Tony D. Sampson - Affect and Social Media: Emotion, Mediation, Anxiety and Contagion

Radical Cultural Studies

Series editors: Fay Brauer, Maggie Humm, Tim Lawrence, Stephen Maddison, Ashwani Sharma and Debra Benita Shaw (Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London, UK)

The Radical Cultural Studies series publishes monographs and edited collections to provide new and radical analyses of the culturopolitics, sociopolitics, aesthetics and ethics of contemporary cultures. The series is designed to stimulate debates across and within disciplines, foster new approaches to Cultural Studies and assess the radical potential of key ideas and theories.

Sewing, Fighting and Writing: Radical Practices in Work, Politics and Culture, Maria Tamboukou

Radical Space: Exploring Politics and Practice, edited by Debra Benita Shaw and Maggie Humm

Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism, Dan Hassler-Forest

EU, Europe Unfinished: Europe and the Balkans in a Time of Crisis edited by Zlatan Krajina and Neboja Blanua

Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities, Iain Chambers

Austerity as Public Mood: Social Anxieties and Social Struggles, Kirsten Forkert

Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, Depth edited by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen

Affect and Social Media: Emotion, Mediation, Anxiety and Contagion, Edited by Tony D. Sampson, Stephen Maddison and Darren Ellis

Pornography, Materiality and Cultural Politics, Stephen Maddison (forthcoming)

Writing the Modern Family: Contemporary Literature, Motherhood and Neoliberal Culture, Roberta Garrett (forthcoming)

The Male Body in Digital Culture, Jamie Hakim (forthcoming)

Gender and Sexuality in Space Culture, Kat Deerfield (forthcoming)

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Selection and editorial matter Tony D. Sampson, Stephen Maddison and Darren Ellis 2018

Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: HB 978-1-7866-0438-5

PB 978-1-7866-0439-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sampson, Tony D., editor. | Maddison, Stephen, 1970-editor. | Ellis, Darren, editor.

Title: Affect and social media : emotion, mediation, anxiety and contagion / edited by Tony D. Sampson, Stephen Maddison and Darren Ellis.

Description: London ; New York : Rowman & Littlefield International, [2018] | Series: Radical cultural studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018007129 (print) | LCCN 2018008968 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786604408 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781786604385 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781786604392 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Social mediaPsychological aspects. | Affect (Psychology)

Classification: LCC HM742 (ebook) | LCC HM742 .A4156 2018 (print) | DDC 302.23/1dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007129

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.481992.

Printed in the United States of America

Gregory J. Seigworth

I T IS EASY, wrote Gilles Deleuze in his unsettlingly prescient 1990 Postscript on Control Societies essay, to set up a correspondence between any society and some kind of machine.

Wait... hold on a minuteeasy? What? Did anyone alert the editors of this brilliant collection of writings? But Deleuze knew that at a certain level of abstraction, it is not especially difficult to say something like The contemporary era has been fundamentally reshaped and redefined by the rise of social media. Indeed, such pithy pronouncements are sometimes so commonplace that they can feel simultaneously quasi-profound and thoroughly banal. Oh yes! Oh, yawn. To stake a claim, then, about a machineas a highly particular and interwoven configuration of practices, materials, technologies, and sensations/sensibilitiescorresponding to any society (this present one, that past one, some future one) must arrive not with the finality of declaratory closure but, instead, will work only if it serves to open up fresh lines of inquiry: to catalyze evocative mappings and excavations, to afford opportunities for counterclaims and inversions, to tend to the subtlest shadings of processes and events (in both their vapors and tendrils). As each of the sections and chapters of this book amply demonstrate, such an approach is at the very heart of Deleuzes belief that he was, at once, a pluralist and an empiricist. By eschewing the relative ease of sweeping abstractions in order to pursue the singularities of the concrete, Deleuze argues that the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced. Okay then, maybe not so easy.

Bringing affect on-board for such a critical undertaking further complicates the scenario. Thats because affect doesnt track. At least not straightforwardly or cleanly. Whatever vectors, whatever blooms or decays, whatever pilings or foldings or pealings: affect just doesnt lift up and neatly separate from its situatedness, not without bringing along a tangle, a clot, a smudgy impression (or an over-determined expression).

Approaching social media through the shifting prisms of affect theories almost certainly guarantees that two things will happen: (1) the social of social media will be understood as more-than-social (by encompassing the hard-and-fast nonhuman materialities and more evanescent atmospheres that extend through and beyond fleshy human sociality) and that (2) apprising the (im-)mediations of media will serve as a reminder that something like Human Computer Interaction (HCI) or digital interface is merely one of our most contemporary ways of describing what continually transpires in the rhythms and ruptures of a bodys [any-body-whatever] capacities to affect and to be affected by the moving wedge of the in-between. Given this intertwining, the affective study of social media tends to take on the qualities of a sort of cartographic endeavor, a plotting of coordinateswhere the latitudes of the extra-/other-than-human social (stretched, pulled, extended