Counter-energy or ‘cracking the flags’: Audience research in times of ideological crisis

Something very significant erupted in the heat of the 2025 UK summer, which saw a surge of very public displays of nationalism amid simultaneous violence and anger at the migrant population housed in hotels around the country. English towns, like the working-class mining town I grew up in, were covered in St George’s flags: the red cross on a white background, the national flag of England. White road-traffic roundabouts, pedestrian crossings and various other available white spaces had been painted in red crosses as visible and emotive outbursts of nationalist sentiment, a trend which seemed to rage across the United Kingdom. ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ began in August 2025 as a campaign group promoting national pride, encouraging the public to display Union Jacks, the red and white St Georges flag, as well as the flags of the other nations of the United Kingdom. There is urgent work for audience studies here to decipher and decode what is structurally happening on the ground, in and through the platform mediation of ideologies of right-wing nationalism.

At the time, there were curious conversations about this phenomenon. Was it healthy patriotism? For some, it emerged from (or happily collided with) the England women’s teams football success in the European Championships. Indeed, some politicians from all parties, right and left, came out in support of the flags, announcing their own patriotism while further dividing the nation given the glaringly obvious relationship to the far-right and to racism. This peaked in the ‘Unite The Kingdom’ rally, apparently the United Kingdom’s largest ever far-right rally in September 2025, where over 100,000 marched on London resulting in violence.

The contours of this ideological struggle are not exactly new. But it does signal a moment in which audience studies are confronted with the challenge to understand the powerful (and the media platforms at their disposal) as well as the more vulnerable and disenfranchised, and most importantly the relationships between them. Audience research on dis-information has tended to centre on how disinformation spreads through people who are more likely to be exposed to it and share it (Nelson and Taneja, 2018), focussing on audiences’ potential ‘vulnerability’ to dis-information (Pantazi et al., 2021), while Cushion and Kyriakidou (2025) find that audiences tend to accept dis-information as inevitable.

What can a Cultural Studies approach to audience research bring to this landscape? It is difficult to adopt the frame of ‘empowering audiences’, when it comes to right-wing extremism. Also, how do we address the mainstreaming of extremism in a contemporary struggle over meaning without recourse to ‘truth’? How do we tackle the audiences’ roles within the shifting – what I call ‘kaleidoscopic’ ideological landscape – a reference to how constant digital mirroring and refraction seem to generate dynamic realigning of ideological positions in surprising ways. In the kaleidoscope, what counts politically is where meaning settles and with what force. In Audience, I suggested that although the patterns in digital culture are unstable, it does not mean that they have no shape at all (Wood, 2024a). And right now, it is clear that they certainly do have a renewed shape and pull towards the right.

Audience studies for the digital age is addressed in Audience by seeing the through-lines between older audience research to contemporary forms of analysing the audience/user/producer of digital media (Wood, 2024a). One of the practical things we can do is simply re-instate our attention to media ‘form’. Digital architectures and their affordances are also texts and forms which help to organise, and are organised by, the formations of our social and cultural contexts. The old neat binary between text and context may have been blown up by digital culture but meanings generated across conjunctural contexts are just as important, perhaps even more so, in a world of dis-information, fake-news and political polarisation.

In the current political context of the United Kingdom, the precise techno-discursive arrangements require attention as the material basis of the flags is inextricably entwined within the political social-media battleground of populist politics. One of the central arguments of Audience, was that we should be careful not to let go of important foundational questions when we analyse the seemingly shiny new capabilities of (not so democratic) technological change. Audience studies in the United Kingdom started with questions of class and ideology. In David Morley’s (1980) research The Nationwide Audience, he was wrestling with the interpretation of the dominant meanings of a conservative television programme within the context of the Thatcher government at the beginnings of the gateway to privatisation, marketisation and the dismantling of the welfare state. This was after Stuart Hall’s 1979 important essay, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, which cautioned for more precise attention to the way in which fascism and economic recession together, ‘seem to render transparent those connections which most of the time are opaque, hidden and displaced’ (2017 [1979]: 174). Hall called for greater attention to conjunctural specificity of the time – concerned as he was with the way in which the right had such popular success in neutralising the contradictions between ‘the people and the state/power block’ which made Thatcher seem like she was ‘for the people’ while the social democratic government stood for power. Now in the summer of 2025, the neoliberal project has digitally accelerated into this conjunctural context and the far-right is speaking so successfully to (some) of the working class in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, weaponising their ‘patriotism’ – and perhaps their despair – for their own agenda.

Of course, across media and communication studies, there has been a considerable amount of attention to documenting the rise of the far-right in Europe and the mainstreaming of extreme ideologies in what Ruth Wodak (2020) calls ‘re-nationalising tendencies’. Using a discourse-historical approach, she shows us the ways in which extremist ideas filter from the backstage into the frontstage of mainstream of politics and into popular culture in Europe. This year in the United Kingdom, the rapid success of groups like, ‘Operation Raise the Colours’, and its ally, ‘Flag Force UK’, has been fuelled online over social media as the images of the flags in our neighbourhoods are uploaded and circulated, generating pageantry that spreads through a heady mix of techno-social activity. The recent far-right success has often been attributed to its early adoption of online tools, adapting to platform evolution and circumventing the mainstream media (Conway et al., 2019).

