Undermining Cosmopolitanism - Cyber-racism Narratives in Australia

Abstract

Cyber-racism is a relatively new and yet increasingly pervasive form of racism that adds another dimension to the spread of race hate. Multi-cultural countries such as Australia share a concern for the effective development of online strategies to combat this problem, including through building community resilience. Understanding how cyber-racism impacts cosmopolitanism, as a key characteristic of multiculturalism, will give insight into how it can be countered. Cosmopolitanism can be described as an ideological concept that focuses on embracing cultural difference. More pragmatically, cosmopolitanism is a contextualized worldview that encourages and sustains productive engagement with cultural difference in multi-cultural societies. Social media such as Facebook has the potential to facilitate such a culturally inclusive worldview, or to work against it. Using a narrative approach, this research investigates a Facebook page that has been reported to the Online Hate Prevention Institute (OHPI) as racist. The findings of this research show that the worldview perpetuated in the narrative on this page is one of cultural exclusion, undermining the prospect of cosmopolitanism in Australia.