Furries, freestylers, and the engine of social change: The struggle for recognition in a mediatized world

1 Introduction

According to Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp (2017, p. 4), the notion of mediatization is a shorthand for “all the transformations of communicative and social processes, and the social and practical forms built from them, which follow from our increasing reliance on technologically and institutionally based processes of mediation”. As part of an emerging research area of ‘mediated recognition’ (e. g., Campanella, 2018; Jansson, 2015; Maia, 2014; Nærland, 2017), the present article examines these transformations with regard to some of the fundamental communicative and social processes and forms: recognition and disrespect. Specifically, the article merges the ‘terminologies of social change’ from recognition theory and mediatization research in order to argue that the latest “wave of mediatization” (Couldry and Hepp, 2017) has eased and accelerated what recognition theorist Axel Honneth has called individualization and social inclusion (Honneth, 2003a, p. 186). However, discussions of Honneth’s framework have problematized the idea of “moral progress” that is integral to this conceptualization of social change because it does not include an adequate account of power. First, the article starts with an outline of Honneth’s conceptualization of social change and the related critique. Following Douglas Giles (2020), the article suggests that we must take this critique into account by distinguishing between affirmational and transformational recognition struggles. Secondly, the discussion is related to the conceptualization of social change in mediatization research, which provides the starting point for exemplifying, in the final part of the article, how the conditions for affirmational and transformational recognition struggles, and thus individualization and social inclusion, have changed in a mediatized world. This exemplification builds primarily on examples from an ethnographic case study of mediated (mis)recognition in the lives of four young Danish persons with different subcultural identity positions.

2 Recognition, social change, and power

It is the core tenet of Axel Honneth’s Hegelian recognition theory that all people need mutual recognition in the form of love/care, rights/respect, and esteem/solidarity in order to develop and maintain the corresponding practical relations-to-self (self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem) for a positive self-realization (Honneth, 1995). Recognition is thus essential for a person’s sense of place in society and individual autonomy. Of course, many people experience harm and injustices or feel disrespected by others or society in general (Honneth, 2007a), but these feelings and experiences of disrespect are also where Honneth (2003b, p. 245) locates “the engine of social change” – and the normative potential for moral progress – since the feeling of moral injury can lead to (collective) demands and struggles for recognition: “All in all, my idea is that, with regard to social development, we should be able to speak of moral progress at least to the extent that the demand for social recognition always possesses a surplus of validity and therefore in the long run brings about an increase in the quality of social integration” (Honneth, 2003a, pp. 174–175). By surplus of validity, Honneth refers to the premise that claims for recognition often take the form of appealing to the principles that underlie different forms of already existing recognition relations in a given society:

Each principle of recognition has a specific surplus of validity whose normative significance is expressed by the constant struggle over its appropriate application and interpretation. Within each sphere, it is always possible to set a moral dialectic of the general and the particular in motion: Claims are made for a particular perspective (need, life-situation, contribution) that has not yet found appropriate consideration by appeal to a general recognition principle (love, law, achievement). Honneth (2003a, p. 186)

Although the specific ‘contents’ of recognition and disrespect vary historically and culturally (as the basis for social integration), Honneth argues that this ‘universal’ dynamic constantly and continuously plays out. Hence, when struggles are successful, recognition claims find “appropriate consideration”, and progress takes place via the two processes of individualization and social inclusion:

One the one hand, we see here a process of individualization, i. e., the increase of opportunities to legitimately articulate parts of one’s personality; on the other hand, we see a process of social inclusion, i. e., the expanding inclusion of subjects into the circle of full members of society. (Honneth, 2003a, pp. 184–185)

