Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics

by Zizi Papacharissi

Over the past few decades, we have witnessed the growth of movements using digital means to connect with broader interest groups and express their points of view. These movements emerge out of distinct contexts and yield different outcomes, but tend to share one thing in online and offline solidarity shaped around the public display of emotion. Social media facilitate feelings of engagement, in ways that frequently make people feel re-energized about politics. In doing so, media do not make or break revolutions but they do lend emerging, storytelling publics their own means for feeling their way into events, frequently by making those involved a part of the developing story. Technologies network us but it is our stories that connect us to each other, making us feel close to some and distancing us from others.

Affective Publics explores how storytelling practices facilitate engagement among movements tuning into a current issue or event by employing three case Arab Spring movements, various iterations of Occupy, and everyday casual political expressions as traced through the archives of trending topics on Twitter. It traces how affective publics materialize and disband around connective conduits of sentiment every day and find their voice through the soft structures of feeling sustained by societies. Using original quantitative and qualitative data, Affective Publics demonstrates, in this groundbreaking analysis, that it is through these soft structures that affective publics connect, disrupt, and feel their way into everyday politics.

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Zizi Papacharissi is professor and head of the Communication Department at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Her work focuses on the social and political consequences of online media. Her books include A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age (Polity Press, 2010), A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (Routledge, 2010), and Journalism and Citizenship: New Agendas (Taylor & Francis, 2009). She has also authored over 50 journal articles, book chapters or reviews, and serves on the editorial board of eleven journals, including the Journal of Communication, Human Communication Research, and New Media and Society. Zizi is the editor of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, and the founding and current Editor of the new open access Sage journal Social Media and Society. She has collaborated with Apple, Microsoft, and has participated in closed consultations with the Obama 2012 election campaign. She sits on the Committee on the Health and Well-Being of Young Adults, funded by the National Academies of Science, the National Research Council, and the Institute of Medicine, and has been invited to lecture about her work on social media in several Universities and Research Institutes in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the US. Her work has been translated in Greek, German, Korean, Chinese, Hungarian, Italian, Turkish, and Persian. Her fourth book is titled Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology and Politics (Oxford University Press) and recently won the National CommunicatIon Association Human Communication and Technology Division Best Book Award.

Zizi was born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece, and graduated from Anatolia College in 1991. She received a full scholarship to Mount Holyoke College, where she completed a double BA in Economics and Media Studies (1995), and to Kent State University, where she received a Masters degree in Communication Studies (1997). Her studies were fully funded by fellowships and scholarships from both the Onassis Foundation and the University of Texas of Austin, where she received her PhD (2000) in New Media Technologies and Political Communication. She was recently recognized by her alma mater, UT-Austin, as a high-impact scholar, an honor bestowed to a handful of the School's most productive and impactful doctoral graduates

Reviews

[Wendelle]

highly theoretical analyses of twitter activities at the height of various protests and uprisings, such as the democratic wave in the Middle East and North Africa and the Occupy movement.

[Jacqueline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Basically everything I've been trying to work through with regards to the political and affective potentials of feminist hashtags.

[Alexander Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is more of an interesting guide to framing affect in the Twittersphere under a technologically limited "public". It suggests how a mixed-methods approach can be utilized, and what theory if of immediate importance.

What this book does not offer is concrete conclusions or methodological approaches that can be repeated and reach similar conclusions. This is more of a loose theoretical and methodological outline of studying affect than a comprehensive argument about what the state of digital publics are or how affects play a role in them.

This book could have focused on any one of its topics more comprehensively and made a much clearer argument about how affect functions. That said, it is nice to see a mixed-methodological approach to communicative/informational affect study.