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Introduction
Ico Maly is associate professor Digital Culture Studies at Tilburg University and editor-in-chief of diggit magazine (www.diggitmagazine.com). He has a PhD in Cultural Studies (Tilburg University). His research focuses on New Right, algorithmic activism, algorithmic populism, digital media & politics, Digital discourse analysis, activism, cultural products and (micro) media.
Additional affiliations
January 2020 - present
March 2015 - August 2020
November 2013 - August 2015
Publications
Publications (52)
Far-right movements, activists, and political parties are on the rise worldwide. Several scholars connect this rise of the far-right at least partially to the affordances of digital media and to a new digital metapolitical battle. A lot has been written about the far-right’s adoption of trolling, harassment, and meme-culture in their metapolitical...
The alt-right, the different chapters of the pan-European movement Generation Identity and the rise of the so-called radical right populist parties in the West have been responsible for the renewed interest in the metapolitical project of La Nouvelle Droite. In this attention, we see a strong focus on the ideological impact of this school of though...
Economy and ideology. Combine the terms and one immediately thinks of Marxism. As is commonly known, in the Marxist theoretical tradition, ideology is part of superstructure; while 'the economy' makes up the base of society. In its classic Marxist formulation, it is the base-that is the relations of production and the forces of production-that in l...
Metapolitics, Algorithms and Violence argues that we need a more finegrained approach to understand contemporary far-right violence – an approach that takes language and cultural production in a digital economy seriously.
This book underlines the importance of socio-political, economic, historical and technological context in understanding the ris...
Drawing from Erving Goffman's seminal work on face-to-face interaction, this article introduces the concepts of digital face-work and the digital interaction in order to make sense of digital interaction. The theoretical framework emphasizes the sociotechnical aspects of face-work, portraying digital platforms not merely as spaces for interaction b...
Ico Maly buigt zich over de vraag op welke manier Conner Rousseau de sociaaldemocratie nieuw leven inblaast. Hoe gebruikt hij digitale media en digitale cultuur om de beweging op te bouwen?
Starting from the idea that understanding Big Tech ideologies is a prerequisite for assessing how major tech corporations see a (re)organization of society, this paper offers an analysis of the opening statements of the CEOs of four of these corporations during 2020 antitrust hearings before the U.S. House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee. These st...
Method and methodology are concepts that are used on a daily basis by social science students, researchers, and lecturers. Interestingly, for many students (and also researchers), both concepts have acquired a synonym-like quality. It is not exceptional to read in papers, theses, and published books a description of a method under the 'methodology'...
In the current climate of extreme nationalism and fear-mongering, a new politics for a socially just world is needed more than ever. Featuring internationally-renowned scholars, Applied Linguistics and Politics explores how innovative theories, methodologies and pedagogies in applied linguistics can address the political challenges and issues arisi...
In januari 2021 overleed Jan Blommaert. Deze bijdrage blikt terug op zijn uitgebreide academische carrière en zijn talrijke bijdrage aan de sociale wetenschappen.
Going Dark. The secret social lives of extremists is a real page turner. It is a well structured book that gives the reader basic information on how the global far right and radical Islamists use digital media in their (meta)political battle. It is a perfect introduction to the dark corners of the world, but don't expect it to do more than that.
Forum for Democracy (FvD) is a political party on the rise in the Netherlands. Thierry Baudet, the conservative revolutionary and dandyesque leader of the party, positions himself and his party as right-wing and as an acceptable ideological alternative to all the other Dutch parties. All media controversies about his radical right ideology are labe...
The Trump 2020 election campaign has adopted the language of war. Not only is Trump accusing Biden and the Democrats of destroying America, but the campaign is also organizing itself as an army controlled by Trump's campaign team that goes by the name of Trump War Room on Twitter.
Populism studies tend to understand populism as a purely political phenomenon (MUDDE; KALTWASSER, 2017; MÜLLER, 2016). To categorize someone as a populist or not, is in many cases solely based on an evaluation of discourse, style or even ideology. It is much rarer to see approaches to populism that focus on the relation between politics and media a...