Honneth’s framework^[1] and this idea of social change have fostered strong debates in political theory, social philosophy, and many other academic fields. In this eclectic literature, one of the central debates revolves around whether recognition theory provides an inadequate account of power. Important critiques coming from both Bourdieusian, feminist, and postcolonial directions (e. g., Allen, 2010; Balaton-Chrimes and Stead, 2017; Busbridge, 2018; Butler, 1997; Markell, 2003; McBride, 2013; McNay, 2008) point out that a recognition-theoretical view of (inter)subjectivity and sociality risks overlooking or even upholding the fact that certain political and social recognition orders maintain both individuals and groups more or less consciously in disadvantageous or harmful identity positions and structures of subordination and domination. For example, Amy Allen (2010), following Judith Butler, has argued that Honneth’s framework cannot adequately explain modes of subordination that do not produce any struggle, such as being socialized into stereotypical gender roles, and Cillian McBride (2013) reminds us that the struggle for recognition is essentially a struggle for authority. McBride problematizes that the recognition-theoretical literature is pervaded by a “recognition deficit” model, which assumes asymmetrical relationships between those who lack recognition and those who have the authority to give or refuse it. According to Balaton-Chrimes and Stead (2017), this idea of deficits has in fact often been the “structuring logic” of social struggles, particularly within the global North:

Faced with ongoing grievances by women and minority groups, or indeed by new grievances seemingly emergent through recognition claims and struggles, the response of both scholars and activists has often been to advocate for more, or better recognition largely within existing political communities and structures, or in ways that might transform those structures, but not exit or reject them.

As a response to these critiques, Honneth has proposed to distinguish between morally justified and ideological recognition, where the latter refers to those “forms of recognition that must be regarded as being false or unjustified because they do not have the function of promoting personal autonomy, but rather of engendering attitudes that conform to practices of domination” (Honneth, 2007b, p. 325). In tandem with the idea of ideological recognition, Honneth (2012, Chapter 9) has also discussed the concept of individualization in a more faceted way and argues that

claims to individual self-realization, which have rapidly grown as a result of an historically unique combination of very different processes of individualization in Western societies over the last thirty or forty years, have become such a strongly institutionalized pattern of expectations for social reproduction that they have lost their inner telos and instead become a basis for legitimizing the system. The result of this paradoxical transformation, in which those processes that once promised an increase in freedom have now become ideologies of deinstitutionalization, is the emergence of a number of individual symptoms of inner emptiness, the feeling of being superfluous and meaningless. (p. 157)

Honneth refers to this situation as “organized self-realization”. However, it is important to notice that while the critiques and revisions make us aware that recognition entails subjection (Butler, 1997), which perhaps always involves subordination of some sorts, it does not mean that recognition can be altogether discarded in an account of (inter)subjectivity and sociality. For instance, Balaton-Chrimes and Stead (2017) point out that the refusal of repressive recognition regimes is “arguably not a turning away from, or opposition to recognition per se, but rather a rejection of particular instantiations of recognition” (p. 12). Similarly, McBride (2013) emphasizes that individuals have a degree of independence and agency in negotiating social recognition but also points out that “recognition-sensitivity” is a basic aspect of social interaction (pp. 67–69).

