YouTube interactions between agonism, antagonism and dialogue: Video responses to the anti-Islam filmFitna

Abstract

Fitna, is a 2008 short film made by a Dutch member of parliament to support his fight against Islam.It shows shocking footage of terrorism, violence and women's oppression and claims that these are inherent to Islam. The film caused immense controversy and mobilized people across the world to produce and upload their own views to YouTube. In this article we analyze these videos using different theoretical models of democratic interaction, and distinguishing between antagonism, 'agonism' and dialogue. On the basis of a cybermetric network analysis we find that the videos are mostly isolated reactions on the film. Only 13 % or fewer of the posters interacted with each other through comments, subscriptions or 'friendship'. These interactions could be qualified as antagonistic or agonistic, but very rarely involved dialogue. We therefore conclude that YouTube enabled a multiplication of views rather than an exchange or dialogue between them.[147] host of user-generated video reactions possible. This resulted in an even greater novelty: a global public debate conducted through visual media. This visual debate is the topic of this article. In a previous study of these video reactions, we established that their makers perform a political and/or religious self through their videos and assume a global audience to whom they want to speak. Most videos express a desire to make a connection to geographically dispersed others in what we called a possible act of (global) citizenship (Van Zoonen, Vis and Mihelj, 2010). Yet, we also concluded that for such an act to become meaningful, it needed to be seen, listened to and acted upon by others, in some form of re-action or interaction. Whether and how this happened, and which views were shared and contested forms the general question of this paper. We will first examine the notions of re-action and interaction through the the theoretical frameworks of political, religious and Web 2.0 studies. Then, we will present the combination of research methods through which we examined the video exchanges and networks. iv We will conclude the analysis by asking whether and how the videos constitute a 'video sphere' for different sorts of political and religious interaction. Antagonism, agonism and dialogueIt should come as little surprise that the Fitna controversy was aired on the internet. This is for two reasons. First, from its beginning, the internet has hosted religious websites, forums, chat rooms, email lists and so on (O' Leary and Brasher, 1996). Internet users regularly list religion among their While public sphere theory -originating from Habermas' seminal work, but developed, adjusted and contested ever since -is often employed to embed these kinds of questions, Papacharissi (2009) has argued that it probably does not offer the most helpful perspective for understanding the kinds of engagement occurring on the internet, whether in its 1.0 or 2.0 variety. She argues that blogging and vlogging are best qualified as 'civic narcissism' because they are mostly means of self-...

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