In this paper I will focus on the construction of the populist voice in an attention-based hybrid media system (Chadwick, 2017; Venturini, 2019) and argue that the contemporary 21st century populist uses the affordances of digital technology not only to attract the attention of common people and the legacy media, but to actually mobilize people to...
Since mid-October, Charlie Kirk's Culture War college tour has been increasingly haunted by the Groyper and nicker Groyper Q&A trolls. These offline trolls use the Q&A-sessions that are part of the Culture War show format to frame Charlie Kirk as a fake, 'anti-white' conservative. A new chapter in the alt-right's cultural war re-emerges in full for...
This working book is part of an ongoing dialogue with my colleagues at the University of Tilburg and it focusses explicitly on the connection between people, culture, identity, language and semiotic material in a post-digital context. Or more concretely, it analyses how the symbolic economy of Ghent, Belgium is constructed in the neoliberal and pos...
The paradigmatic impact of superdiversity not only forces us to go beyond accepted notions regarding the relation between people, identities, language, and space; it also forces to engage with the development of new methodologies. In this paper, we introduce Digital Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape analysis or ELLA 2.0 ) as a new methodology to st...
A model of linguistic landscape analysis adjusted to the online-offline nexus, in which physical emplacement of signs is accompanied by, and inextricably intertwined with, online signs.
In online interactions, we usually lack reliable access to the individual and collective identity diacritics. This has considerable effect on theory and methodology, and some of them are addressed in this working document. We explore the purchase of an action-centered discourse-analytical strategy, inspired by Garfinkel and others, for getting towa...
Digital media play an important role in the contemporary rise in visibility of New Right and far-right activist groups online, offline, and in the mainstream media. This visibility has boosted their online and offline mobilization power. Through a live digital ethnographic analysis of the rise of Schild & Vrienden, a recent Flemish far-right activi...
review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrator of the white nationalist terrorist attack in New Zealand, saw himself as a crusader for the white race, a white terrorist stepping in the footsteps of Breivik. This battle has an offline and an online dimension and it is crucial that we take this online/offline nexus on board when analyzing contemporary white terror...
Digitalization gave birth to a new form of populism: algorithmic populism. If we want to understand contemporary populism, we should understand it in its social, political, economic and technological context. Algorithmic populism cannot be understood without taking the uptake and algorithmic activism in particular into account. Populism and computa...
The massive media attention sparked by GoDaddy's decision to pull support for the radical right social network site GAB after the murderous riot in a synagogue in Pittsburg should urge internet companies to rethink their policies towards hate speech. The damage control policy of blocking activists and platforms after murderous riots raises the impa...
Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis (ELLA) has over the past few years proven to be a very sensitive tool for detecting changes in superdiverse environments. It has allowed us to distinguish between various types of presence and ownership of different communities within one physical space, and it also added complexity to what more convention...
This paper argues that nationalism, and nationalistic activism in particular are being globalized. At least certain fringes of radical nationalist activists are organized as ‘cellular systems’ connected and mobilize-able on a global scale giving birth to what I call ‘global nationalistic activism’. Given this change in nationalist activism, I claim...
In this paper, I want to introduce a(n digital) ethnographic approach to populism that understands populism as a (digitally) mediatized chronotopic communicative and discursive relation. Populism, I argue, is not only constructed in a (mediatized) communicative relation between journalists, politicians and academics, but also in the relation to cit...
This paper investigates how the discursive battle for the Flemish nation is waged in the Flemish mass media by politicians of the Flemish nationalist party, the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA). I focus on the 'new nationalism' that N-VA politicians advocate as a means to 'banalise' a hot Flemish nationalism. I establish that N-VA spokespeople and espec...
Superdiversity, on the one hand, calls for new frames, concepts, and methodologies to deal with a fluid reality characterised by rapid (social) changes. On the other hand, we also have a need to broaden our scope beyond the heavy focus on the urban metropolis as the locus of superdiversity. With this paper I want to contribute to the research addre...