Examining the online worlds of the far-right demonstrates the patterning of extremism – there is a generally accepted consensus that social media encourages disconnection and polarisation and that ‘debate’ evolves through the simplified and repetitive taking of opposing sides, rather than through a greater complex negotiation of issues (Vaidhyanathan, 2022). Although research into the more precise ‘ways’ polarisation works is still fairly thin on the ground (Kubin and Von Sikorski, 2021). Dis-information is central to this landscape where ‘truth’ and ‘facts’ are evasive and slippery. Naomi Klein (2023) talks of a ‘doppelgänger’ effect where the mirror-world of the internet produces polar camps which define themselves in opposition to whatever the other is saying and doing at any given time, in which she says, ‘we are not having disagreements about differing versions of reality – we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in simulation’ (p. 111).

In this distorted kaleidoscopic world, it is the circulation and reproduction of that information, where it lands and settles that gives it its force – if not its truth. This is the terrain in which the far-right do so well – Trump initially on Twitter now on his own network, Nigel Farage on TikTok (Indeed Farage has more TikTok followers than any other UK Member of Parliament combined). In the account of the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, discussed above, far-right groups were claiming a turnout of ‘millions’ while the mainstream press suggest it was more like 100,000. These numbers are still significant of course, but the force of them, amplified by the imagery and pageantry of flags sediments, shifting the terrain until the actual numbers, along with the rest of dis-information about asylum seekers, seem to matter little, as attacks on asylum hotels appear up and down the country. To further double-down on such a context, the ‘unite the country’ rally was supported by Elon Musk – part of the frightening way in which ‘reciprocal radicalisation’ (Lee and Knott, 2020) connects the dots between national contexts, following a global set of patterns which seem to be bringing a very dominant ideology into ever dominant, if not exactly sharper, focus.

My suggestion, for audience analyses of the interplay of the online and offline configuration of ideology, is to think more fully about the nature of the ‘everyday’ of this mainstreaming. How do these ideas rest, sediment or refract within the ‘ordinary’ on the ground – taking our cue from Cultural Studies’ approaches to audiences. Trying to make the flags seem ‘benign’ is of course part of the problem, and we are brought back to Michael Billig’s (1995) important text Banal Nationalism where the everyday, small and routine operations of nationalism are potentially even more powerful than larger pageants. While it’s been difficult following the Facebook groups promoting the flags, I am also struck by the videos of the ‘ordinary’ people trying to take flags down outside of their homes. The young woman pressing her wheelie-bin against a flag bearer to prevent him getting to the lamp post outside her home, all while his friend filmed her apparently unreasonable protest. Or the hooded young men in the night climbing lamp post after lamp post to recover flags by stealth. This is quite literally a terrain of struggle in the current conjuncture – while the flag groups claim these ‘everyday’ activists as ‘traitors’, alternative groups like ‘Hope not Hate’ claim them as ‘heroes’. This is evidence of a techno-material struggle over meaning, and we need audience studies that, as Joke Hermes (2026) would tell us, really listens to what is happening on the ground.

As Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter (2020) discuss, there is a problem with the labelling of far-right sentiments as ‘populism’ as though it comes from ‘the people’ and as the result of popular demands, because that ignores the way in which reactionary politics is being used by those in power for their own ends. Those arguments that blamed the racialised white working-class for Brexit failed to see class as more diverse and acknowledge the working-class areas, mainly in the cities, that actually did not deliver support for Brexit (Shilliam, 2018). We can see the slippage here between the celebration of England’s football victory and the violence on the streets of London as part of that conflation of the ‘will of the people’ which can too-readily be blurred in the mirror-world. For Mondon and Winter, we need to understand the ‘ideological underpinnings of this manoeuvre, which places the blame squarely on the voiceless, [. . .] deflecting attention from those responsible for the current sociopolitical situation’ (2020: 333).

Audience studies should be part of this conversation, thinking more fully about the nature of the ‘everyday’ mainstreaming of right-wing extremism. It needs to recover the diverse voices of the working class as well as, and as part of, documenting the rise of ‘fannish’ practices in relation to political extremism and activism (Driessen et al., 2024). I have argued elsewhere that in all the contemporary interest in online digital ‘labour’, we have looked away from class (as it is raced and gendered) (Wood, 2024b). As ever, we have to pay attention to the racialised dynamics of class in the ‘societal relations of production’ recognising that ‘race is the modality through which class is lived’ (Hall et al., 1978: 394). Paying attention to the current ‘societal relations of production’ therefore is to recognise the rising cost of living, precarious low-paid labour, insecure housing, criminalising of the poor, and their intersecting relations, and how these meet this ideological kaleidoscope. As Stuart Hall cautioned in 1979, the popular success of the move to the right is not just a ‘trick’ as the left seemed to present. ‘Its success and effectivity does not lie in its capacity to dupe unsuspecting folk but in the way it addresses real problems, real and lived experiences, real contradictions’ (Hall, 2017 [1979]: 185/6). We need to understand the struggle unfolding in our digitally mirrored neighbourhoods and to recognise that to study culture ‘from below’ today is an even more urgent struggle against power, racialised capitalism, dis-information and the far-right.