In continuation of these revisions of the relation between recognition and power, Douglas Giles (2020) has recently proposed some amendments to Honneth’s theory of recognition. First of all, he criticizes Honneth’s tripartite, Hegelian distinction of recognition forms for being too strongly demarcated (Giles, 2020, pp. 20–55) and argues that (mis)recognition can better be understood as the engagement of individuals and social institutions with recognition norms and other individuals. This means that misrecognition is not the contrary of recognition: “The social norms themselves may be at fault either in being intrinsically biased against some members of society or in inadequately reflecting individuals’ attributes and needs” (Giles, 2020, p. 12). Furthermore, Giles points out that we need to rethink what it means to struggle for recognition: “I take issue with the tendency in recognition theory, not just in Honneth, to consider struggles for recognition predominantly as collective political movements for legal justice” (Giles, 2020, p. 15). Giles (2020) therefore makes an important distinction between “affirmational” and “transformational” struggles for recognition (pp. 209–215). The former is “the ongoing efforts of individuals to seek recognition that constructs and affirms their personal identities and their place in society” (p. 210), while the latter signifies “responses to circumstances or instances of misrecognition that seek to rectify perceived injustices and restore healthy recognition relations” (p. 211). According to Giles, this clarifies that the constant, everyday seeking of recognition in order to “fit in, belong, and to be accepted” (p. 212) are different from oppositional struggles, such as political resistance, which are grounded in feelings of misrecognition and disrespect. Furthermore, Giles shows that when transformational struggles do occur, they often involve individual agency in everyday life rather than always being caried out in social movements. In fact, if people experience mutual recognition in subcultures or “counter-publics” (Rogers, 2009), they are not necessarily motivated to struggle for recognition from the wider society, even in the face of marginalization and misrecognition (Giles, 2020, pp. 237–250). In relation to the recognition-deficit model, this realization is important because it helps us avoid “the condescending view that for members of subaltern groups to develop positive relations-to-self, they must seek recognition from dominant groups” (Giles, 2020, p. 242). If we compare this with Honneth’s idea of individualization and social inclusion, we can see that attempts to articulate aspects of one’s personality or to be socially included take place as both affirmational and transformational struggles.

In the final part of the article, I will relate this terminology to a case study of mediated (mis)recognition. First, however, I will give a sketch of the terminology of social change in mediatization research in order to argue that digital media use in everyday contexts, as a part of mediatization processes more generally, has eased and accelerated the processes of individualization and social inclusion.

3 Mediatization and social change

Returning to the initial definition of mediatization by Couldry and Hepp (2017, p. 4), we can now ask how our increasing reliance on technologically and institutionally based processes of mediation might have transformed processes of (mis)recognition and disrespect and how this relates to Honneth’s conceptualization of social change. Regarding these questions, it is important to notice that, within recognition theory, the ‘mediation’ of (mis)recognition is mostly considered in terms of face-to-face communication (oral interaction, facial expressions, gestures, etc.) (e. g., Honneth, 2001) or in terms of social institutions (e. g., Honneth, 2007b, pp. 334–336), which include (mass) media institutions, or, more generally, the public sphere (e. g., Honneth, 2014, pp. 255–304). These perspectives overlap with familiar themes in media and communication research, since media, in a broad sense, have always been key to both affirmational and transformational recognition struggles.^[2] However, with the latest wave of mediatization (Couldry and Hepp, 2017), which mediatization scholars also refer to as “deep mediatization” (Couldry and Hepp, 2017; Hepp, 2020; Hepp, Breiter, and Hasebrink, 2018), the media environment looks markedly different than just a few decades ago. Hepp and Hasebrink (2018) identify five “trends” that “characterize the change of the present media environment”:

First, a differentiation of a vast number of technologically based media of communication; second, an increasing connectivity of and through these media, which offers the possibility to individually and collectively ‘link’ across space and time; third, a rising omnipresence of media that creates the possibility to connect permanently and everywhere; fourth, a rapid pace of innovation, the emergence of ‘new’ media and services in ever-shorter periods of time; and fifth, a datafication, which is the representation of social life in computerized data via media devices and their underlying software and infrastructure. (p. 19)

These “quantitative trends” (Hepp, 2020) do not represent a linear development, and they cover many subprocesses with different consequences (and divides) in different regions and social domains across the world. But one of the things that generally distinguishes the current media landscape from previous landscapes is the “social location” of media: “In addition to their traditional position between people and various organizational entities (including media institutions) that characterized the mass media landscape (…), media technologies are now to a greater extent located between people” (Jansson, 2015, p. 82). André Jansson calls this “a social relocation of media”, which means that “communication has come full circle to the sort of interactive and multimodal forms of interchange that characterize face-to-face settings” (Jensen, 2020, p. 9). Hence, this social relocation, with the rise of digital media and mobile devices, integrates the two above-mentioned forms of mediation of (mis)recognition (via interpersonal communication and via social institutions).

