1st Edition
Affective Politics of Digital Media Propaganda by Other Means
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.
Preface by Jodi Dean
Introduction: Propaganda by Other Means
Megan Boler and Elizabeth Davis
Part I: Theorizing Media and Affect
Chapter 1: Affect, Media, Movement: Interview with Susanna Paasonen and Zizi Papacharissi
Megan Boler and Elizabeth Davis
Chapter 2: Reverberation, Affect, and Digital Politics of Responsibility
Adi Kuntsman
Chapter 3: "Fuck Your Feelings": The Affective Weaponization of Facts and Reason
Sun-ha Hong
Chapter 4: Blockchain, Affect, and Digital Teleologies
Olivier Jutel
Chapter 5: Becoming Kind: A Political Affect for Post-Truth Times
Ed Cohen
Chapter 6: Beyond Behaviorism and Black Boxes: The Future of Media Theory Interview with Wendy Chun, Warren Sack, and Sarah Sharma
Megan Boler and Elizabeth Davis
Part II: Affective Media, Social Media, and Journalism: New Relationships
Chapter 7: Pioneering Countercultural Conservatism: Limbaugh, Drudge, and Breitbart
Anthony Nadler
Chapter 8: Breitbart’s Attacks on Mainstream Media: Victories, Victimhood, and Vilification
Jason Roberts and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen
Chapter 9: Algorithmic Enclaves: Affective Politics and Algorithms in the Neoliberal Social Media Landscape
Merlyna Lim
Chapter 10: Hashtagging the Québec Mosque Shooting: Twitter Discourses of Resistance, Mourning,
and Islamophobia
Yasmin Jiwani and Ahmed Al-Rawi
Chapter 11: Hindu Nationalism, News Channels, and "Post-Truth" Twitter: A Case Study of "Love
Jihad"
Zeinab Farokhi
Chapter 12: Computational Propaganda and the News: Journalists' Perceptions of the Effects of Digital Manipulation on Reporting
Kerry Ann Carter Persen and Samuel C. Woolley
Part III: Exploitation of Emotions in Digital Media: Propaganda and Profit
Chapter 13: Empathic Media, Emotional AI, and the Optimization of Disinformation
Vian Bakir and Andrew McStay
Chapter 14: The Heart’s Content: The Emotional Turn at Upworthy
Robert Hunt
Chapter 15: Empires of Feeling: Social Media and Emotive Politics
Luke Stark
Chapter 16: Nudging Interventions in Regulating the Digital Gangsters in an Era of Friction-Free Surveillance Capitalism
Leslie Regan Shade
Chapter 17: Digital Propaganda and Emotional Micro-Targeting: Interview with Jonathan Albright,
Carole Cadwalladr, Paolo Gerbaudo, and Tamsin Shaw
Megan Boler and Elizabeth Davis
Contributor and Interviewee Biographies
Biography
Megan Boler is Professor in the Social Justice Education Department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on philosophy and politics of emotion; critical studies of affect, social media, and propaganda; and digital media practices within social movements. Her books include Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (1999), Democratic Dialogue in Education (2004), Digital Media and Democracy (2008), and DIY Citizenship (Ratto and Boler, 2014).
Elizabeth Davis is a PhD candidate in the Social Justice Education Department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on histories and structures of feeling drawing on materialist, feminist, critical race, disability, media, and cultural studies approaches. Her articles can be found in Theory & Event, Emotion, Space and Society, and The Senses and Society.
"This is an invaluable guidebook to the affective landscape of our political moment, packed with contributions from original and groundbreaking thinkers. It counters the pace and tone of online propaganda with a crucial critical intervention, contributing to our understanding of the fate of understanding itself—and the consequences for political life."
Mark Andrejevic, Professor of Communications & Media Studies, Monash University
"This collection presents the state of the art for investigating affective politics. Importantly, it outlines the risks posed to our democratic institutions if we don’t ensure the technical and legal fixes required to delimit social media firms capitalizing on emotional appeals and cognitive biases."
Philip N. Howard, Director, Oxford Internet Institute and Professor, Oxford University, author of Lie Machines (2020)
"Affective Politics of Digital Media is a body of work that demonstrates just how central affective dynamics are to the political realities generated in an increasingly mediatized world...any chapter of this book stands as a useful entry point for scholars interested in the affective politics of digital media, with each offering a unique perspective and potential avenue for further exploration. It is therefore an important collection for anybody working in the fields of technology, media, journalism, political communications, and policy, and for those seeking to become attuned to the affective dynamics of digital media more broadly."
Rachel Billington, New Media and Society 24(6)
