The Discursive-Digital Link: Antagonism and Polarisation in Digital Spaces

We are in a state of crisis. Democracy is under threat, authoritarian politics are on the rise, and digital media—once heralded as emancipatory technologies—are increasingly implicated in democratic erosion. The Discursive-Digital Link offers a critical framework for understanding the entangled relationships between discourse, digital media, and the hidden dynamics behind antagonism and polarisation. The Discursive-Digital Link presents a fluid social ontology that theorises how discourses and digital communication technologies are inseparably entangled, and how this entanglement contributes to the formation of complex hierarchical relations. Drawing on discourse theory and new materialist perspectives, Dehghan maps how the various components of the discursive-digital link—users, collectives, identities, the medium’s design, underlying neoliberal capitalist logics, and structural power dynamics—together shape antagonistic frontiers in digital spaces. Through detailed case studies across multiple digital media, Dehghan demonstrates how these entanglements manifest through different articulatory logics that could transform societies towards either agonistic progress or disastrous polarisation. By revealing the logics of discursive-digital alliances and active passivity, Dehghan provides critical insights for academics, activists, and anyone seeking to foster progressive togetherness. The Discursive-Digital Link offers a powerful theoretical framework and methodology for analysing digitally mediated communication. It challenges monolithic understandings of polarisation, technological solutionism, and symptom-focused approaches, instead advocating for radical structural interventions across all entangled components of the discursive-digital link—a necessary shift in both academic research and progressive political strategy to address the democratic crises of our time.