Affective Politics of Digital Media

Propaganda by Other Means

Megan Boler, Elizabeth Davis, Megan Boler, Elizabeth Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000169171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Faschismus & Totalitarismus

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 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.

The 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.

PART I

Theorizing Media and Affect

1

Affect, Media, Movement

Interview with Susanna Paasonen and Zizi Papacharissi

Megan Boler and Elizabeth Davis

This interview took place by videoconference on February 3, 2020, and was edited by correspondence in the following weeks.

Elizabeth:	How did each of you come to the study of affect and digital media? Where and when did that begin for you?
Zizi:	I was pretty much a stranger to this area. I started reading up on it around 2010–2011. I was thinking a lot about the simple phrase people use in everyday speech, “You’re making this decision with your brain when you should be thinking with your heart.” Or they’ll say, “You’re thinking with your heart when you should be thinking with your brain.” And I thought well, this is just weird, how can you separate one from the other? I mean, it just seems like such an unnatural thing to do. Initially I was trying to understand that on my own just so I could move forward as an individual. At the same time, a lot of social movements started happening that shook up the world—the Indignados, the Occupy Movement, and the Arab Spring. What really drew me to the study of these movements was the performative elements that were associated with them that were so distinct. You know, the idea of occupying a space, and the performativity involved in that. Or the human mic, “mic check” strategy that Occupy adopted to amplify voice. Or the festive activities and dance circles associated with the Indignados movement. This is something that Catherine Knight Steele has picked up on in her work on movements and black joy. I found these performative elements fascinating. What I thought they had in common was tension; a lot of intensity around what was happening. And in order for democracies to survive, they need to have ways to release that tension so that they can start over again and reimagine processes. First I turned to Zizek’s idea of jouissance, then I read more of Jodi Dean’s work, which turned me to specific aspects of Lauren Berlant’s work and the formidable Affect Theory Reader (by Gregg and Seigworth). These helped me understand this intensity as affect; as a mood or a feeling, but also the potentiality to feel something. The work of psychologists further helped me come up with an operational definition that I could use in the work I was doing, which had a computational element to it. So, I guess I kind of stumbled into affect as the most convincing explanation for the phenomena I was observing. I found it to be the best way to interpret the intensity that renders public formations into being.
Susanna:	Well, I know I co-organized a conference in 2001 on rethinking embodiment in feminist media studies through affect. I probably didn’t understand much about the whole thing just then, but affect theory spoke to me in offering a different take on materiality in media studies inquiry that was so much focused on the textual. As a child of ’90s academia, that’s what I was trained to do and, methodologically, I sort of grew very uneasy with that. Affect became more central when I started doing work on online pornography a few years later as a way of accounting for the particular power of images, sounds, and text that move the bodies of people watching. What happens in those moments? What impact, what encounter is there, and how can it be conceptualized? Affect also offered ways to unpack some of the politics around porn as these result in firm stances as either “for” or “against.” There is a tendency to frame porn as being either about sadness, rage, and disgust, or about joyful exploration and pleasure, depending on one’s particular stance. For me, affect has been about foregrounding complexity and ambiguity. Increasingly, I’m interested in the ambiguity of things. When we’re talking about intensities that move bodies both individually and collectively, and how these become registered in bodies, it’s not going to be just one quality. At some point, I figured that maybe my musings on affect were not that particular to online porn, and that the same kind of framework could be used to understand other online phenomena: habitual exchanges across social media, the kind of shit storms that last for 24 hours, but also for more lingering things. During the past few years, it’s become increasingly clear that the social media economy is an affective economy where affect is being both monetized and manipulated, and where attempts are made to turn affect into data to be mined and repurposed like any other user data. The objects of our study keep on transforming, and I don’t think we can do without affect theory if we want to understand what’s going on in social media.
Elizabeth:	Susanna, can you say a bit about the concept of “resonance” you’ve developed, initially I believe in Carnal Resonance [Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (2011) MIT Press], and how this is helpful in understanding affect in digital media?
Susanna:	I felt that visual terminology, which has tended to dominate studies of porn (as in discussions of the gaze and representational politics), wasn’t helping me much in conceptualizing the visceral qualities that encounters with porn may entail, so I turned to the notion of resonance instead, and to the vocabulary of sound studies more generally (as in rhythm, tone, and tempo). Resonance basically describes oscillations induced in objects affected by others oscillating at the right frequency and it also refers to a sense of importance, power to evoke emotions, and intensifications produced through vibration. For me, it has helped to account for connections between bodies that need not be in any sense similar to one another—when, for example, a single image or a video clip among hundreds of others grabs one’s attention and perhaps somehow lingers and sticks. Understood as moments when something happens that becomes registered, even as dissonance, resonance describes an encounter that is interactive, highly material, and contingent. This can be about being turned on, disgusted, amused, bemused, or bored by porn, although I’ve grown to think that resonance is about a more general dynamic of being touched and moved in an immediate way before having time for reflection. Resonant encounters with networked media involve human bodies just as they do nonhuman ones, made of plastic, silicone, copper, steel. In resonant encounters something has the power to move the user’s body from one state to another, be this a cat gif, a news photo, or a particularly evocative webcam performance. And if resonant encounters entail affective intensity, then they are also ones where things come to matter.
