![]() ![]() He comes out as a true believer of the libertarian and counter-hegemonic destabilizing effect of the free Internet and more peculiar, the Internet as a source of liberation, a way back to explore pure identity and uncorrupted truth: You will not find the truth anywhere else.” Radicalization as the “rational response to degeneration” is driven by a dynamic between online and offline socialization “in the flesh or online” (Tarrant 2019:36). In one of his bizarre Q&A-sections possibly mimicking the ‘Ask-me-Anything’ format of Reddit, Tarrant states (2019:17): “ From where did you receive/research/develop your beliefs? The internet, of course. His identity-formation as much as radicalization was driven by the hyper-medial environment in which it was aimed to unfold meaning (Madisson 2016). This is one of the first and key take-aways from the ‘manifesto’ of ‘third position’ radical right ideology terrorist Brenton Tarrant released online (of course – and its content presented extensively below): his understanding of the world and his communication with the world is shaped by the Internet and its specific communication culture. Tarrant thus has much in common with ISIS who painstakingly staged their executions as emblematic hybrid media narratives with the purpose of a maximum of impact (Krona 2019). ![]() Facebook is said to have removed no less than 1,5m videos of the terror attack during the first 24 hours, which demonstrates the magnitude of terrorism as an act of strategic communication (Falkheimer, 2013:44-55) or as Marsh and Mullholland argue: “the attack seemed orchestrated for the social media age” (CNN 2019/1). The far-right terrorist attack of Christchurch was staged ‘in real life’ (IRL) with the purpose to create maximum impact through dissemination online. Moving from idea to action, cognitive and behavioral levels of radicalization (Önnerfors 2018:27). ![]() In the age of online communication and social media, the stage is the same as the Internet and the audience that interactive mix of producers and consumers, the so-called ‘prosumers’ of online ‘user generated content’, where it is difficult to determine the borders between production and consumption of what Bauman has called ‘autotelic violence’ (2017:30). ‘Bühnensucht’ is a German expression denoting an irrational longing to take the stage or as Jenkins put it already in 1974, “terrorism is theater” (Jenkins 1974:7). Terrorism as theater in the age of Internet ![]()
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