In recent years, the right-wing extremist site Avpixlat (‘Unveiled’) and the anti-racist blog Inte rasist, men... (‘Not a racist, but…’, IRM) have established themselves as political actors and platforms for political discussion in Sweden. However, we know very little about them and their impact on democracy. The purpose of my work is to analyze social movements’ discussion forums on the internet based on an idea that they are within a tension field between democratic potential and being a potential danger to democracy. Representative democratic theory, socio-cultural learning theory and the idea of discursive debate, form my theoretical framework. I use these three theories as tools to extend our understanding of the role of the discussion forums in political debate, and how they will affect the task of the education system to educate democratic citizens. I do a text analysis of articles and user comments on Avpixlat and IRM, and a survey among pupils in upper secondary school. Two major conclusions are made; 1) There are no major differences between the right wing extremist forum Avpixlat and the anti-racist blog IRM, they can both be described as authoritarian groups with high social pressure, and they look at democratic actors with skepticism. 2) The education system seems to be unaware of the fact that young people come into contact with right-wing extremism and undemocratic political discussion every week in their spare time. Therefore, pupils are never given a democratic alternative to the political discussions that they meet in social media. This brings to questioning whether schools can be said to follow the curriculum on educating democratic citizens.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-31662 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Halvarsson, Elina |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för statsvetenskap (ST) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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