Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work theory The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

The overaffectation of the crowd

From pg 163 of Material Participation by Noortje Marres:

Among concepts of the community of the affected we could also include theories of affective politics developed in recent cultural theory (Thrift, 2008; Terranova, 2007; Blackman, 2008). Such ‘post-emotive’ conceptions of the public propose to understand the mobilization of publics in terms of the quick and intense propagation of feeling through a population that sensationalist media make possible, in a quasi-epidemological way. Importantly, the rise to prominence of such affective publics is often traced back to precisely the period in which the pragmatists wrote their books about democracy in the technological society, the 1920s, and indeed, to these very works, insofar as they also discuss the new opportunities provided by mass media for the instant proliferation of passions and the creation of sensations, and relatedly, the increased possibilities for the manipulation of public sentiments, and their deployment for partisan purposes. (Walter Lippmann, moreover, holds a special place in this history as a member of the American national public propaganda committee during the First World War.) This affective public may arguably be understood as a technologically mediated version of the crowd. I have decided to exclude this community of the affected from consideration here, as it opens up a very different set of problems of the public than the ones I will focus on. The biggest problem of affective publics is arguably that of their ‘overaffectation’, an unsustainable, unproductive form of engagement in which mobilization does not translate into action.

, , ,