Groupuscular identity-creation in online-communication of the Estonian extreme right

Abstract

AbstractFor explaining the dispersed extreme right movements that are presently flourishing in the online sphere, British historian and political theorist Roger Griffin has elaborated the concept ofgroupuscular right. The groupuscular right can be characterized by the non-hierarchic and the rhizomatic structure of intra-groupuscular communication. Our study on Estonian groupuscular right complements it with the ideas of cultural semiotics that help to explicate self-descriptions of particular groupuscular nodes (e.g., blog posts) but also to analyze their relations with other extreme right groupuscules and with the radical online sphere as a whole. Although the extreme right’s communication has become more heterogeneous in its form and content, it is still possible to distinguish central and peripheral meanings. Our approach allows us to understand a seemingly paradoxical problem: why, despite of the plurality of different view-points available on the web, are groupuscular communications still dominated by strict and homogeneous ways of modeling information.