Affective Body Politics of Social Media

‘Being a feminist online is exhausting’: Fear as affect in anti-feminist harassment of women in online spaces In the wake of the release of the Facebook Files in The Guardian exposing the social media platform’s dismissive attitude to gendered threats of violence, it is demonstrably clear that social media can be a deeply hostile and frightening place for women. Harassment is a central issue on social media and has been the subject of important academic research projects (Powell and Henry 2015; Lenhart et al 2016); the usual focus of scholarly work in this area is how women are affected as the direct targets of harassment (Powell and Henry 2015; Cole 2015; Jane 2014). This study builds on these important works and takes an alternative approach to the issue by exploring how women are indirectly affected by witnessing harassment on social media. This paper discusses the findings from an ethnographic interview study with nine female-identifying feminists in Melbourne, Australia. This study found fear can causally change the way women interpret and respond to online harassment and the way the affective fallout from witnessing or observing harassment can cause a traumatic response. This study also draws on Sara Ahmed’s incisive work on the affective politics of fear and how it functions in relation to the human body — bringing bodies together and moving them apart, thus inducing a tactile response to both physical or imagined threats (Ahmed 2014). It is important therefore to understand the destabilising nature of fear, how it affects changes in the way women relate to online spaces, and how they perceive their safety, or lack thereof. Fear was found to be affecting changes in behaviour even in the absence of an object to be feared. This paper will present the implications for observing anti-feminist rhetoric, including the consequences of fear as affect on both physical and online security measures. It will be shown that fear for women in online spaces is not merely based on an ‘object’, i.e. physical violence, but the mere threat or suggestion of a threat causes women to disappear, to shut themselves up and retreat from public interactions. This paper calls for greater emphasis in research and scholarship around women’s individuated social media practices to facilitate further discussion with social media platforms to promote safety and security for women online.

Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly

Affective Politics of Digital Media: Propaganda By Other Means, 2021

This interdisciplinary, international collection examines how sophisticated digital practices and technologies exploit and capitalize on emotions, with particular focus on how social media are used to exacerbate social conflicts surrounding racism, misogyny, and nationalism. Radically expanding the study of media and political communications, this book bridges the humanities and social sciences to explore affective information economies, and how emotions are being weaponized within mediatized political landscapes. The chapters cover a wide range of topics: how clickbait, "fake news," and right-wing actors deploy and weaponize emotion; new theoretical directions for understanding affect, algorithms, and public spheres; and how the wedding of big data and behavioral science enables new frontiers of propaganda, as seen in the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal. The collection includes original interviews with luminary media scholars and journalists. This book features contributions from established and emerging scholars of communications, media studies, affect theory, journalism, policy studies, gender studies, and critical race studies to address questions of concern to scholars, journalists, and students in these fields and beyond.

2019

Given the increasing encroachment of Twitter into offline experience, it has become necessary to look beyond the formation of identity in online spaces to the ways in which identities surface through the formation of affective communities organized through the use of technocultural assemblages, or the platforms, algorithms, and digital networks through which affect circulates in an online space. This essay focuses on the microblogging website Twitter as one such technocultural assemblage whose hashtag functionality allows for the circulation of affect among bodies which “surface” within the affective communities organized on Twitter through their alignment with and orientation by hashtags which serve as “orientation devices” to direct some bodies towards some affective communities and not others. Thus, this paper contends that “Asian Twitter,” “Black Twitter,” “Academic Twitter,” and other such “twitter territories” can only be identified through the ways in which they circulate aff...

In an era of clickbait journalism, Twitter storms, and viral social media campaigns varying from social protest to commodity promotion, it has become strikingly clear that networked communications are not merely about critical rational exchange or functional information retrieval, but equally-and perhaps even more explicitly-an issue of affective exchanges and connections of both the fleeting and more lasting kind. As argued in this chapter, the notion of affective resonance provides a means of accounting for encounters with the world in which bodies move from one state to another, and possibly become transformed in the process. This conceptualization is hardly specific to online phenomena as such, and it is used here to explore affective encounters between people, networks, interfaces, apps, devices, digital images, sounds, and texts in the context of social media. Moving from my own considerations of resonance in connection with online pornography to examinations of the role, both pronounced and not, that affect has played in Internet research, this chapter asks how affect matters and makes things matter in a contemporary media landscape driven by the quests for attention, viral circulation, and affective stickiness.