The social relocation of media is therefore closely interrelated with a “re-orientation of the self” (Hepp, 2020, pp. 166–173) that refers to so-called “interveillance practices” of monitoring ourselves and others, which has become “an integral part of the negotiation of belonging and identity in times of deep mediatization” (Hepp, 2020, p. 169). In many ways, this is a consequence of the trends of differentiation, connectivity^[3], and omnipresence, which have led to a “media manifold” (Couldry and Hepp, 2017) with digital media embedded in most of our communities and social activities. However, the re-orientation of the self is first and foremost a consequence of datafication. The data generated everyday by our many digital traces form the basis for constructing “data doubles” of individuals (Hepp, 2020, pp. 158–160), which are primarily used by companies and state agencies for commercial and security purposes, but also, in a less aggregated form, by individuals themselves with regards to, for instance, self-tracking and social media profiles. This has paved the way for “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff, 2019), “data colonialism” (Couldry and Mejias, 2019), and a new “interveillance culture” (Jansson, 2015), where the ‘self’ and everyday life are colonized by “an advantaged digital economy as well as the spread of the dominant neoliberal discourse on self-improvement and self-surveillance” (Hepp, 2020, pp. 160–161). Both Jansson (2015, p. 86) and Hepp (2020, pp. 169–170) point out how this monitoring of – and by – individuals via digital media is intimately linked to what Honneth (2012, Chapter 9) calls the paradoxes of individualization. In this way, the re-orientation of the self can be understood in terms of both the freedom and the demands associated with the turn away from traditional social institutions, and their more unified social standards, towards a more individual articulation of identity, but also an increased need for intersubjective recognition from our peer groups to confirm and acknowledge our value and achievements. It is the promises of individual autonomy and mutual recognition that are exploited by social media companies, labor markets, and a range of other actors. Building on Honneth, Jansson (2015) explains this “organized self-realization” in the following way:

Self-realization becomes ideologically normalized as a biographical goal. Genuinely dialogical processes of recognition are undermined and replaced by standardized patterns of identity-seeking and simulated forms of recognition that serve the goal of legitimizing and further integrating individuals into the capitalist system. Authenticity and autonomy transmute into their opposites, simulation and conformism, and individuals may ultimately find their lives devoid of meaning. (p. 86)

According to Hartmut Rosa (2010, pp. 60–61), this late-modern struggle for recognition is also a driving force of social acceleration because social positions are not automatically allocated (as in the estate-based society) or pre-fixed life-goals to be strived for (as in classical modernity) but have to be achieved and performed every day in a competitive environment. The trends of mediatization are a central part of this dynamic via the social relocation of the media and the re-orientation of the self. The potentially constant contact with a variety of social groups and domains and the ability to monitor oneself and others (and the data doubles) certainly ‘eases’ the possibilities of articulating individuality and mutual recognition, but also facilitates and co-constitutes the increased and accelerated need for intersubjective recognition to confirm and maintain one’s social positions. Thus, it is also in the light of this acceleration that Honneth’s idea of social change must be interpreted. Mediatization is, as Jansson (2015) eloquently argues, “a complex transformative force that integrates both a liberating potential, the prospects of greater autonomy and new avenues towards social recognition enabled by media, and new forms of dependence that in different ways restrict the prospects of liberation” (p. 88).

In the final part of the article, I draw on a case study of mediated (mis)recognition, involving four young Danish persons with different subcultural identity positions, to exemplify how the conditions for affirmational and transformational recognition struggles, and thus processes of individualization and social inclusion, have changed in a mediatized world. I will start with a brief presentation of my case study and interlocutors.

