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

What is it about?

For explaining the dispersed extreme right movements that are pre- sently flourishing in the online sphere, British historian and political theorist Roger Griffin has elaborated the concept of groupuscular 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 under- stand a seemingly paradoxical problem: why, despite of the plurality of different view-points available on the web, are groupuscular communications still domi- nated by strict and homogeneous ways of modeling information.

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