Een reportage op tv. Een islamoloog spreekt over jongeren en criminaliteit, zonder de woorden ‘allochtoon’, ‘migrant’ of ‘moslim’ in de mond te nemen. Alleen: zijn uitleg wordt gemonteerd op stereotiepe beelden: een vrouw met een hoofddoek, mannen in djellaba, een paar schoffies op straat. Voor de argeloze kijker is de boodschap duidelijk: allochto...
Through a critical review of existing literature on hipsters, and an analysis of online data, this article provides a description of 'hipster culture'. To this end, we examine the reoccurring markers of hipster identity and, crucially, the accompanying identity discourses on hipsters. As a result, a picture of hipster culture emerges as a transloca...
Politiek is in hoog gemediatiseerde samen-levingen, onder meer, steeds een strijd om betekenis. Een strijd over wat bepaalde woorden betekenen, hoe we bepaalde feiten moeten interpreteren en hoe we de ideologie van een partij moeten begrijpen. Woorden hebben geen vaste betekenis, maar zijn steeds onderhevig aan een po-litiek-ideologische machtsstri...
'Vlamingen maken na 22 uur geen lawaai meer. Ze spreken Nederlands, zijn punctueel en vinden gezondheid heel belangrijk. De Vlamingen leven niet op straat, ze houden van rust en stilte.' Zo schetste de Vlaamse overheid in zijn legendarische 'starterspakket Inburgering' het beeld van 'de Vlamingen'.
Zouden er vandaag nog mensen rondlopen die deze k...
'Vlamingen maken na 22 uur geen lawaai meer. Ze spreken Nederlands, zijn punctueel en vinden gezondheid heel belangrijk. De Vlamingen leven niet op straat, ze houden van rust en stilte.' Zo schetste de Vlaamse overheid in zijn legendarische 'starterspakket Inburgering' het beeld van 'de Vlamingen'. Zouden er vandaag nog mensen rondlopen die deze ka...
'Vlamingen maken na 22 uur geen lawaai meer. Ze spreken Nederlands, zijn punctueel en vinden gezondheid heel belangrijk. De Vlamingen leven niet op straat, ze houden van rust en stilte.' Zo schetste de Vlaamse overheid in zijn legendarische 'starterspakket Inburgering' het beeld van 'de Vlamingen'. Zouden er vandaag nog mensen rondlopen die deze ka...
'Vlamingen maken na 22 uur geen lawaai meer. Ze spreken Nederlands, zijn punctueel en vinden gezondheid heel belangrijk. De Vlamingen leven niet op straat, ze houden van rust en stilte.' Zo schetste de Vlaamse overheid in zijn legendarische 'starterspakket Inburgering' het beeld van 'de Vlamingen'. Zouden er vandaag nog mensen rondlopen die deze ka...
VA, banal nationalism and the battle for the Flemish nation by Ico Maly © ico@kifkif.be © June 2013
This PhD thesis analyses the political ideology and communication of the New-Flemish Alliance (Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie; N-VA). N-VA is a relatively new political party in Belgian politics. Their main political demand, in the long run, is the establishment of an independent Flemish state. Since 2007 this political party witnessed a spectacular rise:...
Een reportage op tv. Een islamoloog spreekt over jongeren en criminaliteit, zonder de woorden ‘allochtoon’, ‘migrant’ of ‘moslim’ in de mond te nemen. Alleen: zijn uitleg wordt gemonteerd op stereotiepe beelden: een vrouw met een hoofddoek, mannen in djellaba, een paar schoffies op straat. Voor de argeloze kijker is de boodschap duidelijk: allochto...
Over het boek:
De wereld was tot 1989 niet alleen een bipolaire wereld, ze was er één waarin ideologie de belangrijkste breuklijn vormde in het politieke landschap. Bij het naderen van het tweede millennium is cultuur de centrale breuklijn in de politiek geworden en staat migratie bovenaan de lijst van electoraal gevoelige thema’s. Culturen plakken...