The so-called affective turn has been diagnosed in cultural inquiry for soon two decades. In studies of gender, media, and communication, it has allowed for investigations of public sentiment, the force and appeal of media images, texts, and sounds, as well as the entanglement of human and nonhuman bodies in everyday practices of communication. In its diverse manifestations, the turn to affect has shifted analytical attention away from issues of representation and psychology towards questions of materiality and sensation. It has also challenged rational models of communication, as suggested in the influential notion of the public sphere. Considerations of affective online publics formed through public accounts of sentiment, the melodramatic templates of reality television, or the affective appeal of fake news all suggest the importance of expanding lines of inquiry into the interconnections of sense and sensibility, the semiotic and the somatic. At the same time, studies of affect remain divided in their theoretical approaches, from new materialist interest in abstract, pre-personal qualities of affect to more psychological accounts of embodied affective capacities and states. The turn to affect has been critiqued for short-circuiting considerations of social power just as it has been seen as affording novel points of entrance into understanding the affective ecologies of ubiquitous network connectivity. In their focus on bodies encountering and affecting one another, considerations of affect foreground materiality and, in doing so, push against inquiries into gender, media, and communication that address human actors alone.

Springer eBooks, 2022

Affect, emotions and moods all play an important role in social and political life. They motivate, excite, colour experience, are core to communication, help us perceive value and inform our judgements (including those of a moral sort). This chapter accounts for the energising role of feelings in relation to false information throughout the civic body. Using feelings as a catch-all term to describe affects, emotions and moods, as well as reactions to stimuli we may not be aware of, we start by charting the trajectory of the role of feelings in understanding citizen-political communications. Their persuasive importance was recognised millennia ago and this has been recognised anew in recent decades with the advent of neuroscience and the understanding that emotions are important for decisions and judgements. Many studies address how governments can try to best manage public feeling, and hence behaviour, and we highlight three main mechanisms: discursive, decision-making based and datafied. Claims that we live in a post-truth condition are prevalent, with appeals to emotion and personal belief argued to be more influential in shaping public opinion than objective facts. While the relative importance of emotion and facts in everyday life is difficult to ascertain, we demonstrate that the media from which people would normally derive their facts (namely, news media and social media) have become more emotionalised and affective. We suggest that we live in an informational environment that is

Church, Communication and Culture, 2016

What constitutes an affect cycle in digital networks? How is it enacted and what are the conse- quences for individuals, for digital data and for the society that comprises both? Further, what is the relationship between affect and emotion, and what is their relationship with digital networks? Is it possible for an affect cycle to be established between people and digital networks, between peo- ple via digital networks and between digital networks themselves? By examining recent affect theo- ry in combination with Simondon’s theories of technical evolution and other theories of interaction and knowledge, I will define the nature of affect as it emerges through the cycle of interaction be- tween people and digital networks. I trace these cycles through and between the overdetermined, underexamined sites of interaction across digital networks in order to identify who and what are participating in the capture and escape of affect. I also show how this is facilitated and what is changed during, and as a result of, these affective interactions. Using a deep understanding of the technical workings of digital networks, combined with receptiveness to the affective potential of emotional agency in our digital world, I situate human affective practice in the uneasy environment of algorithmic digital corporate networks. Draft chapter for "Emotions, Technology, and Social Media" edited by Sharon Y. Tettegah

2021

This seminar is an introduction to the subject of affective politics on everyday, national and global level. We tend to talk about politics in terms of power struggle, strategies and tactics, global capitalist system, etc. However, ethnographically, politics is less a rational struggle than an affective situation. Although anthropology has always been attentive to sentiments, systematic and conceptual study of public emotions and affect intensified after the late 1980s and especially in the last two decades. In this course, we will discuss relatively recent anthropological works on emotions, empathy, hospitality, cultural intimacy and affect with a particular focus on mass politics.