc, 2017), this study demonstrates that it is also a bottom-up phenomenon, or user-generated nationalism. My analysis does not preclude the possibility that other ways of imagining the world also exist online. Indeed, the second major implication of my research is that nationalism can itself be religious, racialized, and partisan. Even as users imagine their nation as part of a world of nations, they also imagine it, qua ‘nation’ with definitive boundaries, to have particularized characteristics and rightfully belong to a particular group of people. To do so, they draw on what ethnosymbolists call ethnies – pre-modern identifications based on skin color, religious affiliation, or cultural practice (Smith, 1995) – although they may also rely on relatively newer forms of solidarity, such as political partisanship. Conflating the nation with a particular ethnie doesn’t only particularize the nation; I argue that it also legitimizes the ethnie. Ethnic identification in the modern era becomes more normal, more rational, if it can lay claim to a piece of immovable earth as matter-of- 14 S. SHAHIN factly its own. Therefore, nationalism isn’t just banal itself: its fixity in place and its political correctness enable it to banalize other forms of social identification. This study contributes to the fields of digital materialism and nationalism by bringing them in conversation with each other. My analysis underscores the importance of going beyond the materiality of digital storage devices, digital media products, and digital text (Casemajor, 2015) and also taking seriously the materiality of the human condition – both visceral and geographical – in digital contexts. While nationalism was my intended focus, other modalities of human existence – viz. skin color, religious habit, political affiliation – also emerged as bearing upon users’ digital experiences. These experiences, in turn, have material consequences that can go beyond the digital context – for instance, the ascent of White Nationalists or Hindu Nationalists to power. To conclude, my analysis draws attention to the everyday reproduction of nationalism online and the dynamic interplay between nationalism and other modes of social identification. In doing so, it distinguishes the unique value of nationalism’s banal character. It demonstrates that banal nationalism has larger implications than so far recognized: it allows nationalism to lend banality, and thereby provide legitimacy, to religious, racialized, and partisan identities. This dynamic, I argue, is key to understanding the explosion of right-wing populism around the ‘world of nations’–specifically its success in normalizing religious, racial, and partisan bigotry – and the central role being played by digital media in this process (Shahin & Ng, 2020). The study is limited by its choice of social media platform for examining user-generated nationalism – Twitter – as well as keywords used to sample data (‘nation,’‘country’). Future research can look at the phenomenon of user-generated nationalism on other platforms. Comparative studies that are alert to differences in interface design and algorithmic affordances across platforms would be especially interesting. Data sampling can make use of the same keywords from other languages or the names of nations. Drawing on my findings, scholars can also turn attention to the presence of nationalism in explicitly religious, racialized, or partisan discourses online.

Disclosure statement No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor Saif Shahin (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is an assistant professor of communication studies at American University, Washington, D.C. His research interests include critical data studies, social computing, and global politics. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Information, Communication & Society; Social Science Computer Review; American Behavioral Scientist; and The International Journal of Press/Politics. He is also an associ- ate editor of the Journal of Information Technology and Politics. He previously worked as a journal- ist in India, Middle East, Britain, and the United States.

ORCID Saif Shahin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7608-7283 INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY 15

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