Megan:	Zizi, can you say a bit about some of the key concepts you developed in Affective Publics? You draw centrally on Massumi’s conception of affect in your work: Affect is not emotion. It is the intensity with which we experience emotion. It is the slight tap on our foot when we hear a song but have not yet cognitively processed that we like it. It is the phatic nod we produce when we are listening along to what someone is saying, but we have not yet decided whether we fully agree or not. More precisely, it is the drive or sense of movement experienced before we have cognitively identified a reaction and labeled it as a particular emotion. Its in-the-making, not-yet-fully-formed nature is what invites many to associate affect with potentiality. [Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics (2015) Oxford University Press, p. 10] One of the things Elizabeth and I have struggled with in thinking through the uptake of this concept of affect, is how it helps to analyze the material effects, expressions, experiences of emotion. If affect is a “non-conscious remainder,” not yet subjected to language, nonetheless—one presumes—within a few seconds (if the affect is to become “meaningful,” if translated into semiotic representation) affect is “captured” and becomes “emotion,” according to a Massumian account. In terms of understanding the significantly textual and expressive features of social media, how does affect so conceived help us understand textual manifestations and expressions? I’m thinking here about how social media is so precisely about codifying, encoding specific emotions, to drive virality, to stoke affective polarization—but these rely on quite specific expression of specific emotions. Do you have any thoughts on when and how scholars might need one concept or the other in different kinds of analyses?
Zizi:	Herein lies the difficulty in applying affect to social science research. It is our very own Higgs boson particle, I often think. I rely less on Massumi and more on Damasio and Tomkins, and find the work of neurologists and neuroscientists or psychologists (depending on what specifically they research) more helpful in operationalizing the concept so that we can employ it in a meaningful way. As I stated earlier, my motivation in writing Affective Publics stemmed from the need to articulate that emotion is not the enemy of reason, and vice versa. Because I study technology and politics, I want to explain how we react and respond in ways that do not separate logic from the passions, and Affective Publics is intended as a critique of approaches in social science that do so. Larry Grossberg’s work was helpful in isolating affective reactions that we experience in response to stimuli, especially coming from music. And, I used to be a DJ of house music, specifically, so I have always been keen to understand the drive that connects crowds affectively tuning in to a beat for a fleeting few moments. I often say that Affective Publics is my most personal book, because it connects lifelong experiences and questions for me. I use the example of tapping your foot or nodding along as phatic reactions that are indicative of affective tuning in. I follow that by explaining the difficulty of isolating those before cognition categorizes them into emotion at the same time that emotional mechanisms alert cognitive ones. Think of a song that you like, that has lyrics that you don’t particularly care for, for instance. You hear the beat, you start tapping your foot or bopping your head, then you get an uneasy feeling; it is seconds before the feeling triggers cognitive mechanisms that identify that uneasiness as distaste for the lyrics that are bothering you. All of this happens together for us, without a specific sequence. We scientists impose the sequence, so that we can isolate processes and study them, but really, we humans do not experience these as distinct processes. Infants experience affect purely, because their responsive mechanisms are not developed. So they use crying to indicate any and all emotions, ranging from pleasure to discomfort, and in so doing of course endlessly confuse us. All of this said, there is this interesting primitive thing happening often as we connect with others on social media. We are so swayed by the virality with which information moves, that we do not get to transcend beyond that initial phatic reaction. We are also not given the option to evolve beyond that very basic affective reaction—the options we are afforded by social media platforms often do not expand beyond the cognitive palette of infants. Yes, we are often treated as infants by platform designers. But I will not wear the determinist hat here. We respond like infants, too. Which is why I often encourage people to train themselves to avert the gaze from clickbait, to resist button pushing if it does not reflect their feelings accurately, to fight the urge to opine on platforms designed around monetizing opinionating. Finally, in response to your question—how do we measure this darn thing? Like the Higgs boson particle. We do not try to isolate it. We are poised as scientists to call it out when it emerges and before it fades.
Megan:	Both of you have engaged affect theory to examine social movements and activism; what directions in this arena, most urgently need scholarly attention? What is specifically helpful to you in terms of accounts of affect or emotion in thinking about social movements, particularly as they are engaged with different kinds of online communications and platforms?
Susanna:	The simple reason why we need affect theory to talk about social organization is that it’s always been the case that affect drives people together and pulls them apart: think of the organization of anger, for example, of how anger moves bodies, how it may be articulated as love, and how it mobilizes different bodies. I think there’s this kind of tendency to evaluate social media movements through a simplistic logic of success and failure. A year into #MeToo, people were asking “did it fail or was it a success?”, as if this was something that one might judge without a discussion about what qualifies as a success or a failure. Zizi has made the point about how the temporality of social transformation may not be compatible with the speeds of social media, and the campaigns taking place in it. It happens quickly that, in John Protevi’s terms, individual bodies are moved into action and organized on a group level, yet the social body is slow to change. These temporalities are crucial to investigate if we are not to get locked in to a logic of success or failure. Then there’s the question of emotional labor, and what kind of an emotional toll activism in social media entails, as people are articulating their sense of exhaustion, of being burnt out. In the Finnish context where I am, the nationalist populist right finds support from Putin’s troll factory—which is rather well organized and energetic—and used to wear people down. What is the price of doing social media activism within platforms that don’t properly protect people from harm? Things happen without protected measures being in place, making agency fragile and vulnerable in multiple ways. Social media activism happens in the belly of the beast of data capitalism, under conditions that individuals or groups really can’t influence. Anti- or counter-activist work currently seems more vocal, so that it takes a lot for any other sound to really reach anyone. That’s kind of a depressing moment to be in.
Elizabeth:	In terms of counter-activist work, are you referring here to “alt right” or right-wing activists as counter activists or are you referring to a different kind of management of platform politics that suppresses activism?
Susanna:	Both. It’s about platform politics that really don’t leave room for activism when it comes to sexual rights and sexual cultures for example, because of the content policies pertaining to what’s offensive, not just in terms of porn but anything to do with sex. Certain kinds of activism really can’t easily happen on advertising platforms, plus platforms have largely failed to protect users from harassment and abuse (be it in connection with activism or not). But I was more referring to the nationalist po...