Robert Topinka, Cassian Osborne-Carey, Alan Finlayson
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Research into online forms of far-right, alt-right, populist, and supremacist politics has raised questions about the extent to which social media enables or constitutes extremist affects and ideologies. Building on this research and through a case study of how a pro-Trump community on Reddit made sense of news events and sought to contest their representation, this paper explores the relationship between games and politics, arguing that digital platforms encourage people to apprehend, interpret, and contest political ideas and information as if engaged in a kind of videogame. We show how the group sought to manipulate platform affordances, waging a kind of Info War rooted in an understanding of politics as a pure space of conflict. We show how social media orients people to politics, phenomenologically, through the logics, structures and narratives of online games and argue that this affects not only online behaviors but more general apprehensions of politics.
期刊介绍:
International Political Sociology (IPS), responds to the need for more productive collaboration among political sociologists, international relations specialists and sociopolitical theorists. It is especially concerned with challenges arising from contemporary transformations of social, political, and global orders given the statist forms of traditional sociologies and the marginalization of social processes in many approaches to international relations. IPS is committed to theoretical innovation, new modes of empirical research and the geographical and cultural diversification of research beyond the usual circuits of European and North-American scholarship.