Description
A Social Media Study of Neoliberal Populist Hegemony
Gaurav Shah (Assistant Professor in Mass Communication at the School of Management Sciences, Varanasi, India)
In recent years, global discourse on ‘neoliberal populism’ is becoming more and more noisy. Hayek’s doctrine of neoliberal ideology seen as a political-economic project1 is being substantiated with the idea of populism. Right-wing populist movements are being co-opted by neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism has gradually developed into a political-cultural hegemony. This hegemony is the global domination of the ideology of neoliberalism. Mass media and now social media have further exacerbated the hegemony of neoliberalism. But at the same time, there are also counterhegemonic narratives within the domain of social media that questions and challenges the hegemonic cult created and diffused by neoliberal populism. This paper attempts to add to the idea of ‘counter-ideology’ (a term coined by John Schwarzmantel in his paper ‘Challenging Neoliberal Hegemony’) from the media perspective. This counter-ideology will be a force that will influence and mobilise public to oppose the tight grip of neoliberal populism. The paper tries to look for fake news and misinformation that encourage the populist hegemony and also explore the voices that denounce the supremacy of markets and populist ideas.