4 Individualization and social inclusion in a mediatized world

As the official language goes, Denmark is one of “the most digitized countries in the EU” (Tassy and Nielsen, 2020, p. 4). 97 % of Danish households had access to the internet in 2020, while 96 % of Danish households had a least one mobile phone, 91 % at least one PC, and 90 % at least one smartphone (Tassy and Nielsen, 2020, pp. 15–16). Concerning the latter, the numbers have tripled in nine years. This proliferation of internet access and devices provides the infrastructure for a daily life with the internet. For the younger population, 93 % of the 16- to 24-year-olds and 89 % of the 25- to 34-year-olds are online several times every day (Tassy and Nielsen, 2020, p. 17). This mediatized setting has been the starting point for examining, via a qualitative, in-depth case study (Flyvbjerg, 2006), how media (usage, content, and technology) constitute and change processes of, and struggles for, recognition among a small group of interlocutors aged between 15 and 30 (see Tables 1 and 2 below).

Three of the four interlocutors were recruited in the spring of 2020 via a collaboration with a Danish organization working with youth empowerment in residential areas categorized as “exposed” or “ghettos” by the Danish authorities (Danish Housing and Planning Authority, 2021), while the fourth interlocutor was recruited via face-to-face recruitment at a public library. While their media use is “inherently cross-media” (Schrøder, 2011), the idea has been to make each interlocutor a primary ‘guide’ and gatekeeper to the social domains of one platform and then ‘follow’ them from there in accordance with the principles of multi-sited ethnography (Hine, 2015; Marcus, 1995). The methodological approach is thus based on ethnographic interviews and digital fieldwork in a youth research tradition within communication and media research (Boyd, 2015; Johansen and Larsen, 2020), and it includes traditional semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, think-aloud interviews, card-sorting exercises, and online participatory observation. After many delays and rearrangements due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, the case study started in November 2020 with the first interviews and ended in January 2022.

The basic information about the four interlocutors can be seen in Table 1, and brief biographical descriptions of each of them can be seen in Table 2. These provide the basis for the inclusion of examples in the following two sections that focus on affirmational and transformational recognition struggles, respectively.

5 Affirmational struggles

In an interview with tv2.dk, Allan Jensen, a Danish farmer who has been part of the reality television program Farmers Looking for Love^[4], talks about his experiences of growing up as a homosexual in the Danish countryside in the 1980s and how it was difficult to ‘fit in’: “I didn’t have the internet to rely on back then. In my childhood and youth, I never met a homosexual as far as I know” (Østebø, 2021).

The idea of having the internet ‘to rely on’ to find people like yourself and to express your identity is very indicative of the way that the latest wave of mediatization (Couldry and Hepp, 2017) relates to affirmational struggles for recognition. The various trends of mediatization have created a polymedia (Madianou and Miller, 2013) environment, which involves spatial extensions of the social world and an increased optionality in terms of media to use. This is an environment with a diversity in mediated content and actors, where also ordinary people have become producers of media content. As Couldry et al. (2014, p. 615) argue: “Digital media and digital infrastructures provide the means to recognize people in new ways as active narrators of their individual lives and the issues they share with others”. For one of my interlocutors, Maarika, who was often the only girl when she played football in school or in her local community during her childhood, videos on social media also gave her access to a world of such narrators:

As a child, it [social media] helped me get inspired. I saw other girls playing football! Later, when freestyle became popular, I also saw many girls do that. And that made me start. If I had not seen those girls doing it, I wouldn’t have known that it existed. I will say that without social media, I wouldn’t be doing freestyle today. I’m a 100 percent sure of that.^[5]

Whereas Allan Jensen had to wait to his late 20s to meet someone who he could talk with about his sexuality, already from her childhood, Maarika was ‘connected’ to this sort of identification and inspiration (although she still missed role models with headscarves), and her core narrative as an influencer revolves, in particular, around giving to children similar experiences. Indeed, while I have spoken extensively with my interlocutors about their awareness and experiences of disrespect, exploitation, and exclusion of both human and algorithmic kinds in and via digital media and datafication, their overall narratives about their own media use is one of places and people they can ‘rely on’ in their affirmational struggles “to fit in, to belong, and to be accepted” (Giles, 2020, p. 212). For Maarika, who often experiences online discrimination and other downsides of being an influencer (social media have given “stupid people the opportunity to say stupid things”, as she says), there is no doubt for her that social media have increased her own and others’ opportunities for self-realization. She sometimes even uses the word “recognition”:

