Zizi Papacharissi’s Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics.
contributes to and Politics contributes to the discussion about the role of social media in political protests but has ventured into a new domain. She is less interested in the use of social media for political effect she is used for political influence, which refers to the innovative ways that social media users leverage those platforms to participate in the “soft structures of feeling” (p. 116) and express those views they feel need to be evinced at that moment. She also argues that social media participants are components of a developing narrative, and as each participant expresses his or her emotions, thoughts, and words through the chosen social media platform, that participant becomes integrated into the story.
For Paparcharissi, therefore, unfolding social movements rely on developing narratives and not on the social media technologies per se. The expressed emotions and words (about the social issue that fueled the social movement) channeled through social media contribute to the political discourse and become in and of themselves political statements (p. 7). For example, if I tweet my support in #MeToo even if I have never experienced sexual harassment, I am making a political statement that as a woman, I empathize with women who have suffered sexual harassment and I will support any campaign against individuals or institutions that engage in sexual harassment. My tweets are my expressions of my political sentiments. This notion is a crucial point Papacharissi makes because now the discourse about social media’s role in forging an emotional sense of belonging has become intertwined with the discourse about social media’s role in forging political engagement. The thrust of her argument is that any discourse about political organizing must include theories about the effect, as social media participation allows people to “feel their way into politics” (p. 25).
Paparcharissi reviewed the theory of effect from the time of the late seventeenth century which saw the rational/emotional dichotomy when the Enlightenment critiqued the Church’s monopoly on the knowledge that spurred the demand for a democratic society which is founded upon reason. She is primarily interested in exploring how affect is a force that can catalyze humans to engage in new actions or thoughts: “Per affect theory, empowerment lies in liminality, in pre-emergence and emergence, or at the point at which new formations of the political are in the process of being imagined but not yet articulated” (p. 19). In this view, when individuals feel that their opinions matter, that’s when they feel empowered and become motivated towards political engagement. Paparcharissi’s perspective is primarily centered on how individuals become personally fulfilled through online expression. Importantly, the consideration of effective expression illuminates how social movements gradually and ponderously build from shared emotions into transformative actions.
There are three case studies of Twitter hashtags which Paparcharissi uses to explore “affective publics” by employing discourse analysis. The first case study is #egypt which describes how a flow of emotionally charged tweets that were both facts and opinions became “effective news” – “effective” because those tweeting were leveling their anguish and frustration at an unresponsive regime, and “news” because its characteristics were newsworthy. The second case study, #ows, concerned the Occupy Wall Street movement whose tweets were emotionally charged, but because of the multitude of divergent views that were expressed in that hashtag, the discourse became more disruptive rather than effective. Her third case study is an analysis of trending conversations in Twitter where she attempts to examine how “the act of making a private thought public bears the potential of a political act” (p. 111) and from the standpoint of an academic and intellectual analysis, would allow one to attempt to connect the impassioned expressions of individuals about whatever issues concern them, to collective political action and consciousness. She suggests that scholarship of the role of new media can help to lay bare the “affective attunement and engagement these invite” (p. 134), where “effective attunement” refers to how people engage in new media to relate to current events, news stories, or civic mobilization. Paparcharissi’s work provides an encouraging framework that scholars can adapt to explore how emotive expressions and their consequences might unfold in social media such as Twitter, particularly when there is the affordance of anonymity, and how this might bode for the future of democracy in societies everywhere.
My study is about Twitter social movement #Block_famous_campaign which is a community-driven boycott of Saudi celebrities who use their celebrity to peddle commercial products in Snapchat. Here, one social media platform (Snapchat) is used in specific commercial ways by celebrities, and another social media platform (Twitter) is used by the community, spearheaded by celebrity fans, who are outraged at how social media has been usurped (as they see it) by celebrities for their gain. Unlike in Western and many countries which are so-called ‘capitalist’ societies, society in Saudi Arabia frowns upon celebrities who use their celebrity to further personal and career goals rather than encourage social good or actions that further good for the society.
In my study, it is obvious how effect has become the driving force for this hashtag movement: what emotions spur the fans of Saudi Arabia’s media celebrities to be consumed by what goes on in the celebrities’ daily lives via their social media accounts? Further, how are they expressing their level of obsession? Using content analysis of the tweets in this hashtag movement, I will look for the emotionally charged terms that the fans have tweeted to express their indignation: hates, lies, corruption, obsession, showing off, bragging, etc., as well as the visual rhetoric which expressed effectively through videos, photos, and emojis. In an otherwise restrictive society that does not encourage too much an open expression of thoughts and emotions, this hashtag movement has become popular at all levels of society because there is a shared feeling that celebrities aren’t supposed to abuse the privilege of their fame. Further, an analysis of the history of tweets from the time the hashtag movement was started, will provide valuable insight into how this hashtag account grew, and at what pace, from a few outraged fans’ tweets into a society-wide movement as Twitter as a social media platform is a “social awareness system” (p. 36). As Paparcharissi argued: “Spaces that stimulate political interest, expression, and engagement work best when they invite impromptu, casual, and unforced forays into the political” (p. 121).
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