I love that you have got a platform where you can express yourself. You can post about everything. From drawing to cooking, to doing sports, all sorts of things. There’s room for so many things. This has also made room for diversity and difference, it has spread (…) So many bisexuals and gay people post on TikTok. Boys who put on make-up, which in the past was strange, but because TikTok has become such a big platform, it has normalized. You see a lot of people doing that, and that also makes it easier for minorities to step forward, they are less oppressed, because people no longer see it as a ‘foreign’ thing. It has been recognized, and this recognition is so important for a human being to exist in a society. So, social media have helped really, really much in this regard.

If we compare Maarika’s observations with Honneth’s (2003a, pp. 184–185) formulation of the process of individualization, it is not farfetched to observe a relation between these mediated practices and the more abstract social process. Of course, this also relates to the outlined paradoxes of individualization and the dialectics of mediatization (Jansson, 2015). As contemporary academic and public debates have brought to light, the lives of influencers like Maarika do indeed demand many hours of (often unpaid) labor every day to (strategically) compete for as many likes, comments, and followers as possible, which, in turn, involves feelings of, for instance, exhaustion, inauthenticity, and loneliness, which Maarika also expressed occasionally. And the consequences of this organized self-realization (Honneth, 2012, Chapter 9) are not only experienced by influencers like Maarika. For example, Ahn had a period more or less ‘off’ Instagram between our first two interviews because of “feeling down” due to some personal issues in her life. She told me that when she felt a little better, she also felt a need to post stories to show that she was all happy again, although it was not entirely true, in order to “keep her Instagram going” and not “fall behind”. A couple of months later, Ahn told me she was feeling much better, and that her stories on Instagram also reflected this in a much more sincere way, but she continuously expressed feelings of ambivalence (cf., Hepp, 2020, pp. 157–166) towards the (practices of) self-representation, which was, to a certain extent, also the case for Maarika.

On the contrary, when I talked with David and Nikolaj, they were almost unambiguously positive in terms of the self-expression that is possible within their more ‘closed’ spaces for small groups of friends. Their subcultural gaming communities are important, however, precisely because these groups are alternatives to prevailing recognition orders. In comparison, David avoids certain online computer games or always plays them with a couple of really close friends since he has experienced hostility, toxicity, and exclusionary behavior because of his disabilities (cf., Beeston, 2020). Nikolaj, who says he is “very introvert” and finds it difficult to socially connect in physical contexts, regards ‘the internet’ as his primary arena for social participation and self-expression: “It is my life. The internet is where I feel most like myself. There are many more things that I can joke and talk with people about. If I’m in school, I’m just looking forward to getting home.” All of Nikolaj’s closest friends are online connections, primarily from Germany and the US. He clearly regards ‘the internet’ as a place where his affirmational recognition claims are met, where he feels “most like himself”. It is therefore also the place where Nikolaj first ‘came out’ as a furry. He did so simply by changing his profile pictures on various platforms, including Discord, to a picture of his so-called ‘fursona’ (see example in Picture 1), which he had seen on Reddit and immediately identified with (although he had already identified as a furry). Thus, in both a literal and a metaphorical sense, Nikolaj finds his identity and inclusion online.

Picture 1:

Example of a typical furry character By Yamavu – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36945695.

David has also ‘found’ a group of four really close friends on Twitch. They know each other from following the same streamer, who then created a Snapchat group for himself and his most dedicated followers. David calls this group “a family”. They are in contact every day, and they share feelings and problems with each other about getting divorced, issues with mental health, about falling in love, and so on: not only on Snapchat but also in livestreams on Twitch, where other people join the conversations.

To reiterate, I will argue that these everyday digital practices indicate a certain ease and acceleration in terms of social inclusion in times of deep mediatization. This is probably not entirely the idea of social inclusion that Honneth (2003a, p. 184) has in mind when he defines it as “the expanding inclusion of subjects into the circle of full members of society”, and he does indeed problematize the role of the internet in relation to the stratification and fracturing of national publics (Honneth, 2014, p. 303). Nonetheless, this underscores Giles’ (2020, p. 17) point that Honneth’s account overlooks the full role of subcultures and counter-publics for increasing potential recognition relations. However, as Giles (2020, p. 250) points out, the further the norms of a subculture are from the prevailing culture, the larger is the risk that the individuals of the subculture will experience normative discrimination and misrecognition. This brings us to the question of how responses to misrecognition take form in a mediatized world.

6 Transformational struggles

Contrary to affirmational struggles, which are constant, transformational struggles for recognition are “responses to circumstances or instances of misrecognition that seek to rectify perceived injustices and transform recognition relations” (Giles, 2020, p. 211). Therefore, individuals must also “cross a line” from the everyday affirmational struggles to the transformational struggles, which can “take the form of political resistance or various other forms of social action” (Giles, 2020, p. 245). According to Giles (2020, p. 245), this line to political resistance is difficult to cross for individuals because it often requires stepping out of one’s subcultural sphere into political spheres, which are often “restricted if not closed to subaltern groups, such as homosexuals or racial minorities excluded by normative discrimination”, and that this realm is also outside the interpersonal reach of personal relations and communities. This is also why many people “opt to struggle for recognition outside a political struggle for transformation of misrecognition” (Giles, 2020, p. 238).

As indicated above, my interlocutors have an acute awareness of, and acquaintance with, mediated misrecognition and disrespect: Maarika experiences many critical and often demeaning comments on TikTok about her appearance and activities as a hijabi football freestyler. David talks about the rough, sometimes offending, tone in some Twitch channels and online games. In addition to his own experiences with disablism, he has several examples from his own and others’ channels of trolling and even the so-called ‘hate raids’, which led a group of streamers to arrange a global walkout under the hashtag #ADayOffTwitch on September 1, 2021. Anh notices a lot of skeptical comments on Instagram, especially about people’s looks, and Nikolaj observes a general web discourse of negativity towards the furry community to which he belongs. Thus, the word “haters” was used frequently as a common denominator for disrespectful persons and behavior. In this context, David and Nikolaj describe practices that are aimed to protect their (subcultural) groups of friends from intruding haters: haters are just blocked, plain and simple. David, for instance, is often assigned the role of moderator in the chat of the Twitch channel where he spends most of his time. For Maarika, however, responding to disrespect is integrated into her practices, since one of the main purposes of her social media profiles is to transform recognition relations. While Maarika’s routinization of such responses reflects the prevalence and immediacy of disrespect in many online contexts, digital media also provide a spatial ‘comfort zone’ that enables the individual agency to respond to misrecognition and disrespect. This can be illustrated by comparing different instances of misrecognition from Maarika’s life.

During one of our interviews, Maarika told me about some experiences she had shortly after the Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen stated on a press conference in August 2020 that people were afraid to take the local trains in Copenhagen because of “immigrant boys” making trouble. In the days after the press conference, Maarika experienced both being spat at by an old woman and verbally abused by a middle-aged woman. When Maarika reflected on these incidents in the interview, she compared them to social media: “All the hate you get on social media is something completely different. I also get some ugly messages on Facebook and Instagram, but of course it hits you in a whole different way in real life. I was just left there thinking, ‘what the fuck’.” Maarika’s comparison is telling. If these unpleasant experiences are juxtaposed with her daily encounters with various forms of demeaning comments on TikTok and elsewhere, there is a difference in her own sense of agency. As an expert user of TikTok, who plans and tries different strategies for going viral, Maarika also has strategies for dealing with disrespectful comments. Sometimes she blocks offensive people and deletes their comments (she is especially tired of what she calls “the haram police”), but often she responds with humorous comments or other ‘comedy’ elements build around the lyrics of the accompanying songs or by simply choosing songs with sad, powerful, or inspirational lyrics.

Pictures 2 and 3:

Maarika responding to misrecognition.

Furthermore, her responses are not immediate but well planned, aimed at different target groups, and often give her many likes. Significantly, this strategic way of dealing with misrecognition and disrespect shows a finetuned understanding of political spheres as well as the dynamics of the intensified connectivity and differentiation of media. For instance, she says that she would never respond to hateful comments in private messages on her Instagram profile. On TikTok, she mostly has the children in mind, either to teach them that she is “a human being too” and that comments have consequences, as she says, or to protect her young followers from feeling hurt. She even says that after societal events that might lead to an insecure atmosphere for Muslims in Denmark, such as the prime minister’s comments or terrorist attacks around the world committed by Islamic extremists, she is extra alert in order to protect her community of followers with videos that might not explicitly relate to the events but address them indirectly. On Facebook, however, she is interested in providing political commentary of some sort: “I want to refute prejudices, and therefore I need to reach those people with prejudices or reach someone who can share [my posts] with them”. Similar to her ideas about self-realization quoted above, Maarika is convinced of the transformational potential of social media: “I can be part of forming the next generation and the way they think (…) Generally, it’s easier to normalize things on social media (…) you can make such a big difference”.

While this example of responding to misrecognition underlines Giles’ (2020) point that individual agency in everyday contexts is central for recognition struggles and that these struggles not only take place within social movements, it is clear that mediatization trends and the way they contribute to transformations of communicative and social processes such as transformational recognition struggles have had far-reaching impacts on the ways existing social movements work and new ones arise and develop.

7 Conclusion

This article has merged the ‘terminologies of social change’ from recognition theory and mediatization research in order to show how the mediatization of contemporary societies is related to the processes of what recognition theorist Axel Honneth calls individualization (increased opportunities to articulate and mutually recognize new parts of personalities) and social inclusion (more persons are included in existing recognition relations). The article has outlined Honneth’s conceptualization of social change as well as the critique that recognition theory does not have an adequate account of power, which means that it risks overlooking how existing recognition orders and forms might maintain structures of subordination and domination. Thus, the article has followed Douglas Giles’ (2020) suggestion that we need to distinguish between affirmational and transformational recognition struggles, where the former refers to the everyday seeking of recognition and the latter refers to responses to misrecognition and perceived injustices. This terminology has been related to the terminology of social change in mediatization research, and the article has highlighted that the latest wave of mediatization (Couldry and Hepp, 2017) has led to a social relocation of media (Jansson, 2015), which is closely interrelated with a re-orientation of the self (Hepp, 2020). These phenomena refer to the way media have been increasingly located between people as well as the increased (mutual) monitoring of individuals’ performances and achievements via media. This is intimately linked to the individualization and social inclusion processes of late modernity because it facilitates and co-constitutes the increased need of individuals to be recognized by peer groups as they turn away from the unified standards of traditional social institutions. Thus, mediatization is “a complex transformative force that integrates both a liberating potential, the prospects of greater autonomy and new avenues towards social recognition enabled by media, and new forms of dependence that in different ways restrict the prospects of liberation” (Jansson, 2015, p. 88). Finally, the article has exemplified how the conditions for affirmational and transformational struggles have changed with mediatization via examples from a case study about mediated (mis)recognition in the lives of four young Danish media users with different subcultural identity positions. It has been indicated how affirmational struggles are facilitated by the increased differentiation and connectivity of media, which makes it easier to articulate personality aspects as well as find (subcultural) spheres for social inclusion. Similarly, it has been described how digital media afford individual agency in transformational struggles against experiences of misrecognition and disrespect.